Tag Archives: Moral Relativism

News

Irish woman explains why she got an abortion: “I wanted to travel”

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Abortion lady and her partner
Abortion lady and her partner

This is from Life News.

Excerpt:

A young Irish woman has spoken of the trauma she endured by travelling to the UK for an abortion.

Cork woman Tara (24) has told how she and her partner Steve felt they had no choice but to travel eight hours – almost 590 kilometres – to an abortion clinic in west London.

Tara, who does not give her surname, appears in a BBC Three documentary “Abortion: Ireland’s Guilty Secret?” to tell her story and why she’s pro-choice.

Under the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, it is an offence to “intentionally destroy unborn human life” and those found guilty face a maximum jail term of 14 years.

Tara, who had an abortion because she wanted to travel and she wasn’t yet ready, tells reporter Alys Harte that the Government here is “ignoring” her right to choice.

“I’m really angry. I’m angry that they are ignoring women basically at the moment.”

“They shouldn’t have control over my uterus. I deserve that choice and it was taken away from me by my Government.”

“You deserve to be treated as a human and not as a criminal more than anything else,” she said.

The stress of travelling abroad to have an abortion was “not really pleasant”, Tara added.

“This could’ve been so simple. This could’ve been something I could’ve done two weeks ago basically when I found out.”

“It’s not really pleasant for anyone to have to go through the fact that you have to leave home and fly across the water and do something that is such a simple procedure. It definitely adds to the stress of it.”

Tara is one of around 4,000 Irish women who travel to the UK every year for abortions because it is illegal to do so in Ireland.

The country’s abortion laws will be the subject of a special report this year by Amnesty International.

Ireland is one of five countries chosen by Amnesty as “emblematic of global abuses of sexual and reproductive rights”.

The report aims to include testimonies from Irish women who have had abortions and explore issues such as the “prohibitive” high cost of travel, particularly for young women and socio-economically marginalised groups such as asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and Travellers.

The criminalisation of termination of pregnancy which results from rape, incest or sexual violence will also be reviewed as part of the My Body My Rights Campaign.

Tara claims that Ireland is behind its other Western counterparts on the abortion issue.

“The rest of the world can see that this is wrong but we’re in a western society and yet it hasn’t changed yet.”

I think the picture that goes with the story is really telling. Look at the man that she chose… hoop earrings, tattoos, piercings. He is her “partner” – not her husband. He is there for recreation, not to provide for her or lead her on moral/spiritual issues. They are having sex, but it’s doubtful that he has the discipline to provide for a family. Yet she is giving him all of herself anyway, because it’s fun to have recreational sex. Marriage isn’t fun though – marriage is boring. Marriage is work. Marriage is self-sacrifice. She is only 24! It’s too early to think of marriage. Now is the time for having fun, seeking thrills and traveling. It’s time for adventures! Not for prudence and caution. And if a child comes along who wants to stop her fun, then that child just has to die. And he is all for it!

I think this story goes very well with the mean post I wrote earlier expressing my frustration with how we as a society seem to have lost the ability to tell young, unmarried women “NO” when they want to act selfishly and/or unwisely. Look at the man she chose! He is not the kind of man who would tell her NO for anything she is doing wrong. He wants the sex, and he is willing to keep his mouth shut to get it. He’s not looking for a competent partner to support him in some enterprise. They are both more interested in recreational sex than they are in marriage and personal responsibility. I sincerely doubt that this man is financially prepared to be a protector and provider – he chose a woman who just killed his child! And she chose him because she could get his attention and acceptance, but without having to be judged or led by him in any way.

Why would she choose this man? A person who understands morality subjectively will try to surround herself with people who will always tell her that she is doing the right thing – no matter what she is doing. “Follow your heart”. She will also seek to silence anyone from telling her that what she is doing is wrong. She will also vote for laws that will punish people who say in public that what she is doing is wrong. With respect to abortion, that means no clinic protesters, no graphic images from protesters, no mandatory ultrasounds, no public expressions of Christianity. Anything that makes her feel that a majority of people are opposed to her has to be tuned out or silenced by force of government. The most important question that a subjective-morality person asks is “what will people think of me if I do this?” And also “I want to do this, how can I make more people agree with me?”

If we want women to stop making poor decisions with their lives, then we have to speak up and be convincing on issues like abortion, and to teach them to be careful about surrounding themselves with people who are using them, and who will agree with any crazy thing they want to do in order to keep using them.

