I'm going to start with a language alert for the links below. Rachel Lucas and the Ace of Spades have been loading up with both barrels lately. But when you read the accounts, I'm not sure that you would blame them.
Starting here... there's the breathtakingly shallow, cruel, and self-serving opinion of one Nicholas Provenza -
Like many, I am troubled by the implications of Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to knowingly give birth to a child disabled with Down syndrome. Given that Palin's decision is being celebrated in some quarters, it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome (or by extension, any unborn fetus)—a freedom that anti-abortion advocates seek to deny.
Notice how people like this are always "troubled by the implications," and it's ALWAYS about other people's actions. None of these jokers get troubled by the implications of what they do or say. Now, I'm not talking about making a mistake, because that's everybody - I'm talking about making a mistake, and being so emotionally involved in the mistake that one begins first to excuse it, and then to defend it, and finally to promote it. Every step escalates not only the original error, but leads one to new and worse errors, all taken (and justified) as necessary - even admirable! - in order to prove the point of the first mistake.
Why not just admit the first error and move along, happy? For all we hear of "it's the journey, not the destination," lots of people seem to be stuck in neutral, or worse.
That error, by the way, is in "reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus." It's already been confirmed that doing so is evil. There's your morality question, easily answered.
...it is completely legitimate for a woman to look at the circumstances of her life and decide that having a child with Down syndrome (or any child for that matter) is not an obligation that she can accept. After all, the choice to have a child is a profoundly selfish choice; that is, a choice that is an expression of the parent's personal desire to create new life.
And this is the end result of trying to defend that initial error. It eventually turns one inside out, mentally - freedom is slavery, war is peace, and parenthood is selfish. To bring new life into the world, and to dedicate oneself to its service, is selfish. How dare you sacrifice your own prime years of life and all that time and money on somebody else! You thought it was noble to accept the grave responsibility of feeding, clothing, educating, civilizing, and above all unconditionally loving a creature who is at turns helpless, demanding, petulant, resentful, rebellious, and ultimately not even answerable to you in any way! Selfish bastards.
And most parents seek to create healthy life; in the case of the unborn fetuses shown to have severe developmental disabilities, one study reports that over 90% of these fetuses are aborted prior to birth. But if you notice, the anti-abortion zealots try to attach a dirty little slur to these abortions, labeling them a form of eugenics.
The Spider is fond of quoting the old saying, "Sin makes you stupid," and this is yet another example. Yes, Nicholas, this IS eugenics. That's what the word "eugenics" means. Aborting developmentally challenged fetuses is merely a means to achieve the ends of eugenics. Incidentally, so is demanding that others murder their own children in order to satisfy's one standards of racial purity.
Incidentally, that blends smoothly with the item that doubled my blood pressure: "
Saving Bristol":
These are not empty words. I, Doug Stanhope, am offering you, Bristol Palin, the sum of 25,000 dollars so that you can abort your child and move out of that draconian home.
Yup - if you can't convince the mom to abort, convince her daughter. Mr. Stanhope (hereafter referred to by his initials, "scum-sucking lesion on the buttocks of humanity") is a D-list comic whose entertainment resume is nearly as thin as Obama's political one. Apparently, soliciting a contract murder on an unborn child is a step upward for his career.
Never in history has a woman been under more pressure to keep an unwanted pregnancy than Bristol Palin. She is the teenage daughter of Alaska Governor & Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin - a conservative, Creationist Christian power-vampire and pro-life huckster who has put Bristol and her un-welcomed fetus at the center of a politico-religious crusade to stop her exercising her constitutional right to terminate the pregnancy.
The creationist thing has been disproved, as far as I know. "Power vampire" is a hoot, coming from someone who is trying to further his own interests with this monstrous stunt. "Pro-life huckster" is stupid almost beyond fathoming. Huckster? As far as I can tell, asking someone not to kill their baby isn't a scam or a scheme. The pro-lifer gains nothing, and is in fact regularly reviled for it by morons like this. (But blessed are we who are cursed for the sake of righteousness...) And obviously the parents know what they would get into - in fact, many of them abort precisely because they DO know and wish to avoid it - but from purely altruistic reasons, of course...
