Bush v. Children September 17, 2007 Jill Congressional Democrats are trying to pass a bill that would provide health care to millions of children — and President Bush may very well veto it. Because pro-life Republicans care about life so much.
Is it possible to be a libertarian, say, without being an asshole who hates children? Love the blog, Jill, but I’d sure be happier if you’d make some effort to see where the opposition is coming from.
Is it possible to be a libertarian, say, without being an asshole who hates children? Sure. Just don’t stake your political position on being “pro-life” because you love the babies sooooo much, and then do everything in your power to make their existence insufferable once they’re born. Love the blog, Jill, but I’d sure be happier if you’d make some effort to see where the opposition is coming from. I see where they’re coming from. They don’t like spending tax dollars on things like children’s health care, because they think it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to socialism from there. I think they’re wrong. I’m also a feminist blogger and this is my space to vent. If I were a journalist, I’d present both sides of the story. Luckily, you have the New York Times for that. I’ve never claimed to be fair or balanced.
Oh, I see, so you can’t be a *pro-life* libertarian without being an asshole–that clears things up. As long as we’re agreed that you’re not being fair I’ll stop harping on this. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to be fair though. You can be fair without being a journalist.
I’m still confused as to how, exactly, I’m being “unfair.” As far as I can tell, there’s a bill out there that would expand health care access to millions of children who need it. Bush is planning on vetoing the bill because it doesn’t fit in with his conservative view of health care, which rests on privatization. Privatization has been disasterous for a great many Americans, particularly the uninsured and under-insured. At the same time as he’s cutting off bills that would provide health care to children, he’s declaring “Sanctity of Life” day and curtailing abortion and birth control rights because he claims that he values children. Sorry, but I do think you’re an asshole if you have a chance to get millions of children medical care and you don’t take it because you’re beholden to the interests of private insurance companies. Please explain what I’m being “unfair” about — is it just because I disagree with the conservative stance on this one? Because I didn’t outline their stance as completely reasonable and understandable when it’s not? Tell me what I could have written which would have made this post more “fair.”
You can be a pro-life libertarian without being an asshole. To suggest otherwise becuase you need to vent is, I think, not fair. I thought you agreed in comment 3 that you were venting and being unfair, and were definding the practice of unfair venting on a blog. Now you’re saying that you are being fair after all? So you stand by the view that all pro-life libertarians are assholes? Or have I misunderstood you to be committed to this? It isn’t unfair to merely disagree with the pro-life libertarian. It is unfair, however, to say that no pro-life libertarian cares about poor children. I’m really sorry if I’m being tiresome. I just find this sort of tone and name-calling intellectually stifling.
How, exactly, does one square being “pro-life” with being a libertarian? I mean, unless you’re just personally against abortion and don’t advocate governmental regulation of it for other people. But isn’t demanding that the state outlaw abortion sort of antithetical to the whole anti-government stance of libertarianism?
Zuzu, Suppose that, for one reason or another, you think (what seems unwarranted to me) that all abortion is murder. And suppose you think, as libertarians typically do, that the govt should outlaw all murder. Then it seems that you’ll be a “pro-life” (I’m going to go ahead and use the scare quotes for you because I want you to feel the love) libertarian with no obvious contradiction.
It’s only bad government regulation if we disagree with it. Oh and how dare you agree that I don’t have to pay municipal taxes and then bill me for water, sewage and roads.
Oh, I see, so you can’t be a *pro-life* libertarian without being an asshole–that clears things up. No, you really can’t. If you’re advocating for government control of women’s healthcare on the one hand and saying that the government should have no control of children’s healthcare on the other, you’re not a libertarian. You’re just an asshole who wants the government to control people you don’t approve of.
The funniest part of this thread is that George W. Bush is as much a libertarian as I am a giraffe in a top hat and monocle. “Jill don’t you think it is possible to be a libertarian and not engage in ridiculous non-sequitors?”
Suppose that, for one reason or another, you think (what seems unwarranted to me) that all abortion is murder. So, you’re positing a libertarian who thinks that a pregnancy should always be continued, no matter what, but that he has no responsibility to support the child that he insisted must be born. Sorry, still seeing a whole shitload of hypocrisy there. You don’t get to impose a lifelong burden on someone and then insist that she pay for it by herself.
Mnemosyne, it is no part of libertarianism that one “has no responsibility to support” a poor child. The libertarian view is that one *should* have no *legal* responsibility to support the child. That is consistent with the view that everyone has a moral responsibility to help poor children. Also, Bush’s position is more-or-less indistinguishable from a pro-life libertarian on this particular issue. So what does it matter if he is not a libertarian across the board? Talk about a non sequitur ellenbrenna! Just in case this is not clear, I’m not defending libertarianism, I just think that they have sophisticated and interesting reasons for their views and that they are not typically assholes. (Or at least, not in virtue of their libertarianism!)
If you’ll recall, chad appeared in a thread earlier this month about pharmacists refusing prescriptions for contraceptives on the grounds that said pharmacists didn’t want women to have contraceptives. His issue was that we said those pharmacists were assholes. Apparently feminists calling people assholes when they act like assholes is a big issue for chad.
