[the princess of the paupers.] (![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lookslikelove) wrote2008-09-05 02:30 am
lookslikelove) wrote2008-09-05 02:30 am
Entry tags:
[saint james square is brimming with light]
I have been relatively good so far about not spewing my politics forth into the internet (those who have interact with me in RL have not been so lucky -- I have been loud, proud and vehement about many things), but as I catch up on my news here at work as my shift ends I cannot contain myself. Things happen and I won't be sorry for my personal beliefs and I don't think that anyone should ever be.
First off: the system of politics in the United States is broken. It has this way of dragging things out and getting conflicted and arguing over things (the Straw Man argument comes up over and over again to the point that I want to rip out my own hair and burn something just to distract myself). It's not a helpful system, but when voters are left to choose between two parties this should come as little surprise. It's not much of democracy and that's a shame, because in the end it ends up harming the people who it ought to help, but then again this is a country in which a staggering amount of its voting population doesn't. But I digress.
In case you've never met me or noticed, I tend to be on the more well, liberal side of things (note the little L). I believe that the government should do more for things like healthcare and education and those who live in poverty and work less to please the one percent of the population who holds most of the country's wealth or big business. I think the wage gap should not be increasing in size rather than decreasing and other things of that nature and that a woman has a right to choose and that people have the right to love whomever they want to love. Yeah, I'm that person. Get over it.
My most recent serious fight, where I put on my Serious Fighting Gloves and wanting to scream at something, but screaming never solves any sort of conflict occurred shortly after Sarah Palin was announced as the VP candidate on the Republican ticket. Every time someone used the "well, you're a feminist, you must love the fact that a woman got nominated somewhere, right?" argument part of my brain wanted to die. Don't get me wrong, it's not the petty, pathetic arguments being used by some ("She doesn't even know what a VP does! HA!"). This one is a bit more serious. It covers the fact that this woman, whose seventeen year old daughter is pregnant (and having a very public shotgun wedding) is asking everyone to stay out of their family business, since it was her daughter's decision to keep her baby. To be a mother as a teenager. Fine, more power to her, who am I to judge? What really gets me is the fact that this woman, if elected (if by some act God or Nature winds up in the office of the President) would use her power to try and make certain that what is currently my right as woman to chose (my reproductive rights), to keep them private or amongst my family, would be the choice of the government. She would have no trouble stripping women who have been raped or are pregnant due to incest or other horrible and traumatic experiences of their right to seek relief. To even have to the option of an abortion. That choice is so powerful, even if no one takes it and I know what it means. There was once a time when women couldn't have one legally and the options were dangerous and not talked about (I'm the result of someone who faced such a choice and you know what I'm pretty grateful that she didn't chose the sketchy way out, but I'm biased). Comparing abortions to infanticide makes me sick, because even if you don't agree on any level, there's more at stake than just what meets at the eye. If we undo one thing, where does it end? Where do we stop and say "enough is enough"?
This country is supposed to be about opportunity and choice and the freedom to be who you want to be and chose to be and so many great things that people claim to have, but instantly forget about the instant conflicting viewpoints get involved. Maybe it's just the idealist in me, but people should wake up and realize that part of being a human being is stepping outside the world the grew up in and not black and white choice between losing what you hold dear and changing the world. We're in all this together. Let's kind of act like it for a change.
First off: the system of politics in the United States is broken. It has this way of dragging things out and getting conflicted and arguing over things (the Straw Man argument comes up over and over again to the point that I want to rip out my own hair and burn something just to distract myself). It's not a helpful system, but when voters are left to choose between two parties this should come as little surprise. It's not much of democracy and that's a shame, because in the end it ends up harming the people who it ought to help, but then again this is a country in which a staggering amount of its voting population doesn't. But I digress.
In case you've never met me or noticed, I tend to be on the more well, liberal side of things (note the little L). I believe that the government should do more for things like healthcare and education and those who live in poverty and work less to please the one percent of the population who holds most of the country's wealth or big business. I think the wage gap should not be increasing in size rather than decreasing and other things of that nature and that a woman has a right to choose and that people have the right to love whomever they want to love. Yeah, I'm that person. Get over it.
