I don’t think Trump believes this for a moment but:
And to all of the moms here today: We celebrate you, and we declare that mothers are heroes. (Applause.) That’s true. Your strength, devotion, and drive is what powers our nation. And, because of you, our country has been blessed with amazing souls who have changed the course of human history.
We cannot know what our citizens yet unborn will achieve, the dreams they will imagine, the masterpieces they will create, the discoveries they will make. But we know this: Every life brings love into this world. Every child brings joy to a family. Every person is worth protecting. (Applause.) And above all, we know that every human soul is divine, and every human life –- born and unborn –- is made in the holy image of Almighty God. (Applause.)
Together, we will defend this truth all across our magnificent land. We will set free the dreams of our people. And with determined hope, we look forward to all of the blessings that will come from the beauty, talent, purpose, nobility, and grace of every American child.
That’s a solid chunk of the electorate locked down for the autumn.
He believes enough of it to set up and extremely sharp contrast between himself and the Democratic Party candidates who are presently celebrating the joy of abortion and advocating legalization of abortion at any time up to birth.
He has not only locked down that portion of the electorate whose pro-life beliefs are high on their list of personal beliefs and policy priorities, he has reminded everyone here in the States just how crazed (and bloodthirsty) all of the Democratic Party candidates actually are.
He’s reminding everyone that when you cut out the bullshit, Donald Trump is the sane one.
Dennis is perfectly correct in his analysis, I think, and I reckon the Donald is expressing his true self.
I would simply add that he is offering a vision. None of the Democrats have one.
You don’t have to be religious to believe that human life is ‘sacred’ and that a foetus is not part of the mother’s body.
Nor that the family has been sh*t upon constantly for the last 50 years.
Nor that abortion is not liberation.
@Dennis
Good summary, I agree. Although I’d add in New York and at least one other, Democrats have legalised ‘abortion’ after birth
@The Other Bloke in Italy
I would simply add that Johnson is offering a positive vision. The EU don’t have one.
Alexander von Schoenburg is editor of Bilt, Germany’s largest newspaper
It’s not just about abortion.
“our nation”
“our country”
“our citizens”
“our magnificent land”
“every American child”
It’s citizen-ism, straight from the Stephen Miller playbook. This used to be perfectly normal for politicians: to declare passionately how great their country and their people are. Hollywood used to make movies about how great America was, as recently as the 1980s. How the hell did they ever lose that instinct?
Andrew M;
They used to make TV and films about a particular, non-urban, segment of the place; Smokey And The Bandit, Convoy, Every Which Way, Rosanne, what have you. Somewhere into the nineties, everything became terribly urban.
@Andrew M
We haven’t lost that patriotism. It is just a thin line on the coasts that think that way. Outside of the major cities, you still se flags flying outside of homes. People there still celebrate the patriotic holidays.
Labor/Democrat have lost their old industrial heartlands. This is why Democrats are so afraid of deplorable, flyover country. It is why they want get rid of the Electoral College. Then they don’t have to care about deplorable, flyover country anymore.
Matt Frei asking people living in the quarantined Chinese city how they react being told not to leave. Hello? Hello? Hey Matt, it’s the fucking totalitarian system you fuckface support, socialism, people don’t really have a voice or choice there you see. What a fucking stupid cunt.
Ducky,
Re: Every Which Way (But Loose)
I doubt anyone here could watch the opening to that film and not wish that the world was as it was back then. Finish work at your comfortable blue collar job, share a joke or two with the women at the office (who don’t feel the need to scream about rapes or microaggression), drive to the local (where the bar man knows you) for a drink, have a punch up with some mouthy fat bastard…
Have none of his wives or lovers had an abortion? He must be mighty confident of that.
I despise the Dem enthusiasm for abortion but the fact is that some of his rhetoric is just baloney.
“Every life brings love into this world.” If only.
“Every child brings joy to a family.” ‘Tain’t so.
I take a properly conservative view. Our laws on the subject are decades old. They’ve worked without causing the huge social split the Yanks have. So leave ’em be.
