via commenter CV at Mark Shea’s:
Celling Out: Bioethics and the Culture of Cool
Excerpt (emphasis added)
A buddy of mine from college, one of the few with whom I still maintain regular contact, is convinced that I misplaced my brain somewhere over the course of the last eleven years… I’m religious—a Christian, to be more precise—which automatically makes my perspectives questionable as far as my agnostic friend is concerned. Exacerbating matters is the extent to which my views place me squarely within a “conservative” political framework and thus, in my friend’s estimation, a position of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition….
Fortunately for my ego, I eventually came to realize that such intransigence really has very little to do with me personally; rather, it’s part of a much larger phenomenon with which those of us attempting to safeguard human life must learn to deal. To state the matter as simply as possible, what I have discovered about my friend is that when it comes to bioethical issues, he’s much more concerned with the associations of particular beliefs than the beliefs themselves. For him, embryonic stem-cell research is justifiable—even perhaps praiseworthy—not because logic has led him to this conclusion but in order to align himself with one particular cultural community over and against another. In short, my friend—a devotee of The Daily Show and NPR, a subscriber to The New Yorker, Adbusters, and The Financial Times, and a pretty big fan of both Al Franken and Michael Moore—wants to be thought of as an urbane and intelligent person and so has chosen for himself the political opinions that he believes further this reputation.
YES. For too many people, logic has nothing to do with it. They live in Maureen Dowd’s world, a world where grown-up people still live by the rules of the middle-school cafeteria: I think this way because the cool kids think this way.
The saddest part of the pro-life/pro-choice bs is everyone forgets this should have never been a gov issue this should have remained a personal issue for women A moral issue for each and every woman.
The fact that men that don’t live in our bodies can dictate yea or nay is wrong on so many levels.
I personally do not advocte abortion.. I believe where there is a heartbeat there is life.
YES. For too many people, logic has nothing to do with it. They live in Maureen Dowd’s world, a world where grown-up people still live by the rules of the middle-school cafeteria: I think this way because the cool kids think this way.
Amen.
I very often think many people become pro-choice simply because they don’t want psychological rotten fruit thrown at them.
Yes! Now imagine the continent’s newsrooms full of these people! Very frustrating.
Yes, I am proud to think exactly the way the in-crowd thinks. Anyone who doesn’t think this way is obviously an idiotic fundamentalist. Elton John is right. Organized religion just makes people into hateful lemmings.
The government should torch some churches before those evil fundamentalists come and get us.
Oh Erik,
I actually felt sorry for Elton John with his last tirade. I wondered he if is suffering from some kind of brain-eating bacteria. I am actually really sorry he is so angry and misguided.
I wondered he if is suffering from some kind of brain-eating bacteria.
That would account for his sense of dress. A prion disorder, perhaps? He is Englisch.
I am actually really sorry he is so angry and misguided.
It’s funny that term “misguided,” because it sounds so mild, yet it is most apt, and most troublesome. The anger is a result of being misguided, misguided in terms of the proper ends of human activity and misguided in terms of the nature of being human. It is a terrible thing.
I see these people all the time. The disconnect between what they are meant to be and what they are aiming themselves at eats them up, and their anger just hardens them into the horrible stuff that causes the anger to begin with.
I live with one of these people… he doesn’t want to go against the flow, he feels totally uncomfortable around homosexuals, (which I don’t, go figure) yet he will argue in favour of homosexual marraige (which I won’t). Also, I think the whole “in” perpective lets them be guilt and consequence free, and what could be better than that? Then if anyone tries to say anything different, they’re ignorant (not because they’re wrong, but because if they were actually right then the “in” crowd would be so guilty, it would be crippling, horrifying. At this point, they don’t WANT to be wrong, they are desperately hanging on to anything that will still convince them that they are right.
he doesn’t want to go against the flow, he feels totally uncomfortable around homosexuals, (which I don’t, go figure) yet he will argue in favour of homosexual marraige (which I won’t).
Rosey Posey and I just had a somewhat similar conversation the other day. She mentioned that she was surprised that I felt perfectly comfortable working at the health food coop, as it seemed as far as she could tell, the only “conservative” type person there. Most of the other workers were homosexuals, or lots of politically liberal bumper stickers.But I do come from a crunchy, artsy NYC background. I know the stereotype is I should be rigid, and ignorant and walk around with a Bible
and looking like Christabella from Silent Hill.
Perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that women who want to kill their babies yell at prolifers, but dead fetuses cannot stand up for their rights.
Pansy,
That is what it was like for me as the only Conservative at the Established-in-1960-folk-and-roots-music record label I worked for (no homos, though, but lefties and Commies of every other stripe). I had great fun and remain friends with all of them to this day, and prefer there company to your average suburban Republican any day (although I do have some good friends who are suburban Republicans, so we are talking very generally here – and the only suburban Republican friends I have are Catholic. If we were talking Protties, here, it would be a more absolute rule).