Quote:
Originally Posted by Low C Sharp
Sure, but I have to call a spade a spade. Anyone who says abortion is murder isn't interested in dialogue, anyway.
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That may be your experience. It is not mine. What you say is true of some people who consider abortion murder, but not all. To suggest otherwise is simply mass generalization and attacks against a straw man.
Nobody has a monopoly on hypocrisy or intolerance -- not religious people, or the Klan, or Republicans, or atheists, or "conservatives" or "liberals" (whatever those words really mean) or any other group. One can find hypocrisy and intolerance among
any group.
But to suggest that unless people live up to one's own standards of "what a truly religious person would do in this situation if they really believed what they say they believe" doesn't seem to me to be calling a spade a spade. To be frank, it seems more like imposing one's own values and standards on others -- not that different from what the religiously-motivated are accused of doing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin
PP v. Casey staked out whatever middl,e ground there was fairly nicely.
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See, I see the middle ground, or perhaps better said, the common ground, somewhere else entirely. It is quite possible that people will never change each others' minds on an issue like this, or find a "resolution" every one can sign on to.
But what can happen is people learning to change the nature of the conversation, and learning how to disagree with others without demonizing them or treating them like The Enemy. And perhaps, that can lead to the common ground of finding ways to work together to, say, reduce unwanted pregnancies before they happen.
I highly recommend looking at some of the work of the
Public Conversations Project, which initiated a series of conversations between some on opposite sides of the abortion debate after clinic shootings in Boston in 1994. (Boston Globe article "Talking with the Enemy"
here.) What they discovered was that minds weren't changed, but that how they related and talked to each other was dramatically.