My most recent serious fight, where I put on my Serious Fighting Gloves and wanting to scream at something, but screaming never solves any sort of conflict occurred shortly after Sarah Palin was announced as the VP candidate on the Republican ticket. Every time someone used the "well, you're a feminist, you must love the fact that a woman got nominated somewhere, right?" argument part of my brain wanted to die. Don't get me wrong, it's not the petty, pathetic arguments being used by some ("She doesn't even know what a VP does! HA!"). This one is a bit more serious. It covers the fact that this woman, whose seventeen year old daughter is pregnant (and having a very public shotgun wedding) is asking everyone to stay out of their family business, since it was her daughter's decision to keep her baby. To be a mother as a teenager. Fine, more power to her, who am I to judge? What really gets me is the fact that this woman, if elected (if by some act God or Nature winds up in the office of the President) would use her power to try and make certain that what is currently my right as woman to chose (my reproductive rights), to keep them private or amongst my family, would be the choice of the government. She would have no trouble stripping women who have been raped or are pregnant due to incest or other horrible and traumatic experiences of their right to seek relief. To even have to the option of an abortion. That choice is so powerful, even if no one takes it and I know what it means. There was once a time when women couldn't have one legally and the options were dangerous and not talked about (I'm the result of someone who faced such a choice and you know what I'm pretty grateful that she didn't chose the sketchy way out, but I'm biased). Comparing abortions to infanticide makes me sick, because even if you don't agree on any level, there's more at stake than just what meets at the eye. If we undo one thing, where does it end? Where do we stop and say "enough is enough"?
This country is supposed to be about opportunity and choice and the freedom to be who you want to be and chose to be and so many great things that people claim to have, but instantly forget about the instant conflicting viewpoints get involved. Maybe it's just the idealist in me, but people should wake up and realize that part of being a human being is stepping outside the world the grew up in and not black and white choice between losing what you hold dear and changing the world. We're in all this together. Let's kind of act like it for a change.
no subject
I get that. I really do. I like to think I can pretty objectively put myself in other people's shoes. And if we were talking about grown people-murder, and you heard people going on about how we should have a right to kill someone if they're inconvenient to us or cause us grief or our association with them is the result of a traumatic experience, and how they should have the freedom to choose whether to eradicate that person from their lives, I imagine that must be pretty horrifying.
But the fact of the matter is, that you need to choose that path of belief. It is a moral doctrine that a person chooses to live by, and while no amount of debate will ever convince someone who believes abortion is baby-murder that it's not, or ever convince someone who believes it's not baby-murder that it is, we choose which side of that argument we want to take. And we are allowed to change our mind, and choose to take the other side. Plenty of pro-choice women choose to carry unwanted babies to term at great expense to themselves; plenty of pro-life women abort for personal reasons that we don't necessarily need to judge. And that's choice. Choice is not about saying abortion is right, or even necessarily needed. It's about saying that when there is a moral debate that is not easily settled in our society-- that people have the right to choose which side of that debate they belong to, and that the government cannot mandate that one side of the debate is right, and the other side of the debate is wrong-- that no one may be forced into a position where they must observe someone else's morals. It doesn't stop at abortion. The issue of gay marriage falls into the same spectrum of choice. This is why Prohibition failed, and why our government has not yet found an appropriate way to address drug abuse. If we lived in a country where morality governed our way of life, if my religious moral strictures superceded someone else's freedom, and their religious moral strictures superceded my freedom, we would all be teatotaling vegans with no technological comforts who always covered our heads and could not shave. And women would not be allowed to show skin in public.
no subject
Part of why I stand so strongly on this particular platform is that I believe in the power of a right to make a choice. In the fact that no government, particularly not one that values things like personal personal property and personal freedoms so strongly should have to right to say "well this section of the population should not be allowed to have the right to make ANY sort of decision either way" simply because by virtue of being they have become an exception to a rule. I understand why people feel more morality should be pumped into government or into our lives as a whole, but um frankly as some one who has danced naked under the full moon, I would like the federal government not to jail me for that. Or something ridiculous like that.
no subject
I baffle at how a woman can want to turn over roe v wade. I do empathise with their belief that yes, this is murder, but I believe it is their right to then not have one, as it is my right to have one.
I've had an abortion. I had sletchy high sex with someone a week after my husband walked out. He wallked out because he didn't believe that the guy who was a friend of ours raped me the week before. I was doing a lot of parting and not knowing what was up and barely in a place to care for myself I made a decision. My decision. I got a nurse at the niagara hospital put on severe disciplinary action for telling me god wouldn't want me to do this and trying to talk me out of it when I had a panic attavk. so i'm biased too.
Still, its a choice. and we all deserve it
no subject