Giuliani is pro-choice, but the reasoning is scary
I don’t agree with Rudolph Giuliani’s views on abortion, but you have to give him some credit for facing it head-on. Most candidates would have ducked the issue hoping it’d go away. Although I appreciate his honesty, his reasoning is convoluted and raises more concerns for me than his actual position:
“One, I believe abortion is wrong,” he said, adding he would counsel a pregnant woman to keep the child and put him or her up for adoption rather than abort.
And secondly, he said abortion supporters, especially women, are “equally moral, equally decent, and equally religious” and fervent in their beliefs as abortion foes, yet have come to a different conclusion.
“So therefore,” Giuliani said, “I would grant to women the right to make that choice.”
But how can that be if you believe that abortion is wrong? This is analogous to saying I believe the Nazis were wrong when they killed millions of Jewish people, but they fervently believed they were right so we’ll give them a pass this time. Bin Laden believed he was right when he killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but we know he was wrong.
This just isn’t an issue where you can say everyone is equally good and right. Your a Yankees fan or a Red Sox fan, not both. The idea that Giuliani is a subjective moralist bothers me a lot more than his support for pro-choice policies.
Archived in: 2008 Election, 9/11, Abortion, Bin Laden, Republicans, Rudy GiulianiMay 11, 2007 at 4:27 pm | Trackback
12 comments
Just as a matter of consistency, if Guiliani thinks abortion is wrong, it’s impossible for those who engage it to be right, and “equally moral, equally decent and equally religious”. Interesting code of ethics.
Unless your understand that your moral judgment is not absolute, and you are a fallible human being as well. You can have faith, and understand that you don’t know for sure. In order for it to be ‘faith’, mustn’t you understand that you don’t know for sure?
Every politician will have to address this issue in the way he or she sees right but as for me, abortion is not an issue.
Twice I have had new life come to me and each time, marveled that the body I had “known” all my life had somehow gone on auto-pilot. I was raised with Sunday School instruction and had parents who felt strongly about their own spiritualities but both brand new human beings arrived in my life with no instruction from my rationality or applied intellect. Eight pounds, tweleve ounces and another nine pounds six ounces of absolute pink perfection and I didn’t have a clue how perfection was manifested, but was very sure I had been chosen. Faith? It’s all very real, and very good, for believers, even if we don’t understand.
Fred, your mother would consider the best gift she could receive from you to be…..?
More moral relativism fred? You might properly mitigate a person’s reason for an action, but you cannot mitigate right or wrong.
Do not tell me about some other civilization’s mores. We aren’t subject to them by residency.
Giulani denies his belief; not the first time either. When will the cock crow for Giulani? It took Peter only three times until he realized what occurred.
When I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not zebras. When I hear Giulani, I think liberal, not truthful.
Characteristically fred misses the point. Giuliani states that two diametrically opposed moral views on the taking of life are both valid. There are no shades of meaning between a life fetus and a dead fetus. It’s a matter of simple logic, but completely incomphrehensible to the liberal.
Fred. You have a collection of liberal views on Social Security, global warming, inflationary spending for the public good; others you’ve discussed here.
What makes your liberal moral system superior to those which oppose it on practical AND moral grounds? Liberalism is, in fact, a moral system entwined with various ideological and political interests.
You insist that “facts” are the only key to the material world. The fact of brown eyes was considerable alterable by the fact of dye pigment by German science not long ago. What is a “fact”? It’s your god, or gods, or so it seems.
You pontificate a lot here. What’s your moral system and why is it preferable to ours?
And by the way, fred. I’m not asking you what you believe in, I’m asking you WHY you believe in it. First principles. The absolutes, the foundation, the purposes, the objective morality.
That is akin to asking a stalk of celery why it’s green.
“In order for it to be ‘faith’, mustn’t you understand that you don’t know for sure?”
I think that’s a monumental misunderstanding.
The answer is an emphatic NO!!
The clearest evidence that one’s faith is true is that he knows that the answer that his faith leads him to is true, even if he cannot present evidence sufficient to convince skeptics.
The substance of things hoped for. One believes not because it’s logical but because it’s irresistible.
fredct: Do you lock your doors at night? You shouldn’t if you have “faith” that everyone’s moral code is just as right as your own. If someone killed and robbed you, I’m sure they had a really good and ethical reason for it.
Pat, I think the kind of faith your talking about, is faith in that the guarantors of your security will arrive after you’ve been violated.