Mr. Stool:<\/p>\n
So pro-choice supporters have to realize that there is a “moral dimension” to abortion? And then a “compromise” would be possible? Does Mitch sound like he wants to compromise, boys and girls?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, Bad Dog, all you had to do was ask. I think I was pretty clear about it.<\/p>\n
Me? Personally? Hell no. If it were up to me, there’d be no compromise at all! Not on abortion, or many many many other issues.<\/p>\n
But I’m not an absolute dictator. I am one of a couple hundred million voters.<\/p>\n
Our society<\/em> reaches compromises, though, on pretty much every issue (mostly; there’s not much call to legalize cannibalism). I liken it to tugs of war, with people pulling the rope of each issue one way or the other; some pulling hard, others not so much, still others cajoling people to pull with them or at least stop pulling for the other side.<\/p>\nIf you want a different metaphor, you go ahead and pick it! But since society does the compromising, my goal is to pull like a mofo to try to make society’s compromise better (from my point of view).\u00a0 I expect others to pull against me.\u00a0 Being a conservative, I’m a match for any 20 of them, but knock yourselves out.<\/p>\n
Well, he does wrote about “an acceptable<\/strike> a less vile compromise,” Spotty.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nGrasshopper, does that sound like Mitch would accept half a loaf if offered to him?<\/p>\n
No, I guess not.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith good reason – society and its attitudes aren’t a “loaf” that someone offers me, for which I should be grateful, with which I should just shut up and go along. It’s a huge organism with five million parts (in Minnesota alone), each with a mind of its own. And I’m doing my best to reach as many as possible, on the things that matter to me.<\/p>\n
And if “Spotty” thinks society and its attitudes and the way our\u00a0culture conducts its business\u00a0are <\/em>some kind of “loaf” handed to him by some unseen benefactor, [Joke about how DFLers are just a bunch of mindless hive creatures, like Borg slathered in patchouli and chanting mindless doggerel, deleted for civility’s sake<\/em>]<\/p>\nMitch sees compromise as just a step in the incremental banning of abortion until it is entirely illegal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Bad dog! Stupid dog! Who’s gonna clean up this pile of steaming intellectual crap on the floor? Bad dog!<\/p>\n
I see compromise as “where society as a whole is<\/em>” on whatever issue you want to talk about.<\/p>\nAnd yes – my goal is to try like hell<\/em> to make society as a whole realize that life begins at conception.<\/p>\nBecause it’s not my <\/em>role to compromise. My role is to affect<\/em> the compromise. To respect the results <\/em>of that compromise, of course – it’s called “living within the rule of law” – but to keep trying to swing that compromise via any legal, civil means.
\nTo be fair to Spotty, though, he’s handicapped. DFLers in this state aren’t used to compromising. They’re used to having absolute control. Now that there’s someone pulling against them on some of these issues, it’s disconcerting to some of them.<\/p>\nTough.<\/p>\n
Tell you what Mitch, come back after you’re willing to concede that there is a privacy and civil liberties dimension to abortion. Then maybe we can talk.<\/p>\n
But you go first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
OK. I’ll go first.<\/p>\n
No! I will concede no such thing! The parents’ civil liberties and privacy do not <\/em>trump the “fetus”‘s right to life, liberty and happiness any more than they do mine! The fetus is a human from the moment it’s conceived. Killing it is murder. People – individual men and women – need to take that into account before they make flippy floppy. It’s as simple as that.<\/p>\nAnd for someone else – let’s call her “Gretel Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis” – it’s equally clear-cut. Abortion is not just a right, it’s a civil sacrament, which I have an obligation to supply via my tax dollars.<\/p>\n
Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis and I meet. We yell. We scream. And in the end, since we do <\/em>need to decide and since neither of us has the power or right to coerce each other, we compromise somewhere in the middle. I retain my opinion; Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis retains hers. We continue trying to pull the issue toward our point of view. If I get bored and drop out, Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis will make abortion a civil sacrement! And if I convince someone else – say, Ann Plotnik, pro-lifer – to join the debate – we’ll outnumber Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis and the compromise will be recast, maybe a little more to the right.<\/p>\nYou see how it works, Spot?<\/p>\n
Oh, jeez – you pooped on the floor again, didn’t you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Implausible” means “people talking with their dogs”. “Irony” might be “leftybloggers that would lose debates with real dogs”. Ipso “Spotty” from Culling Snook: If Mitch had an irony-warning meter in his head, it would have been pegged while he wrote that. But Mitch is, of course, dead to irony. Well, to be fair (to me), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}