@Ducky McDuckface
Good timing: we’re watching Smokey And The Bandit II now
Eighties: CHIPS, Air Wolf, Dukes of Haz, Knight Rider, A-Team, V…. Top Gun, Firefox…
90s SJW PC subtly inserted to condition public – see ITV’s CATS EYES on youtube
C21 CGI PC & Green crap
eg BBC Silent Witness S23 all are “White Man Bad” – full of bloopers too
.
@Jussi January 25, 2020 at 7:56 pm
+1 and he/C4 would be first to whine if China didn’t and they flew to France then onto here, although that would be Tories fault
Weekend Horror Show
Bat Soup, Snake Chow Mein, Chimp Chowder, Three Squeak Dips with side of Corona & Ebola Virus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM_hRWVNcMk
Time to eat Kenyan Locusts?
.
Harry: from Bloke to Woke to SIMP
https://youtu.be/R7Jv43MlGd4?t=226
Marry your [paedo RoP] rapist bill – coming to UK soon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvXeMrvvhxU
PCar; was trying to avoid kids TV, really. But Cheers features characters who aren’t exactly amongst the successful urban elite, even if it’s Boston. Frasier uses Martin, and Daphne, and Roz, and just about everyone, including the dog, to skewer the brothers’ intellectualism and snobbery.
After that…
The language is a bit over the top and rosy, i.e. “every child brings joy”, but not out of line with just about any political speech – “renewabulls will make the world cleaner and make us richer, and on a basis that’s more fair”. But when he was running for the Republican nomination one concern people had was whether he really was pro-life or just fishing for votes. So far he has stood true to his words and been perhaps the most pro-life President we’ve ever had.
President Trump is evidently pro-child; he has five of his own, and ten grandchildren. I think as you get older a bit of your cynicism wears off. I was just thinking to myself last night how my list of the truly important things has changed. I’d still love a libertarian revolution, of course, but if my family is basically OK I’m not going to man the barricades. Of course he has to spout some boilerplate about every child bringing joy, love et al.. but only because hedging it it with “most” children etc. would be rhetorically useless. I think a fairly decent litmus test of whether one is a complete cunt or not is one’s attitude to a baby: “great, another human life” or “oh no, another mouth to feed”.
I take a properly conservative view. Our laws on the subject are decades old. They’ve worked without causing the huge social split the Yanks have. So leave ’em be.
The wisest words I’ve ever read on this subject.
We got to where we are through what is regarded as some of the best non-political (apolitical?) debates seen in Parliament in recent times by many accounts. If ever there was a subject that had to be taken out of politics its this, not the NHS.
I say this being both for and against abortion. I don’t like it and I don’t like the consequences of banning it. On this of all subjects I wish we lived in a perfect world, but we never will and dragging it in to the political domain will make both sides losers and regret it.
@BiND
I’m similarly mixed in my views.
But I do keep thinking. 8.5 million since abortion was legalised in the UK.
8.5 million.
I take a properly conservative view. Our laws on the subject are decades old. They’ve worked without causing the huge social split the Yanks have. So leave ’em be.
What Andrew said (if losing the equivalent population of Aberdeen or Norwich to abortion every year at a time when the native population is shrinking is “working”, it’s working very differently to how David Steel promised it would).
And if this is the proper conservative view, it’s proper and conservative in the same properly conservative way the Muslim pedophiles gangs still haven’t been stopped – the respectable so-called Right just pretends it isn’t happening, tra la la.
I don’t think we arrived at an abortion death toll that’d have impressed Pol Pot through anything proper or conservative at all though. I think we got here through cowardice and wilful blind-eyeism.
British conservatives sneer at Yank culture wars, not because they have a better way of conserving social sanity (they couldn’t even conserve the legal definition of “woman”), but because they’re too dickless to fight.
Steve
I’m somewhat confused about all this.
Not all ejaculations (into proper womanly bits) leads to conception. Fail en route, or refused by the egg….
Using a condom means you’ve probably intervened to destroy the possibility of a life.
Same with withdrawal.
One could advance the notion that not coupling whenever feasible destroys the possibility of yet another soul existing.