I was once in a similar situation where I'd accidentally impregnated a girl and she had to make that same fateful decision that now faces you. It was easy for her... We made the right choice and rather than end up bitter rivals in court battles over custody or support, we are great friends who high-five over our decision and have all the free time and disposable income that young mothers never know.
I guess this stunted little troglodyte doesn't read enough Provenza. Alternately, he's making a huge sacrifice by taking on all that free time and disposable income... Lonely are the brave.
(Come to think of it, that would explain the socialist mandate to confiscate all private possessions and redistribute them - a noble sacrifice on behalf of the state, to amass all property and wealth so that we the people are not burdened by them. Or by the kids that we ought to be aborting. And if we can't be trusted to choose correctly, that choice can be made for us, capice?)
It's a spectacular, epic fail of a piece, really - it's a shocking low even for the likes of Stanhope, who is apparently so bad at his chosen field that he's been sacked from the Man Show on Spike, and failed as the on-screen host of the Girls Gone Wild video series. Mind you - this guy is so bad at what he does that he can't be trusted to attract paying customers to booze and sex.
Prohibition couldn't stop people from selling booze - Doug Stanhope did.
Sex is the one thing everyone uses to sell everything else - INCLUDING BOOZE - Doug Stanhope can't sell it.
You don't need to ruin your future in order to support the megalomaniacal self-promotion of a mother whose every action is rooted in a demonic ego and archaic superstition. Don't become victim of the same pressure that had your brother "volunteering" for duty in Iraq.
There's that selfish meme again. There's also the "burdened with a child" meme. And the "soldiers are all dupes" meme. And "ZOMG Xians are so DUM!!1!" I'd call this standard Palinsanity, but really, in a way she's just the lightning rod. The storm that rages is merely stooping upon her as the most convenient target.
If I were still the pro-choice leftist that is de rigeur in my family, this would clear the scales from my eyes. I can't fathom telling a mother that it's selfish of her to bear a child, or to suffer hardship for another's sake. It's so obviously the mirror image of what these pinheads say it is. And as far as "smarter than others," this is also proof positive that evil is not a matter of poor intelligence, but a poor heart. Provenza is obviously much more educated than Stanhope. He is possibly possessed of greater raw intellect. Yet they both come to the same conclusion - one through his intellect leading him astray, and the other through pure bile.
Evil is rooted in the will and the soul. Unchecked and undisciplined, evil rots the whole person - the emotions and the intellect. When that happens, even the strengths of a person become weaknesses, as those faculties are converted from their true ends to servants of that evil. An honest person becomes a liar, and a compassionate one turns cruel, and a smart one turns into a double-talking apologist for every sin and folly. It's like a virus turning a healthy cell into a factory for replicating viruses.
Eventually, it can reach what we see here. Everything that brings people closest to each other - family, community, faith, service - are called traps for chumps, conformist schemes designed to enslave people. But what does he offer that's so much better? Money. That's it. That's all he's got. He'll PAY to see his will done.
This guy is the turd in humanity's punchbowl. All the things he scorns are freely-chosen obligations accepted by the consent of those involved, and he thinks that money is a sufficient replacement. It's pitiable.
By contrast, virtue transforms even the humblest raw materials into great strengths. Brother Lawrence could not be trusted to handle anything more complex that answering the door to his monastery - and yet people flocked to see him rather than any of his more gifted brothers. The cart collector at the local Acme supermarket brightens everyone's day - ceaselessly cheerful and polite, and eventually named Employee of the Month. In fact, people campaigned for him to win! Who does that for anyone at a supermarket? When I worked at Friendly's our busboy and dishwasher, Frank, was about the hardest worker you could imagine. Whatever he had he poured into his menial tasks as if he were working the cure for cancer... how many "superior" folks could dare to claim that sort of commitment to their "more important" careers, or earn as much respect?
These three men are greater in the Kingdom than I. I would never dare to suggest that they were better off dead, much less that any of us would be better off if they were. The two colossal nitwits above can pour themselves a long tall glass of bugger off with a side of kiss my ass.
(update, 9/19 - noonish - ricki asked how long it would take, and the answer is, "
Not long at all." [hat tip to
Rachl Lukis, yet again])
