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To: BlackElk

Given Emma Watson’s background, she may never have ever talked with anyone who is pro-life. The answer to “I should be able to do with my body as I will” is “YOUR body isn’t the one being aborted!” If you want to change someone’s mind, you do not spew venom...and Watson seems to actually HAVE a mind.

She needs someone to ask her “When does life begin? Is it when the child can take care of him or herself? Is it at birth? What about after 8 months in the womb, when the ‘fetus’ is capable of being delivered - alive!? If the ‘fetus’ can be delivered alive instead of aborted, in what sense is it not already another human being?”

There is no reason to suspect Watson doesn’t support abortion rights. However, many women in her position have never even considered what abortion involves. And she was right about some things in her speech - that societies, even ours, often treats women solely as sex objects, and that men are not valued as fathers and that men should have a role in liberating women. She is also correct in admitting that for women in England and the US “as a woman I am paid the same as my male counterparts” - try getting Obama to admit that truth!

How many lockstep liberals would admit, “I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision-making of my country. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men.”

Her speech had good points and bad, but it was much better than I would expect from someone brought up in the film industry and liberal colleges. It certainly did not deserve the attacks and vicious name-calling it received here.


45 posted on 09/25/2014 7:13:42 AM PDT by Mr Rogers
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To: Mr Rogers
With all due respect, I will stick with the idea that she is innocent until proven guilty. We are not handicappers or bookies. That she attended liberal colleges proves nothing. My wife, a convert to Catholicism partially due to her college experiences, attended Yale which is certainly as notoriously liberal as Brown. My wife was a "progressive" upon arrival at Yale and now is to my Right. At Yale there is an undergraduate student organization: The Party of the Right which is thoroughly conservative.

Yale, Harvard. Columbia and Princeton are likewise quite liberal. IIRC, you are a Reformed Christian. As a Catholic, I am not as familiar with Evangelical Christianity in the Ivies but I am somewhat familiar with conservative Catholicism in the Ivies. The famous Opus Dei priest, Fr. C. John McCloskey III, is a regular visitor to those campuses and has made many converts. Numerous students arrive as agnostics, atheists or secular humanists, have the experience of fellow students or even Fr. McCloskey intellectually challenging them and winning their souls. Some have gone on to the priesthood.

IIRC, in his spare time, Fr. McCloskey converted the political columnist Robert Novak from Judaism and then Kansas Senator and now Governor Sam Brownback from Methodism but students are a very important target of his interest and efforts.

Oxford, although not in Miss Watson's time there, enjoyed the lengthy attention of John Henry Cardinal Newman, first as an Anglican priest and, after his conversion, as a Catholic priest, cardinal and brilliant polemicist. At Oxford, even in the 20th Century, giants walked the land. Such Christian intellects as C. S. Lewis (Anglican), Charles Williams (apparently Methodist), and J. R. R. Tolkien (Roman Catholic) met regularly with others at Oxford to discuss literature including their own often religious novels and other writings. It is highly unlikely that any of those three or their circle of friends would accept abortion even if they were meeting today.

I suspect that each of these schools has similarly vibrant Evangelical activity but I am just not as personally familiar with them. There is also substantial activity in the Ivies among Chassidic (verrrrry Orthodox) Jews whose views on abortion do not materially differ from yours or mine. Although Miss Watson may well be neither Chassidic Jewish nor Catholic nor Evangelical (more likely Anglican by ancestry at least), she would run into many of each at Oxford and at Brown. One purpose of higher education is to argue and defend one's opinions in an ongoing intellectual combat with students who are one's peers.

Don't despair. There are principles and religion and social conservatives even among the young and privileged and quite educated elite. We just don't hear as much about them as we hear about Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Leonardo DeCaprio. Quite often the libertarian temptations of the privileged young can fade into a principled conservatism as they age.

Look at all of the sound views that Miss Watson expressed and which you have noted. She may also have her views on abortion, whatever they may be, overwhelmed by the personal experience of pregnancy and looking into her own child's eyes or by the grace of God.

God bless!

46 posted on 09/25/2014 11:57:40 PM PDT by BlackElk (Dean of Discipline Tomas de Torquemada Gentlemen's Club: Roast 'em Danno!)
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