"kurgan" wrote in message
oups.com...

Ed Huntress wrote:

Sure you can. I'm anti-Nazi, but I admire the Jewish ACLU lawyers
who
fought
for the Nazis' right to hold a parade in Skokie, Illinois. They were
anti-Nazi but pro-free-speech.



That's a poor analogy.


Well, then, tell us a good one.



"I'm anti-abortion, but pro-choice."

"I'm anti-torture, but pro-waterboarding."


It's just semantics. The First Amendment/Nazi thing is not semantics.
You support their right to express their opinion (as do I).

Semantics is the wrong word here, because all semantics means is the meaning
of words. It sounds like you're saying, rather, that the positions are
incompatible.

Since I draw about the same conclusion as Gunner on this issue (although I
have no idea how he arrives there, nor if we have anything in common about
that), maybe I could explain my own position. I have a gut aversion to
abortion. Without making a judgment about when a gestating fetus acquires
enough human characteristics that I'd say it's crossed some imaginary line,
they're close enough, particularly in the third term, that I have almost the
same feeling about killing one as I have about killing a born human being.
Not quite the same, but close. It's a continuum. The closer it gets to
full-term, the more I feel it.

But, in the early term, I have no such feeling at all. There's no magic
here. Conception is of no more significance to me than the fertilization of
ragweed.

So, unless you have a strong belief that all fetuses have some spiritual or
divine characteristic, you can have the same reaction those ACLU lawyers had
toward the First Amendment rights of the Nazis. The woman's body is her own
business. Early in her pregnancy, if she chooses to abort, I feel neither a
philosophical nor an emotional conflict in leaving it up to her.

Late in her pregnancy, an emotional conflict develops in me against her
having an abortion. It's not philosophical -- I have no internal lines drawn
concerning the "rights" of the fetus until it actually is born. But I oppose
late-term abortions as a matter of human sympathy. That's when it gets tough
to adhere to a genuine philosophical principle, that it's the woman's
business until the fetus is born, and not mine.

I see that as something similar to the Nazi situation. Someone espousing
views you object to should not challenge your support for him to speak his
mind. When he starts saying things that insult and offend you, it gets
tougher. When he's saying you are a lower sub-species of human being who
should be treated more like an animal than a human, and he's speaking with
the intention of prosyletizing for more people to believe as he does, we
find out whether you're a man of principle or not.

There are a lot of similarities here. BTW, my experience is that few people
have the courage of their beliefs to do what those ACLU lawyers did.

--
Ed Huntress