Editorials & Other Articles

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sun Oct 14, 2012, 10:56 AM Oct 2012

Of Babies and Beans: Paul Ryan on Abortion

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/of-babies-and-beans-paul-ryan-on-abortion.html

Watching the political debates this season always puts this writer, perhaps irresponsibly, in mind of seventies movie comedies: Romney seems like the smug country clubber in a hundred National Lampoonish movies, the one Chevy Chase takes the girl away from, while Paul Ryan last night seemed exactly like the authority-pleasing, solemn student-body president who either gets pantsed midway by the stars of “Porkys” or else blissfully turned on to grass in the final reel by Bill Murray. Joe Biden watching Ryan, meanwhile, put me in mind of nothing so much as the great, grouchy, aged Eddie Albert in Elaine May’s matchless original, “The Heartbreak Kid,” narrowing his eyes in disbelief as he listens to the slick, oleaginous (and already married!) Charles Grodin courting his beautiful blond daughter: “ I heard everything you said… and I will tell you, quite honestly, I was very impressed. Very impressed. And I think I can also say, quite honestly… I have never heard such a crock of horseshit in my life.”

But beyond the horseshit something genuinely disturbing and scary got said last night by Paul Ryan that is, I think, easily missed and still worth brooding over. It came in response to a solemn and, it seemed to some of us, inappropriately phrased question about the influence of the Catholic Church on both men’s positions on abortion. Inappropriately phrased because legislation is made for everyone, not specially for those of “faith.” (And one would have thought that, at this moment in its history, the Catholic Church would not have much standing when it comes to defining the relationship between sexual behavior and doctrinal morality. However few in number the sinners might be, the failure to deal with them openly casts doubt on the integrity of the institution.)

Paul Ryan did not say, as John Kennedy had said before him, that faith was faith and public service, public service, each to be honored and kept separate from the other. No, he said instead “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.” That’s a shocking answer—a mullah’s answer, what those scary Iranian “Ayatollahs” he kept referring to when talking about Iran would say as well. Ryan was rejecting secularism itself, casually insisting, as the Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan put it, that “the usual necessary distinction between politics and religion, between state and church, cannot and should not exist.” And he went on to make it quietly plain that his principles are uncompromising on this, even if his boss’s policy may not seem so:

All I’m saying is, if you believe that life begins at conception, that, therefore, doesn’t change the definition of life. That’s a principle. The policy of a Romney administration is to oppose abortion with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/of-babies-and-beans-paul-ryan-on-abortion.html#ixzz29HlJeICq

3 replies

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Of Babies and Beans: Paul Ryan on Abortion (Original Post) xchrom Oct 2012 OP

"A Mullah's answer" indeed ffr Oct 2012 #1

That "bean" anecdote was nutsy XanaDUer Oct 2012 #2

And the reason women should have the right to choose is that they JDPriestly Oct 2012 #3

ffr

(22,670 posts)

1. "A Mullah's answer" indeed

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Sun Oct 14, 2012, 03:02 PM

Oct 2012

Paul Ryan did not say, as John Kennedy had said before him, that faith was faith and public service, public service, each to be honored and kept separate from the other. No, he said instead “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.”

Apparently Ryan never looks in the mirror.

XanaDUer

(12,939 posts)

2. That "bean" anecdote was nutsy

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Sun Oct 14, 2012, 08:08 PM

Oct 2012

Didn't he steal that from Kurt Cobain? And, as usual, it was a nonanswer- women should be forced to bear rapists' babies b/c his and his wife's fetus resembled a bean? Wtf?

JDPriestly

(57,936 posts)

3. And the reason women should have the right to choose is that they

Reply to XanaDUer (Reply #2)

Mon Oct 15, 2012, 01:52 PM

Oct 2012

bear the burdens of childbirth and pregnancy. 99% of the time, it's the woman who has to give up her career to raise children. And believe it or not women still die or are seriously endangered in pregnancy and childbirth. It isn't as common as it was before the beginning of the twentieth century, but it still happens. Sometimes women know that they are in danger. Sometimes women have to lie down and be cared for hand and foot in the final months of pregnancy. That is why it is a woman's right to choose and not a man's.

And as for what God thinks. When you consider the high rate of miscarriages, you have to ask whether God himself considers conception to be the beginning of life. The priests in the Middle Ages thought it started at the quickening.

My Bible talks a lot about the "breath of life." It speaks of the womb and the fact that people were once in the womb and maybe hints at conception, but the breath of life is the big decisive factor in determining whether life is present in an inanimate body -- at least according to my Bible. If you are breathing, you are alive as a separate being. If you aren't, you are not. And if you rely on your mother's breath for your oxygen, then how can you claim to have the same rights as your mother?

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