Politics for a moment

So I don't often pull out a soapbox unless it has "food," "faith" or "improv" written on it. I'm going to take a moment to borrow this one that says "politics" on it...and it may or may not have a faith footnote.

Sarah Palin struck me as the mayor of Snoozeville when I first saw her speak. I've only seen clips of the convention speech, but I hear that she blew the rest of the speakers out of the water. Now when the rest of the speakers include McCain and Lieberman, well... The point is, sure she's firing up the party. She's a chick in a bikini with a gun and a Bible. It's a Republican's dream! Now I won't sell her short for her story or her accomplishments...I'm just saying that those things come in a very particularly "marketable" package for the GOP.

Let's switch to simmer and put her on the back burner for a minute. The thing that really prompted my rant is this quote from an AP article entitled McCain campaign courts critical Catholic vote: "One Catholic McCain supporter, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, spoke almost exclusively about abortion at various events this week, hammering home the claim that Obama would be 'the abortion president.'"

WHAT?

I heard someone in the McCain camp recently say that Obama "promotes abortion." Let's make this clear, friends. No one promotes abortion. No one likes abortion. No one says, "You know what sounds like fun? An abortion!". It's clear by the language used on either side of the fence that no one ever bothers to discuss any real feelings on the topic, in that pro-choice supporters use the term "anti-choice" versus "pro-life" and and the pro-lifers prefer "pro-abortion" versus "choice"; both sides take a lot of care to portray their opposition as negative and wrong, naturally. I have close friends who have made the choice to have abortions in their past. I did not know them at the time, and thus cannot say first hand what their thought process was...nor could I have, I suppose, unless I lived in their heads. The point being that even when women make this decision and stand by it, it's not easy. If there is anyone out there who thinks an abortion is an easy or fun or simple decision for a woman to make, you are 99.9999% wrong. (I'm leaving the leeway of .00001% for those women who may have no feeling about it one way or the other...who knows.) But the women I have spoken to about it did not consider what they did a political statement or some moment of liberation. They went through a serious medical procedure that eliminated the potential in that moment for them to foster a human life inside of them. For some high-horse, selectively religious zealot politician, male or female, to say that any human is PRO-abortion is just fucking ridiculous. The truth is that the idea that life begins at the moment of conception assumes that God intends for that person to develop. Thus, the person has a soul and is intended to live on this earth. This is based in FAITH. Not FACT. It cannot possibly be proven as fact that humans have souls or that they are "intended" from the moment of conception. That's what makes it faith, friends. If it were a fact, faith would be useless. As a Catholic, I believe that life begins at conception, and thus I would not (likely, I've never been faced with the decision) choose to end it. As a person of faith, I know that I can't prove to the next guy that what I believe is what they should believe. That's what makes this sort of thing completely inappropriate as a matter of civic law. It is entirely personal. And for those of you who say that passing a law to make abortions illegal is morally responsible...well, maybe you can sleep better at night if it's written on a piece of paper. But it won't stop it from happening, it will only increase the physical danger for the women who choose to do it. The best way to deter abortions is to encourage education, both abstinence AND contraception. Hey fellow liberals, I know you bristled at the word abstinence....but let's be honest, it's a pretty effective form of birth control, why not at least mention it as an option to our kids out there? Call me crazy.

And now let's go back and check on our simmering pot back there, Ms. Palin. She advocates abstinence only education in schools. A pregnant teen daughter kind of drives the nail into the coffin of that argument, doesn't it? Then again, maybe Bristol was absent from Health Class that day.