Originally Posted by setch
Imposed morality, of any flavor...on any platform, is wrong and should be put down...IMO

That's like saying that for a guy to flap his arms and fly to the moon is wrong and should be put down.

It's an academic point.

Morality cannot be imposed from outside. Someone acting in a particular way because he fears retribution if he acts otherwise is motivated by law, not morality.

A man who acts morally does so because he chooses voluntarily to choose his own behavior in such a way that it approaches a moral standard that he has willingly adopted for himself.

A rapist (in the classical sense, now, not one of the more modern watered-down versions) who impregnates his victim requires her, among other things, to make a decision between at least two unpleasant alternatives--making room in her life on very short notice to carry a pregnancy to term, or murdering her own child.

It's a heinous violation of her rights to force her into such a choice, which is one of the reasons that we think of it as such a terrible crime.

But looking for a cheap, quick way out of it--well, okay, it's murder, but in this case I guess we can give you a pass--isn't a solution to the problem at hand, and defrauding the victim into thinking it is one is a further violation of her rights.

Regardless of what the government says, if she has an abortion she will become a child-murderer, and years later when she's lying in bed staring at the ceiling wondering if it was a boy or a girl she killed and whether she would be a grandmother by now if she hadn't, the government will not be there with a solution.

It's one of those bad things that you can't make better. But you can definitely make it worse, that's for damn sure. You can make anything worse by denying reality.


"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." --Lysander Spooner, 1867