Want to freeze an anti-choice wingnut's brain? Do what this blogger did and pose a very simple question.
Remember: human embryos are real life people. One blogger wanted to see exactly how far that belief went with the anti-choice crowd. Bad news to little girls trapped in a fire at a fertility clinic if the only person who can save you is Rick Santorum. On the other hand, good news for people who want to debunk that whole notion that actual people are no different than human embryos.
A former Republican Senator considered to be a candidate for the party's 2012 presidential nomination was recently confronted by a blogger with a perplexing question: Being pro-life, if you found yourself in a fertility clinic that was burning down, and you had a choice between saving a 2-year-old girl or a petri dish of five fertilized eggs, what would you do?
Rick Santorum, an employee of the Republican Fox News Channel and former US Senator from Pennsylvania, didn't seem too sure.
"I'd try to rescue as many as those children as possible," he told blogger Mike Stark while filling in as a guest host for a Friday broadcast of the Bill Bennett radio talk show "Morning in America."
Santorum dismissed the question as "a false choice," claiming later in the conversation that if put in such a situation, he would instead "save all human life."
Stark was quick to object at Santorum characterizing his hypothetical question as "false."
"It's an instructive question," he retorted.
Santorum further explained that while he thinks fertility clinics are a moral outrage: "There are lots of things that I think are wrong that don't need to have laws against it."
"That's how I feel about it," he said. "We shouldn't have that choice [between a girl and a dish of embryos in a burning building], number one. If we do have that choice, the choice is to save all human life and to value all human life."
"I'm disappointed that he can't see the moral difference between one child and five children, or that he can't admit that's not really what's going on here," Stark told Raw Story. "There is a difference between a live child with human attachments and a live group of cells in a petri dish."
Got that? Rick Santorum really doesn't know the difference between a clump of cells and actual people. I think, as Stark says, that is instructive. It tells us that deep inside these people know just how wrong they are to compare cells with actual people like claiming that abortion is a matter of human rights so stark to that no "black person" should be in favor of it. It's flat out bullshit. And they know it.
I remember back in 1993 that a right wing preacher tried to hand Bill Clinton an aborted fetus at the Democratic National Convention to make a dramatic point about abortion. It was all about showing a pro-choice candidate being grosses out by a dead fetus. Well, I propose a far less gross photo op.
Pro-choice supporters should find a cute little girl to walk up to an anti-choice politician carrying a petrie dish of cells. And just get a video having her ask the above hypothetical:
If there were a fire and you had to choose between saving this petrie dish of cells and me, which would you choose?
Okay. I know. It's exploitative and all that stuff. But a well-educated and prepared cute little girl might actually enjoy making that point by confronting the likes of James Dobson and force him to say he can't choose or what not. That's a viral video waiting to happen.
Link