Posted on 10/25/2006 10:21:35 AM PDT by freepatriot32
Michael J. Fox is a famous TV and movie star. He is witty. He is charming. A few years ago, we learned he has Parkinson's disease.
PD is a slowly progressive neurological disorder, characterized by tremors, shuffling gait, a masklike facial expression, "pill rolling" of the fingers, drooling, intolerance to heat, oily skin, emotional instability and defective judgment (although intelligence is rarely impaired).
PD is currently incurable, although there are several methods to slow its advancement, including drug therapy and surgery.
PD is tragic, particularly in Fox's case, because it rarely afflicts persons under 60 years old.
Yet everyone faces tragedy at one time or another, in one form or another. A person's moral fiber is revealed in tragedy.
So we learned through Fox's affliction that he has either extremely poor judgment or a diabolical character flaw. He supports human embryonic stem-cell experimentation, thus contending that some humans are subhuman and expendable for others' personal gain.
We know there is nothing new under the sun. So Fox's character flaw is not new, just a variation of the worst of human behavior throughout history.
Slaveholders thought those whose lives and deaths they controlled were "property," as the U.S. Supreme Court determined in the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Hitler thought Jews were evolutionary mistakes. The Islamic government of Sudan currently has it in for black Christians.
Different day, different holocaust.
As is always the case, the powerful determine the fate of the powerless, and if the powerful don't hold the view that all humans are created equal, then the powerless end up enslaved or dead.
Some may think I'm going over the top to compare Fox to slave owners or Hitler or the Sudanese government. "Fox is a nice guy, and he's sick. Be nice."
If you think that, your sympathies are misplaced. Fox advocates killing certain people to experiment on them "for the greater good" simply because those people don't look like we do yet. This is odd, because some day Fox won't look like most people either.
If Fox wanted to kill a football stadium full of toddlers to experiment on them, I doubt anyone would think he was normal, and I doubt anyone would bear with his barbaric rambling to be nice.
But using Fox's logic, experimentation of 2-year-olds should be acceptable. Toddlers are certainly far less developed on the human continuum and don't look at all normal by adult standards. The reason they are called "toddlers" in the first place is because their oversized heads and bellies cause them to "toddle" when they walk.
Scientifically speaking, a human is a human from the instant of fertilization, no matter what phase of development. "Take that single cell of the just conceived zygote, put it next to a chimpanzee cell, and 'a geneticist could easily identify the human. Its humanity is already that strikingly apparent,'" said Randy Alcorn in his newly released book, "Why Pro-Life?," quoting from "Preview of a Birth."
I'll worry about Fox's feelings after he stops using his considerable influence to convince the American public to support taxpayer-funded human embryonic stem-cell experimentation. Fox is not only pushing an ideology on me that advocates the destruction of human life, but he also wants to force me to pay for it. What gall.
I feel sorry for Fox's kids. Flashing them either forward or backward in one of Fox's "Back to the Future" movies, they are in lose-lose situations.
The future Fox wants to create for his three daughters looks bleak. No longer will only hens lay eggs for human consumption if Fox has his way. His daughters will be exploited for their eggs, too, because the only source of these pre-embryos is women. It is foolish to think technology will be sated by the availability of today's orphaned embryos, as is now the spin.
And in an altered past, Fox would have allowed the dissection of his days-old embryonic children so he could surgically ingest them in an effort to cure his own ailments high tech cannibalism.
It's funny that Fox calls himself a vegetarian.
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Jill Stanek fought to stop "live-birth abortion" after witnessing one as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. In 2002, President Bush asked Jill to attend his signing of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In January 2003, World Magazine named Jill one of the 30 most prominent pro-life leaders of the past 30 years. To learn more, visit Jill's blog, Pro-life Pulse.http://www.jillstanek.com/
Are you ready to adopt Atlaw's apparent "riding a bicycle" standard?
"Actually, it has. Tumors."
Yes - exactly. And in all the news coverage during these past 2 days, I haven't heard one reporter discuss that fact.
I thought I was old, remembering stuff like this, but I do not remember this guy or the Hercules movies. I remember Hercules cartoons...
I am glad you are also against circumcision and other genital mutilation.
We have all these folks screaming about rights, yet they don't seem to care about infants who are born!
And it makes it look like pro-lifers are ignorant when they claim there's a logical fallacy in the bird-egg argument. (I.e., the decisions are consistent--it's just a disagreement on when life begins...and the high spontaneous abortion rate [that is, the percentage of fertilized eggs that get "killed" by being booted out by a woman's body] does bring up concerns about the idea of "life begins at conception.")
In case you haven't seen me post it before, I've assisted "pro-life" groups with fundraising efforts and have volunteered for them. However, I wouldn't say I'm "pro-life" in the sense of "pro-life-at-all-costs"...as I am more in favor of "pro-rights," including the right to die, should a person make that decision voluntarily.
