She’s Pro-Choice, Pro-life

Last updated on: January 1, 2015 at 3:04 pm by Mark Shea

She’s Pro-Choice, Pro-life 2015-01-01T15:04:47-07:00 Mark Shea

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and 100% confused. The “Church Must Modernize or Die Lady” repeats the usual tropes about how opposition to abortion can *only* be explained as “good old fashioned misogyny”.

It’s funny. Yesterday, over at “What’s Wrong with the World” I was involved in a hilarious discussion with sundry torture advocates and self-described serious and careful thinkers who are still pulling their chins and wondering if subjecting somebody to simulated drowning 183 times is torture. As one of the more incoherent of them became more desperate in his defense of the indefensible, he opted for the “‘Shut up,’ he explained” approach by issuing a bull of excommunication in which he numbered me among “certain pro-terrorist (purportedly Christian) apologists who would similarly (and quite unhesitatingly) offer innocent American families simply as holocausts to be burnt on the altars of these vile Mohammedans.”

What strikes me is the remarkable similarity of the pro-choice and pro-torture rhetorical strategies above. Absolutely deny that your opponent could possibly have *any* good intentions. Affirm that out of completely perverse evil, he wishes only to do evil.

Opposed to torture as I am, I’m not so thick as to not see what torture apologists are trying to do: they are trying to achieve a good end (as, in fact, all evildoers think they are trying to do). So, for that matter, are abortion supporters, Nazis, cannibals, and child molestors. Nobody wills evil for it’s own sake. Every evil act in the world is done in the attempt to achieve happiness, because we can’t not seek happiness. So arguments which talk as though there is some fundamentally perverse class of human being who will evil for its own sake are cartoons, not arguments. Pro-choice people who talk as though the *only* thing motivating prolifers is not love of children but hatred of women are simply telling lies. Torture apologists who talk as the opposition to torture is simply and solely motivated by a desire to watch one’s friends and neighbor die in agone are simply telling lies. They are not serious. (And by the way, people who talk as though torture supporters are simply motivated by perverse love of sadism are likewise telling lies, just as people who talk as though abortion supporters are simply motivated by a thirst for babies’ blood are also telling lies.) Great evil are always committed by people who have managed to convince themselves that some good end justifies very evil means to achieve it. Sin is not committed by people pursuing evil for its own sake. It is committed by people who are pursuing something good that they love in a disordered way.

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