Female bodies apparently reject groups of cells which could become a person all by themselves.
Explicit human intervention to destroy a somewhat larger group of cells becomes evil when?
I really don’t think there’s a clear answer, and so a degree of “it depends” should be allow.
This without considering issues around serious known/predictable “deformities” etc..
Since I’ve had my son I find I can’t be rationale about abortion.
I get it used to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
We found out my boy existed five weeks later that we might have. The 12 week scan became the 16 week scan.
I can’t bare the idea he might not exist, yet women have abandoned unwanted newborn babies for as long as humans have existed.
Abortion I find personally sickening, but I can’t quite bring myself to ban in, just keep it to a narrow window. It doesn’t help that the same feminist loons who support late term abortion because women shouldn’t be forced into motherhood claim fathers should be forced into financial support.
BiT – I, too, hoped to get into Texas when the lovely Ms. Spiteri was in the charts circa 1997. Alas.
Not all ejaculations (into proper womanly bits) leads to conception.
They do when Steve is manning the sixteen-pounder (ask me about my thousand yard stare)
Using a condom means you’ve probably intervened to destroy the possibility of a life.
Yarp, every sperm is sacred and all that.
One could advance the notion that not coupling whenever feasible destroys the possibility of yet another soul existing.
Mrs Steve has heard and rejected this treatise.
Female bodies apparently reject groups of cells which could become a person all by themselves.
All the time, yes. We had that discussion not long ago about doctors, miscarriages and empathy. I’ve been thinking about that one, and part of the problem may be that our high-tech modern medical culture has misunderstood technical jargon and opaque euphemism for tact.
So when someone is being delivered the awful news that their baby has died in utero, or their Nan didn’t make it through surgery, or they have a particularly aggressive strain of bum cancer… doctors probably shouldn’t use clinical language, they should use plain English so the layman can immediately understand what’s going on instead of having to translate from doctor to human in their terrified heads.
Anyway.
Explicit human intervention to destroy a somewhat larger group of cells becomes evil when?
I think the problem here is in framing the unborn as a “group of cells”. I’m a group of cells, you’re a group of cells, and Robert Smith from The Cure is a group of cells. But that’s not all we are, and it’s tendentious and morally hazardous to describe human beans that way. Not any group of cells could’ve created Disintegration, the groundbreaking and breathtaking 1989 goth-rock masterpiece. Bum cancer rarely troubles the Top 40.
What’s the essential difference between a group of cells in his mother’s womb and another group of cells on the bus? There isn’t one, within that frame of reference.
But calling them groups of cells, using that sort of obfuscatory clinical language, clouds us to biological reality. Unborn humans don’t stay as amorphous blobs for long, they quickly grow eyes and ears and tiny little fingers and toes, organs, a nervous system, and all that jazz.
They can touch their faces by week 16. Dream from 23 weeks. By week 37, they react to their mother’s laughter. Calling them a bundle of cells is like calling John Milton “that blind guy”. When we consider how our light is spent, we might wish for different phrasing.
But that isn’t the answer (and thank you, gentle reader, if you have stayed with me so far).
The answer is explicit human intervention to end a human life becomes evil from the picosecond we explicitly intervene.
Because unlike with French letters, miscarriages, or sullenly watching repeats of Top Gear on Dave instead of shagging, we’re making a deliberate choice to end a tiny and helpless life, one that belongs to our own child. We know bloody well this isn’t right, hence all the euphemising. Things that are good, honest and true don’t need to be tarted up in evasive phraseology.
BiCR,
Agreed. At my age, 68, I would say that the meaning of life is “grandchildren”.
FWIW.
Abortion should be like amputation. Avoided where possible. But accepted as the least bad option when it is.
You can’t legislate for that.
Andrew C,
But I do keep thinking. 8.5 million since abortion was legalised in the UK.
8.5 million.
I vaguely remember the debates and I’m fairly sure that sort of scale was not on the minds of David Steel and other supporters and I’m definitely against abortion as a form of contraceptive.
