AbsurdBeats

Getting bogged in the blog.

I have in mind a couple of pieces (about abortion, morality and politics) in which I lay out a comprehensive argument, with arrows running hither and yon, connecting outliers to the center, blah blah, so as to capture as fully as possible the phenomenon under investigation.

Hah.

Bit by bit, I know. Still, I used to be able to pull my thoughts together for more than a paragraph or two, so my current impatience-slash-laziness (hm, what is the connection between impatience and laziness? I’ll have to blog on that. . . .), both feeds that distraction and increases my sense that I should do. . . something.

Anyway, a coupla’ good pieces on abortion and conscience clauses from Slate:

Dahlia Lithwick notes that so-called conscience clauses only run one way, that is, those who oppose abortion (and anything contra-conceptual) may opt out of their fiduciary responsibilities to their patients any procedures or conversations related to these matters, but those who do provide abortions have to read from scripts with which they disagree and know to be medically misleadling.

And William Saletan has more on the obsfucations surrounding the morning-after pill, involving, unsurprisingly, the substitution of religious for medical definitions. My take? Hey, if you want to make a religious argument about the status of the embryo or fetus, go right ahead. But don’t misrepresent that position as the scientific or medical definition.

Shite. Now I’ll have to blog on the relationships between science, medicine, and morality. And, oh, hell, let’s throw in politics.

Okay, one last thing: the William Ayers op-ed in the New York Times, and Obama’s interactions with Ayers. There’s a lot that’s provocative in this piece, but I want to pull back and consider the larger question of conversations/arguments in the public square.

I gotta go to work, but I want to argue that it is precisely in public that one is able to meet or even consort with those with whom one disagrees, or even finds distasteful. (Remember, I’m an argue-and-eat-pie kinda gal.) I wouldn’t invite a fascist into my home, but I’d certainly talk with her outside of my house.

Shit, this could all get quite complicated quite quickly, and I really do have to go. Would it make sense to say that the public is a more a space of freedom and the home more a place of judgement or discernment?

Nah, I didn’t think so. More on this. Eventually.

Hah.