17 December 2005 - 9:32am
And the moral of the story....
Just suppose....
Let's say you own a machine shop. You have a lot of tools which can do a lot of things, and you know how to use them.
A man drives onto your lot and dumps a bunch of parts onto your dock -- all the parts that go into a bicycle.
He says, "With your tools and my parts, we have all the elements to make a bicycle. Now, you are obligated to me to make the bicycle."
He drives away. You can only laugh. How ludicrous! He demands that you make a bicycle for him! You shove the parts into the dumpster and get back to your own work.
The man comes back later and demands his bicycle. You say he can go make his own bicycle. He storms off in a rage and comes back with the Sheriff.
"You're under arrest."
"For what charge?" you ask.
"For stealing this man's bicycle."
"I didn't steal anything. He was demanding that I make him a bicycle. I refused!"
The sheriff takes out his handcuffs. "You had all the parts and all the tools. Therefore the bicycle already existed. All you had to do was spend a little time and energy to put the pieces together."
"But this is my shop, and I have other things to get done."
"Your convenience is not relevant. You were obligated to make this man a bicycle. Instead, you aborted the job. That's stealing."
The sheriff snaps the cuffs on you and puts you into the back seat of his cruiser to take you to jail.
The man who demanded the bicycle looks mournfully at you. "All my bicycle needed was a little work and time from you. You thief!"
What so-called "pro-lifers" are demanding is that the government enforce their belief that women must devote their time and health and energy and daily lives to make babies for anyone who happens to dump semen into their vaginas -- just like our friend with the bicycle parts demands that the machine shop owner build him a bicycle.
And just as forcing the machine shop owner to work for anyone who demands it amounts to slavery, what the pro-criminalization crowd are demanding are laws that effectively force women into baby-making slaves.
once an ovum is fertilized, that one cell zygote has all 46 chromosomes and is a human being. the sex, hair & eye color and all of it's being is directed by those chromosomes. it is a unique human being that now only requires nutrition, shelter and time to become an adult....
And that little detail -- that it takes 9 months for a woman to make a baby out of those raw parts -- is irrelevant to them. They don't want to hear about the woman and her "convenience." They claim that the bicycle already exists if the parts exist, and that the woman is obligated morally and, they insist, legally to build the bicycle for them.
In other words, it doesn't matter that a baby doesn't exist yet. Just because the parts exist to make a baby, that makes the parts equivalent to the baby.
And that, therefore, justifies stripping the woman of all human and civil rights and making her a slave of the state.
So if you have a machine shop, too bad for you. All anyone has to do is barge onto your lot and dump his load of parts onto your dock, and that obligates you to use your time, tools, sweat and energy into making his bicycle. Or else you're a thief.
Welcome to the "new moral" America.
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Comments
Wow,
My shop has a sign at the dock. DRIVERS MUST CHECK AT FRONT DESK.
I also don't allow fish around the tool crib.
Of course, things are even more ridiculous, because it's really as though he dumped a seat and a set of handlebars in front of you and insisted you had to provide him with a frame, wheels, gears, and so on, and then put the whole thing together.
Or, more apt still, he gives you nothing more than a blueprint and insists you use all your own inventory, most of which is geared more towards, say, farm equipment than bicycles.
...A woman without a bicycle is like a fish on the 10 Most Wanted List.
Or something like that.
..., even blueprint is not enough.
It just blows my mind that people really think that a unique set of the right chromosomes is all it takes to be human. As a molecular biologist who often notices peoples' eyes glaze over as soon as I say DNA, I can't help but think that there are a lot of people who think DNA is the physical manifestation of a soul. Do people really tie spirituality that closely to their physicality? When you get cancer, is your soul also decaying? Should you stay out of the sun to protect your sacrosanct DNA? It doesn't add up at all. Between the widespread misunderstanding of what evolution is, and the mystical qualities assigned to nucleic acids, I wonder what it is that is being taught in high school biology classes.
That seems to be the goal. That's why "pro-life" people oppose policies that would actually reduce the number of aborted pregnancies in this country -- because to do so would mean empowering women.
Maybe I'm just too cynical. It's not news that religious dogmatists are threatened by science. How many great scientists in history were jailed and otherwise oppressed by The Church?
If they claim to have the inside track on The Truth, then they have to attack science because science shows that our understanding of the truth is ever-changing.