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It took me quite some time to thoroughly read and digest this article, and I HOPE that anyone commenting will have put in the same effort.

She's an atheist and I gather that abortion doesn't offend her. She doesn't address capital punishment but I would hazard a guess from her world-view that she opposes executing criminals.

She tries to steer completely away from any moral absolutism, while insisting that all-non-fetal human life be given an unabridged right to live. That is an absolute principle, albeit one not originating in any scripture (or so she wants to think.) It's the idea that "her" people, the disabled, might be classed with the deformed-fetus-community as being disposable, that bothers her. She wishes to deny the peculiar value of a human spirit even as she denies that the capacity for cognition is not the value of a human being. If any lump of flesh with the right DNA is human, then my removed tonsils had a right to live, as well as every fetus, even those without brains, hearts, functioning digestive tracts. As soon as you add God and that wonderful gift of discernment He gave us back into the issue, voila, such problems solve themselves. The issue of who has a right to live becomes amenable to a solution.

The long and short of it is that Singer's and her philosophies are not so very different from one another, and are both faulty because they do not derive their first principles from any authority. Their discourse is empty of real substance, because they have consciously negated the origin of ethics. It's "All P is X. All X is Y. Therefore all P is Y." "No, P is never Y. Therefore not all P is X." They have removed the "thou shalt not" from ethics. Having done so, the exercise becomes a manipulation of empty symbols, saturated with survival instincts and pride.

It doesn't go anywhere meaningful, because science and reason without faith can only chase their tails.

"She's an Atheist."

I'd be an atheist too, if I'd been "dealt" the cards in life she has. In fact, I AM.

Why do people who don't believe in things (which other decent people believe, blah, blah, blah,) for which there is no scientific evidence, and for which there is ample cause for doubt continue to be belittled?

I am so glad this woman is crusading for (obvious) human rights, but stop mingling the relevant with the irrelevant.

The one thought that continually visits my mind when reading of or by Singer is "He is so deeply selfish; selfishness is the source of his crusading, his closet-messiahship. Attorney Johnson likely argued her side well, but if she has failed to see the deeply selfish core from which Singer 'philosophizes', she fails to reach the foundational weakness in his inhumane belief system. And, alas, deepest selfishness is the source of atheism, the motivation to deny a Creator, the substance of original sin.

I applaud her efforts to make sense of her life. However, after reading this essay I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth. First of all, I'm insulted at her handy usage and assumption that multiracial children and babies are "invisible members" of society. Speaking as an American born Spanish mulatta, I've never felt "invisible" or "marginalized" by anyone in America. Why do the liberals like to inject race, then turn around call conservatives racist? Also, her example is not valid because of the other forces driving the politics/financial complications of adoption. Bad example. Another thing that tipped me off was the lesbian camp out thing. Christopher Reeve may be a Unitarian, but he has a believe in God.

She and Peter Singer are cut from the same cloth. Actually I think Singer is a better man because he states his beliefs up front and doesn't use phony distractions to prove his point. She is an atheist and I assume believes in evolution. Evolution WOULD have her chopped to bits in an abotion vacuum or partial-birth abortion-ized. Apart from God and the Bible, she can't really explain why she should be allowed to live other than to spout humanist-earth religious platitudes and goobley gook.

science and reason without faith can only chase their tails.

You got it.

The article annoyed and puzzled and saddened me, but your gloss made all clear.

Since neither Singer nor Johnson acknowledges the existence of a higher power, what is "good" is only what each of them believes or has "reasoned" out. Each stands for their own point of view without having any overarching reason to do so - if there is no God, there is no absolute good, and one person's "sincere belief" is just as good as another's.

The reason Singer bothers her is because she's looking in the mirror.

"If any lump of flesh with the right DNA is human, then my removed tonsils had a right to live, as well as every fetus, even those without brains, hearts, functioning digestive tracts. As soon as you add God and that wonderful gift of discernment He gave us back into the issue, voila, such problems solve themselves. The issue of who has a right to live becomes amenable to a solution."

Bingo, CC! This statement is the crux of the whole issue.

"It doesn't go anywhere meaningful, because science and reason without faith can only chase their tails."

I read the article earlier today, and came to this same conclusion. It was interesting all through the article to see how they had to perform so many semantic somersaults and gymnastic gyrations to avoid having to mention the soul or the Creator. I found myself feeling nothing for her, I suppose simply because she so carefully stepped around the truth. We already know what Singer says. He's made no bones about it. But she prevented an emotional connection to her audience by refusing to acknowledge that even cripples, babies, and atheists posess souls.