party issues

Well I hate it also when somebody expresses an opinion but then won't discuss the facts and reasoning behind why they hold that opinion.  I suppose to turn around your argument one of the guys at the mill could have asked if you think it's ok to kill a full-grown human (who may or may not be guilty, (a disturbing number of guys on death row turn out to be innocent)) but you balk at killing a small collection of cells?

Maybe what your curiously reticent pals at the mill meant by saying that they are different things is that a fetus is not a baby.  It will become a baby, but at the time it is aborted it not yet one,  Between the time when the sperm hits the egg and the baby emerges from the womb is a grey area.  A lot of the argument about abortion is at what point you decide that it becomes a baby.

Another point is practicality or social good.  If women can't get legal abortion they will get illegal abortion which is not safe.  And still another is that raising a baby costs considerable capital which a teenager likely does not have and there goes her opportunity of getting a good education and a good job, and the pro life people are the ones who oppose the state providing means for those in the baby trap.

I'm not against the death penalty for those who commit some horrific crime.  I have no problem with, for example, killing Timothy McVeigh or Richard Speck.  Why spend the state's good money, which could be better spent on providing care for newborns whose mothers couldn't afford it on feeding and housing these murderers?  The problem is that the death penalty does not fall only on the guilty.  When George Ryan decided to end the death penalty in Illinois it was because half the people on death row turned out not to have been given a fair trial or were innocent of the charges. 

But still it seems a little odd that they should be so closely aligned with either party.  There used to be pro-lifers among the dems and pro-choicers among the reps, but I don't think there are any anymore, probably the same with the death penalty but it is just not much of an issue these days.

There is a kind of bundling going on.  If I am a pro-choice dem and you want ,my help on your gun control measure I am going to expect you to oblige me with help on my pro-choice measure, and if I am a pro-life rep and you want my help on your anti gun control measure I am going expect your help on my pro-life measure.


How about Trumps weird response to that Florida shooting where Trump doesn't want to call it terrorism, though if it was any other flavor of Arab he would be screaming bloody mary, and the way that he expects it all to be smoothed over by the Sauds giving some cash payment to the families of the victim like they do in their feudal country.  Putin, the Saudis, Erdogan, they all have, in the colorful language of LBJ, have his pecker in their pockets.