I wrote a shorter version of this as a comment but decided I needed finish it up and make it a full post. My appologies for those who saw both versions...
Ever since Palin was named to the Republican ticket the abortion issue seems to have come back to the forefront of the election. I’ve been boiling about this ever since and just can’t keep it in any longer.
To anyone basing their vote for McCain soley on the Pro-life issue, I ask you this:
How many death related policies can the Republicans have before you will stop basing your vote on this one single issue? Seriously. How many?
The Republican party supports countless policies that cause death. For example, they support business laws that allow companies to produce products that cause death. They allow pollution that is known to cause death. They support a restriction to real sex education and birth control which causes more unwanted pregnancies, more abortions, and more death. They support a foreign policy that increases the chance for wars that cause death. They refuse to support efforts for universal healthcare and this causes death. And on and on and on.
So, tell me this. How many of these policies will it take to get you to base your vote on some other issue?
I guess John "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" McCain is just fucking fine in your eyes so long as he supports the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Well guess what...my god doesn't distinguish between levels of life. Killing is bad at any level and I have to make my choice thinking about all deaths.
And guess what else...for every rational argument against abortion there's another equally rational argument why we shouldn't take away a woman's right to control her own body. Who the hell am I to say what you can do. Yeah, abortion sucks. Life is hard sometimes, but people are ALWAYS going to disagree on this issue. You have been fighting this issue for 35+ years and guess what...we are still fighting. And, even if we change the laws, ABORTIONS WILL STILL HAPPEN.
And you know what else...we can reduce abortions even without changing the law. We can start with real sex-education rather than this abstinence only garbage that is proven to be ineffective. We can follow that with policies that support single mothers and provide health care for all.
And don’t throw your morals at me regarding sex before marriage because I have a news flash for you – it doesn’t matter how much faith and education you instill in your 16 year old. There’s still a good chance he or she will have sex. Hormones are just Mother Nature’s way of ensuring the species makes it to the next generation and guess what: sometimes the hormones win – even in unmarried teenagers. Just ask Palin.
And maybe, just maybe, if we had a different party in power and got off this single track debate about abortion, maybe we could get to work on some of these other death related policies. Like health care for all; Like a foreign policy that will put diplomacy before war; like a reasonable energy policy that would reduce carbon emissions, reduce global warming, and reduce the deaths related to climate change.
So, seriously, how many deaths caused by other policies before you might consider basing your vote on more than this one issue? Until you can answer that, you are just wasting your vote and causing more death.