One last point about this woman. When I look at her picture, I think about her future. I think about whether the man she has chosen is wasting her youth, and whether she understands that men like that do not stick around when a woman gets older. In order to get a man to commit to a woman past the time where she is at her peak of physical attraction, she has to do two things. First, she has to be developing her own skills and accomplishments. Second, she has to choose a man who s trying to achieve something that requires those skills and accomplishments. That’s what causes a man to fall in love and remain devoted to one woman into old age. But this woman is not looking to improve her skills and to get achievements that a good man would find valuable. Instead, she is choosing the easy road. Giving her physical beauty to the wrong man, in order to have fun and thrills today – and there’s no plan for tomorrow.

And as she ages, she will probably find herself without a man who is dedicated to providing for her, and will instead vote for government to take that role in her life. That means higher taxes, more government spending and borrowing, more debt for the next generation, and fewer young men who can afford to marry and have kids. That’s why we need to tell the women of today NO when they want to behave selfishly, and be guided by their emotions.

News

Obama responds to Islamic State terrorism by saying Christians are just as bad

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In the past I blogged about four myths about the Crusades, but for our purposes, the most important is that the Crusades at least started out as defensive reactions to the conquest of Western lands by Islam.

Anyway, here’s a reaction to Obama’s moral equivalence from Investors Business Daily.

First, what Obama did:

In remarks at a prayer meeting Thursday, President Obama implied Christianity, just like Islam, is filled with people who “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.” This is the progressive disease of moral equivalence at its worst.

In recent days and weeks, the world has watched grimly as the horrific barbarity of fundamentalist Islam has been put on full display.

With routine beheadings, crucifixions, tortures, mass killings of civilians, burying children alive, and, most recently, burning a prisoner alive and filming his death agony to the approving yells of onlookers, it’s clear something is horribly wrong within Islam.

And yet, apart from rather routine denunciations of the savagery, Obama used his appearance at a National Prayer Breakfast to upbraid Christians for their sins.

“Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

They write:

The remarks aren’t merely insulting. They betray a deep ignorance of Western Judeo-Christian culture and its history.

No one claims Christians haven’t done terrible things, some in the name of religion. But this is a straw-man argument.

Obama, for instance, talks of the Crusades. But far from being about conquest, the Crusades were a counter-reaction to the Muslim jihad that swept Christian lands in the Mideast, North Africa, Spain and Balkans.

Nothing less than Western civilization was at stake. Not much has changed today.

According to Open Doors USA’s World Watch List for 2015, “Approximately 100 million Christians are persecuted worldwide, making them one of the most persecuted religious groups in the world.”

And who are the persecutors? “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries” that make up Open Doors USA’s watch list, the report says.

Meanwhile, how are Muslims in the West treated? With visas, welfare, legal protection, even special speech codes to protect their religious sensibilities, along with copious apologies by people such as Obama. Even terrorists at Gitmo are given Halal meals, prayer mats and Qurans.

Obama’s done this before. In a speech in Cairo in 2009, he also suggested the Christian West had much to answer for.

In point of fact, the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage has led to tolerance, justice, women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

Neither slavery nor Jim Crow laws were “justified” by the U.S. Christian mainstream. Indeed, as history shows, Christians were the driving force behind the anti-slavery movement in the U.S. But slavery is still found in the Muslim Mideast and Africa.

Terrorist murderers won’t be appeased by Obama’s cringe-worthy remarks. They’ll be encouraged. As such, they aren’t merely wrong — they’re dangerous.

I’ve noticed this “reasoning” that Obama is employing before when discussing social issues with feminists. I produce facts showing that children are least likely to be abused when they grow up with their own parents in a married home. And they say that there exists some child who was abused by his married parents. As if the existence of one counterexample negates the probabilities or the relative frequencies in different situations. What Obama is really saying is this “because you defended yourself from Muslim conquerors 900 years ago, that justifies kidnapping underage girls into sex slavery after you murder their parents in front of them”. Should we have elected a President who is incapable of basic reasoning about history and about ethics? Well, we did.

News

Obama says that 99.9% of Muslims worldwide reject radical Islam, is he right?

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That video is from The Weekly Standard, here’s the text:

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims reject radical Islam. He made the comments in response to a question about the White House avoiding using the phrase “Islamic terrorists.”

