Comment by runarberg
5 years ago
Consider this: Person A calls for a total ban on abortion. person B calls this person a misogynist.
[Now I don’t know if this has ever happened (usually I don’t call people misogynists unless they talk about women as objects) but let’s go with this]
We can rephrase this as: Person A says pregnant people should be forced to undergo their pregnancy. Person B says this person in misinformed in an insulting manner.
What might have even happened in this discussion (we are just being theoretical here, right, so we can entertain, right? Or at least we don’t want this topic to be off limits right?) is the following: Person A actually said: “If it were up to women, humanity would be extinct in a generation. Women are evil, and we should not grant them any rights, particularly not the right to determine the birth of their children”. Person B responds: “I’m glad you’ve shown your bigoted misogynistic face. Now we all know what kind of a person you are, and whether we should keep listening to you. Do your self a favor and keep these opinions to your self unless you want to keep embarrassing your self”.
Who here is guilty of shutting down the debate? Who here decided that talking about abortion rights is “off topic”?
Now person B most certainly suggested that person A shouldn’t continue this debate. They also definitely insulted person A. But is anything here in their response surprising? Did they do anything wrong? How about we look at person A in this context? Do we want people like that expressing their opinion? Person B might have insulted person A, and hoped they would leave and never come back, but person A was insulting all women and calling for a whole group of people to have their decisions dictated by other people.
So why am I taking this example? It is obviously an exaggeration and not specifically what we are taking about here. But for all I know this is the kind of conduct that many people say us “lefties” are doing when we “mark a topic off limits”.
Ancestor’s point was this exactly, many people claim that us lefties want to shut down the topic because we get offended by everything. But do we? Are we maybe just behaving in a completely rational way, insulting back people that have insulted us? Asking people to stop that are threatening us, our friends, or people that we know exist?
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PS: Off course in your example there is another qualifier there: “using federal funds for abortion”. People might have many reason disagree with that including being for forced pregnancies. But now the goalpost has been moved a little hasn’t it? So I took the liberty of moving it in the other direction my self. You provided an example that has probably never happened in reality, so I provide a counter example that also probably never happened, sounds fair?
A premise of your strawman seems to be that women have a different opinion on abortion than men, which isn’t true. Unlike many other political opinions, there is very little difference between men and women on abortion questions: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p.... Republican women are significantly more likely than Republican men to identify as pro-life: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730183531/poll-majority-want-.... Your strawman also invokes gratuitous insults, which aren’t necessary to actually debate the issue.
Apart from that, my hypothetical is one that happens all the time. Article after article denounces policies like waiting periods, which the majority of women support and which exist in other developed countries, as misogynistic: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkg753/what-its-like-to-endu....
Stepping back, a problem with your examples is the individualistic framing. Abortion undoubtedly involves a woman’s bodily autonomy. But it also undoubtedly involves another living thing. (Regardless of what political rights you believe that thing should have, it’s alive as a scientific matter.) Even Roe recognizes that a societal interest in the unborn child kicks in during the second trimester. (Roe, by the way, is unusual even in developed countries. Where many countries have abortion by law, almost none guarantee it under their constitution. Around the same time as Roe, the Canadian Supreme Court declared abortion to be purely a legislative matter. And the German constitutional court declared allowing abortion to be an unconstitutional violation of a fetus’s right to life. That’s still the law in both countries.) It also involves society generally. The fact that the developed world spends tremendous amounts of aid money assisting developing countries to reduce their birth rates belies the idea that reproduction has purely individual effect. Framing it in purely individualistic terms makes it seem more like it shouldn’t be up for debate, but only because the framing cuts out all the interests actually involved. Likewise, a discussion about immigration isn’t just about the immigrant, but about the society that has to expend resources integrating and supporting the immigrant. When you reframe these issues in individualistic terms to exclude effects on other people, they seem more like things that shouldn’t be subject to debate. But that’s just a product of the artificial framing.
> A premise of your strawman seems to be that women have a different opinion on abortion than men.
No it’s not. My premise is that there exist some topics that are disenfranchising to some people, and debating those can be insulting or threatening to some people.
I’m not gonna debate you on the merits of abortion laws or immigration laws, we can leave that for another time. Here we are talking about whether it is OK (or even rational) for us ‘lefties’ to get offended by some topics, and argue to an extend where some people might not want to say certain things in a future debate.
I say it is OK, precisely because there is another person with stakes in the topic who might be at risk if terms of the debate are not in their favor. I moved this to individualistic terms on purpose, precisely because some topics involve individuals. These individuals have feelings and you may expect them to react accordingly.
I think we get into trouble with this analysis, of taking topics off the table for civic discussion.
There are obviously some topics where that's true; for instance, no sane person will entertain a debate about re-segregating schools.
But then you have the idea that immigration is off the table because it dehumanizes undocumented people --- despite the fact that even American Latinos generally believe immigration is a colorable argument, or that abortion is off the table because it threatens the bodily autonomy of women --- despite the fact that a very large fraction of women support addition abortion restrictions. The principle just doesn't hold together.
It's possible that we're all just talking past each other, and that all of us acknowledge that there are going to be public policy discussions about these kinds of topics, and we're just talking about why some citizens will refuse to engage.
(Disclaimer: I think we have a moral imperative to issue a blanket amnesty and simplified path to citizenship for the vast majority of all undocumented immigrants, and oppose European-style restrictions on abortion).