Mnemosyne, it is no part of libertarianism that one “has no responsibility to support” a poor child. The libertarian view is that one *should* have no *legal* responsibility to support the child. That is consistent with the view that everyone has a moral responsibility to help poor children. Ok fine. But it at least makes libertarians inconsistent if they believe that no one has a legal responsibility to support a child, and yet they do believe that women have a legal responsibility to continue a pregnancy to term against their will.
I’ve probably said it before but George W. Bush sends one clear message that goes like “every fetus aborted is one less soldier to die in my utterly unnecessary war”.
Not sure I follow, Jill. Are you arguing that requiring someone to continue their pregnancy *entails* requiring them to support someone (namely, the fetus)? Or are you arguing that requiring someone to continue their pregnancy is somehow incompatible with legally allowing them to neglect the resulting child? Anyway, this is very interesting but my point is that people can surely have good-faith disagreements about these subtleties, contrary to your “asshole” rhetoric. My discomfort with your rhetoric has nothing to do with this being a feminist blog (as annejumps suggests above). I don’t like this sort of rhetoric because, as I said before, it is intellectually stifling. Let me explain a bit. This rhetoric has the (no doubt usually unintended) effect of intimidating people who don’t already agree with you and making it clear that serious disagreement, or even *consideration* of serious disagreement, will not really be tolerated (lest you be classified as a “crazy conservative” or an “asshole” or lumped in with Jerry Fallwell or who knows what else). That is a big issue to me, because I don’t have a lot of commitments on political issues and I like to take lots of different views seriously.
Are you arguing that requiring someone to continue their pregnancy *entails* requiring them to support someone (namely, the fetus)? That’s kind of the idea, yes. She has to support the developing fetus with her body, and then she faces the prospect of having to support the infant/child after birth. You may shrug and say, “Oh, she can put it up for adoption,” but that presupposes a couple of things: 1) that she can give the child up, emotionally (adoption is not cost-free); 2) that there is somewhere for the child to go. Which, in the case of infants who are not healthy and white, requires some state intervention. Parental rights can only be terminated if there is someone (and that someone includes the state) ready to take over. Requiring someone to give her time, money (because being pregnant requires extra food as well as medical care, and that costs money) and health, not to mention her body because some asshole (ooh! I said asshole!) thinks that the state should stay out of *his* personal affairs, but since he thinks abortion is icky, that’s reason enough for him to advocate governmental intrusion into the very bodies of women, is coercive, antilibertarian, and FFS, the very definition of the heavy hand of the state. Meantime, is the government going to require that the guy who got the woman pregnant pay the increased cost of her existence because he dropped off his sperm in her womb?
And as an addenda to the above: there are some states where termination of parental rights in favor of adoptive parents or the state requires *both* parents to sign off. So if you get a situation where the mother wants to terminate parental rights but the father doesn’t, the mother is still on the hook for child support.
Are you arguing that requiring someone to continue their pregnancy *entails* requiring them to support someone (namely, the fetus)? You have no clue how pregnancy works, do you?
Chad, I think maybe you’re misreading our venting as being (in your mind) poorly done presentation of strict political argument, or something. Jill (for example) is basically saying to the regular readers “Hey, check out these assholes, can you believe this? Argh.” It’s letting off steam in an audience of like-minded people, regular readers of a blog. I don’t know, I think it’s a bit much to focus on use of the word “asshole” rather than the asshole behavior under discussion. I think you’re saying that people writing here shouldn’t use “asshole,” but… that’s not really your call, and use of the word doesn’t invalidate the crafted criticism under discussion. I mean, it’s coming close to saying “Gee whiz, I’d love to listen to what you have to say, but your language is just so naughty that I can only focus on how naughty it is.”
Federal legislation banning particular medical procedures is totally libertarian! Pregnant women are not at liberty to decide their own medical care in a dire emergency but it is totally libertarian because George W. Bush and Chad dig it. From now on I totally going to apply philosophical and political labels willy nilly based on my personal preferences. Polka dots are feminist but stripes are completely fascist…I dare you to prove me wrong.
Also, I didn’t use the word “asshole” in the post. It was only a tag. So it seems like a funny thing to latch on to.
Jill, I don’t see why it should matter that you call all pro-life libertarians assholes in a tag instead of in the main text. I’ve been pretty clear about my reasons for opposing your name-calling. None of those reasons fails to apply when the name-calling occurs in a tag. I think it is pretty clear at this point that you are unmoved by my concerns and that my effort to persuade you have failed. That’s ok. Thank you all for engaging with me and for the most part being polite. I won’t keep posting about this in future threads, I promise. Just to sum up, my conclusion is that the people who have responded fall into two camps. In one camp, there are the people who think that all pro-life libertarians really are assholes (not just wrong, or even obviously wrong or incoherent), and they deserve to be called assholes in a public forum. I think that view is pretty obviously mistaken, but hey, at least it is good to know that’s what you think. In the other camp, there are people who think that it isn’t really true that all pro-life libertarians are assholes, but that it is just great to say they are on a blog like this in order to blow off steam. I find that view puzzling. Why would it feel good to call people assholes when they are not in fact assholes? But again, I don’t expect anyone to change their minds at this point. All the best.
Hmmm, I had to look up “libertarian” and apparently this word does not exist in German but the phrase is dem Prinzip der Wahlfreiheit folgend which in English would be following the principle of the freedom of choice. To me that sounds a lot like pro-choice ^^ PS: My rhetoric lecturer might want to use your rantings, chad, as an example of unfair rhetoric.