But I still can’t bring myself to call for a complete ban and see it as an issue of individual health, family welfare and social responsibility, as characterised by evangelicals in the USA before Roe V Wade. Starry eyed I know, but then I think of the alternative.
@BiND
I understand your point of view. It’s reasoned and accepts that there are huge difficulties.
One of the things that does irritate me is the “It’s her body; a woman’s right to choose” argument.
Next time someone throws that at you, try this;
So with the average pregnancy being 40 weeks, would you support a woman’s right to have an abortion at 39 weeks?
Because it’s her body and her right to choose.
And if they mumble something about the 24 week limit being ‘there for a reason’ you can always say that what this means is that it’s a woman’s body and her right to choose until you arbitrarily take that right away from her.
I’m not saying my argument proves anything or is more worthwhile than anyone else’s, just that I hate those people who advance this as being such a black and white issue when morally it’s a swampy brown issue.
+1 to Steve on the meaning of words. I’m reminded of the film ‘Conspiracy’ about the conference at Wannsee where the ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ was decided (brilliant film if you haven’t seen it). In it, the word ‘evacuation’ was used as a euphemism, whereon one of the officers present asks;
“I have the real feeling I “evacuated” 30,000 Jews already, by shooting them, at Riga. Is what I did “evacuation”? When they fell, were they “evacuated”? There are another 20,000, at least, waiting for similar “evacuation”. – I just think it is helpful to know what words mean..”
@Steve
Another all time classic; thank you so much for spending the time to write that.
This clump of cells almost spat tea at one point.
Bravo.
As the film “The Matrix” put it, the problem is choice.
The fact that we are discussing it here is an indication that we (as a group) care about the subject, in practise and also philosophically.
The problem is that as is evident, there are plenty of people out there (potential mother’s) who simply don’t care. At all.
People who are so selfish and self obsessed that nothing is allowed to interfere with their own personal autonomy.
At what point does society as a whole step in to regulate people’s private personal actions?
My view is similar to many. People should have the maximal personal freedom , free from State intervention as is possible. But that is an ever shifting line in the sand and as such is constantly moving. Hence our debates here and elsewhere.
I do find it woeful that so many woman are so quick to readily abort their children.
It is hard not to come to the conclusion that they are shallow, selfish, self obsessed and lacking morals. How else can you explain that not only are they not ashamed of abortion, but are proud of it?
I know people who have had children who were born disabled. An easy life it is not. But cared for, and loved all the same. Even some of life’s accidents can be fulfilling and of worth.
Heartily recommend the Wannsee Conference ‘Conspiracy’ film too. A film that is largely set in one room, that consists of men sat around a table talking, but holds you spellbound. Great acting from Ken Branagh and Colin Firth and lots of other mainly UK character actors. At the end you sit thinking ‘What the f*ck did I just watch? Did that really happen?’ And tragically, it did.
@Andrew C
It’s not unusual in abortion debates for the point of termination to be after birth – for instance, until the child can look after itself.
What’s the essential difference between a group of cells in his mother’s womb and another group of cells on the bus? There isn’t one, within that frame of reference.
Steve, your ill-defined frame of reference serves to deny that there is a difference. Depending on the level of amorphous blobness, the clump in the womb is certainly slightly more or less equivalent to celery; the clump on the bus only maybe. Quips aside, there is clearly an objective, biological difference and within that frame of reference it is reasonable to consider terminating the lowly developed womb clump.
If, however, the frame of reference is a religious view of human existence, then it’s fair to regard there being no fundamental difference in the groups of cells. And that’s really where you’re coming from, yay?
The answer is explicit human intervention to end a human life becomes evil from the picosecond we explicitly intervene.
Even amongst the religious there is a big overlap of those holding that view re abortion and those in favour of capital punishment and the keeping of guns for self defence.
@Ducky McDuckface
If one’s recreation/relaxation is fast things with engines and hot chicks they’re great entertainment.
I also enjoyed Capital City, LA Law, Hill Street Blues, Minder, New Avengers, Professionals, Sweeney etc
Didn’t like Red Dwarf
@Steve
Ping back: Babies Thrown Away