Nah, that's too far from the dividing line to be a standard of delineation. I also don't like the ones of "quickening" or arbitrary "trimesters"...but then again, it is difficult for me to give credence to those who would deny rights to breathing humans while they fight so hard for the unborn. Is there anything wrong with protecting both? Pro-Choice...the babies' choice?
Ya know, if you had read the entire piece you would have noticed the author used the term "cannibal" in the second to last paragraph.
I have to go (to a church meeting, no less), so I'm going to cut to the chase...
Since I have no way of knowing at exactly what point human life deserves protection, I am generally protective of human life at all stages.
When it comes to Abortion, the argument goes that there is a right of the individual to have an abortion that is to be weighed against the right of the fetus to human life. It is this balancing of rights that is at the heart of the abortion debate, which we will not hash out successfully here.
However, when it comes to Embryonic Stem Cell Research, we are weighing the value of the human life, which I find to be unknowable, against the utility to be derived by destroying it. This is a very different type of argument.
Some people approach it by saying that the value of the Embryonic Stem Cell Research is so high, it outweighs the value of the human life destroyed. Others try to counter that argument by saying the value of this research is not so great, therefore it does not outweigh the value of the human life destroyed.
Frankly, I find such arguments to be abhorrent. They can be, and are, naturally extended to other types of human life that is viewed as less-than-fully-human and of lower value. I do not want to tinker with the machinery of who gets to live and who has to die based on the objective value of their lives. I, rather, choose to be protective of all human life, because I understand that the true value cannot be evaluated rationally.
He was a former Mr. Universe, body-builder type who played "Hercules" in B movies during the late 50's, early 60's.
I used to watch those movies on Saturday afternoons on B/W TV when I was a kid. They were fun and Steve Reeves was a hunk.
Yes, this one caught my eye.
History has a tendency to repeat itself ~ diabolically.
Even B actors are not immune.
Reminds me of a Phillip K. Dick short story. In it, anyone who cannot do higher math or has reached the age of eight has been declared "pre-human", and their parents can call the abortion truck to come pick them up.
I'm not too old, but the town where he was born is not too far from me.
There are any number of ways this "subhuman" stuff can go once rabidly wacko secular humanism kicks in. Why some might even want to hold out for blonde hair, blue eyes, the right cheek bones, and certain height requirements...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_code
Sad that Michael J. is too stupid to connect the dots. And he is pretty short, too, with a degenerative disease. Hmmm...
If I own the Bald Eagle, its still a crime to destroy its egg, so I guess I don't agree with the basic assumptions you've made.
If your point is that the law currently views the death of a child by crushing its skull and ripping apart its body as a nonevent if done at the direction of the mother, but a homicide if done against her will, then yes, I follow the analogy, but still not the logic.
1)Intention
2)Means
3)*Structure of the Act*
4)End
No one can describe the structure of the act and claim that killing (the taking of life) has not occurred in such situations. The essential nature of what is involved is precisely what liberals like Michael J. are enshrouding in dishonest obscurantism.
Oh. So your ridiculous statement was in fact intended to confer equivalence on a blastocyst and a four year old. Why did you pretend otherwise? And do you also confer equivalence on a single spermatazoa and a four year old? If not, why not?
Oh, I don't know about that. If the shoe fits, et al.
Just curious. Are you always this childishly dishonest when you debate? It doesn't do your side of the argument (whatever it is) much good.
All I did was reference a story that your comment reminded me of. In what way is that dishonest?
Obama lives in Illinois, but he's been all over lately. Come to think of it Bush is from Texas and currently resides in DC, but he has been seen campaigning all over lately too. It's Political Season, and there are no rules.
Yeah, Bush is breaking the "rules" by campaigning in any of the 50 states he is President of, lol.
From Wikipedia:
"The Pre-persons" is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. It was first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, October 1974.
It was a deeply felt response to Roe vs Wade. Dick imagines a future where congress has decided that abortion is legal until the soul enters the body, which is specified as the ability to do simple algebra. The main protester a former Stanford mathematics major demands to be taken to the abortion center, since he claims to have forgotten all his algebra.
Dick said of the story in 1980:
In this ... I incurred the absolute hate of Joanna Russ who wrote me the nastiest letter I've ever received; at one point she said she usually offered to beat up people (she didn't use the word 'people') who expressed opinions such as this. I admit that this story amounts to special pleading, and I'm sorry to offend those who disagree with me about abortion on demand. I also got some unsigned hate mail, some of it not from individuals but from organizations promoting abortion on demand. Well, I have always managed to offend people by what I write. Drugs, communism, and now an anti-abortion stand; I really know how to get myself in hot water. Sorry, people. But for the pre-persons' sake I am not sorry. I stand where I stand: "Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," ["Here I stand, I can do no other"] as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.
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