“You know, I think that the way to understand this is there is an element growing out of Muslim communities in certain parts of the world that have perverted the religion, have embraced a nihilistic, violent, almost medieval interpretation of Islam, and they’re doing damage in a lot of countries around the world,” said Obama.

“But it is absolutely true that I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam, and I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for–order, peace, prosperity.”

Now, let’s take a look at apostasy and blasphemy laws in Muslim countries, with some help from the left-leaning Pew Research.

They write:

In 10 of 20 countries where there are adequate samples for analysis, at least half of Muslims who favor making sharia the law of the land also favor stoning unfaithful spouses.

Some of the highest support for stoning is found in South Asia and the Middle East-North Africa region. In Pakistan (89%) and Afghanistan (85%), more than eight-in-ten Muslims who want Islamic law as their country’s official law say adulterers should be stoned, while nearly as many say the same in the Palestinian territories (84%) and Egypt (81%). A majority also support stoning as a penalty for the unfaithful in Jordan (67%), Iraq (58%). However, support is significantly lower in Lebanon (46%) and Tunisia (44%), where less than half of those who support sharia as the official law of the land believe that adulterers should be stoned.

In Southeast Asia, six-in-ten Muslims in Malaysia consider stoning an appropriate penalty for adultery. About half hold this view in Thailand (51%) and Indonesia (48%).

Muslims in Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe are generally less likely to support stoning adulterers. Among those who favor Islamic law as the official law of the land, only in Tajikistan do about half (51%) support this form of punishment. Elsewhere in the two regions, fewer than four-in-ten favor this type of punishment, including roughly a quarter or fewer across the countries surveyed in Southern and Eastern Europe.

And:

Compared with attitudes toward applying sharia in the domestic or criminal spheres, Muslims in the countries surveyed are significantly less supportive of the death penalty for converts. Nevertheless, in six of the 20 countries where there are adequate samples for analysis, at least half of those who favor making Islamic law the official law also support executing apostates.

Taking the life of those who abandon Islam is most widely supported in Egypt (86%) and Jordan (82%). Roughly two-thirds who want sharia to be the law of the land also back this penalty in the Palestinian territories (66%). In the other countries surveyed in the Middle East-North Africa region, fewer than half take this view.

In the South Asian countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, strong majorities of those who favor making Islamic law the official law of the land also approve of executing apostates (79% and 76%, respectively). However, in Bangladesh far fewer (44%) share this view.

A majority of Malaysian Muslims (62%) who want to see sharia as their country’s official law also support taking the lives of those who convert to other faiths. But fewer take this position in neighboring Thailand (27%) and Indonesia (18%).

In Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe, only in Tajikistan (22%) do more than a fifth of Muslims who want sharia as the official law of the land also condone the execution of apostates. Support for killing converts to other faiths falls below one-in-ten in Albania (8%) and Kazakhstan (4%).

Now there is one little problem with this Pew Research data that causes them to understate the real numbers who favor adultery-stonings and apostasy-killings.

Andrew McCarthy explains in National Review:

But what is striking is that the depressing state of affairs is manifest despite Pew’s best efforts to make things seem better than they are. Principally, the survey is about Muslim views about sharia, Islam’s legal system and framework for society. It is intimated that Pew’s study is exhaustive, involving interviews with 38,000 Muslims across 39 countries. But, as my friend Andy Bostom pointed out to me this morning, guess which countries are not included in the survey? That would be Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan — perhaps the three most sharia compliant countries in the world, home cumulatively to nearly 150 million Muslims.

[…]In point of fact, sharia is the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran. These countries profess themselves as reflections of the true Islam (Saudi Arabia from the Sunni perspective, Iran from the Shiite) in which no law but sharia is necessary and no departures from sharia are permissible. Sudan (a Sunni Muslim country) is already close to the Saudis and Iranians in this regard and is sure to be more so when it finally adopts a new constitution (which it has been threatening to do for several years).

Iran has about 87 million people, Sudan has about 42 million people, and Saudi Arabia has about 31 million people. These are strict Islamic countries and they were left out of the survey.

So, what are we to make of Obama’s comments now? Are Democrats like Barack Obama, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton accurate enough in their beliefs about the world that we should have confidence in their foreign policy? If they really believe these obvious false assertions, and they are making decisions based on these delusions, then how much does that set back the causes of freedom and democracy in the world? It seems to me that the first rule of protecting the good and fighting against evil is to be able to identify which is which.