Who Promotes the Gun Culture: Liberals or Conservatives?

I came across what seems to be a reasonable creationist, making a statement about James Lee, the hostage taker at Discovery Channel. In his blog, he had these words:

"before anyone gets too smug about how Darwinism leads to violence, let's remember two words: James Kopp. You know, the guy who bought a sniper rifle and assassinated abortionist Barnett Slepian? The fact is that deranged people do violent things because they're deranged. Darwin no more caused Lee's violent acts than the Bible caused Kopp's."

Well at least no one can accuse blogger Todd Wood of being one sided. On the other hand this was the first time I heard that Darwin causing James Lee to buy a gun and take hostages.

But now I have a name, let me try to compare the two acts in several different ways.

1. James Kopp killed someone, James Lee did not. You may think this is splitting hairs, or that this is unimportant. But there is a fundamental difference in what these people did. Both were arguably deranged, but one was also a murderer. Pointing a gun at someone is not the same as shooting someone in cold blood.

2. Nobody directly or indirectly incited James Lee to do anything.

3. There has been no support shown for James Lee's methods or even the terms of his manifesto after the fact. There was support for James Kopp even after he killed the doctor.
http://my.execpc.com/~awallace/herokopp.htm

4. Kopp is not the only killer. There were other incidents, such as the bombing of abortion clinics on the other side. Also, at least one other abortionist was murdered, Dr. George Tiller (I think it was May 2009) Also Dr. Tiller had been shot and wounded before. Let's not forget John Lennon being murdered by a Born-Again Christian, incited by other people in his church.

5. James Lee threatened The Discovery Channel, which was supposedly on his side, whereas James Kopp murdered Barnett Slepian who was an opponent of his.

So in the final analysis, Todd's assertion is true. Darwin did not cause Lee's violent acts any more than the Bible caused James Kopp to commit murder. But on the other hand, nobody supported Lee's idea of pointing a gun at someone. Many creationists supported James Kopp's actual act of violence. And other creationists have carried out other murders.

So if somebody says James Lee is equivalent to James Kopp, what they are saying in an underhanded way, is that Darwinism and Environmentalism did something to incite James Lee.

These two events are not equivalent. There is still the clear rhetoric of incitement, and the evidence of other acts of violence incited by the right wing (and religious) extremists.

I think the evidence is solid that the right wing extremists are doing the overwhelming amount of violent incitement, especially with the use of guns. Another clue is that the left has been trying to pass "Hate Laws" making it illegal to incite violence, while conservatives oppose such laws. Nobody bats an eye when right wing Christian TV Evangelist Pat Robertson calls for assassination of opponents publicly on television. Have you ever heard Michael Moore or Al Gore calling for the assassination of anyone?

In my opinion, with the gun-happy culture in the USA, promoted by conservatives (including Christians) , it's surprising that more people have not turned to guns as the answer. You can hardly turn on a TV without seeing people waving guns at each other.

Here is a blog on the consequences of violent conservative rhetoric.

http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2010/03/consequences-of-conservative-speech.html

Is Abortion Like SLavery?

I was recently Googling the words slavery and abortion and came up with 2,020,000 hits. All the pages I read were comparing abortion to slavery and saying why abortion is as evil as slavery (hint: both treat a person as a non-person).

It is interesting that the religion pushing hardest against abortion, the Southern Baptist, is also the religion that justified slavery based on the teachings of the Bible. Not only justified it, but made it morally wrong to oppose slavery.

Since the same religion is involved in both supporting slavery and opposing abortion because they say it is like slavery, my guess is that even to this day, they don't "get" why slavery was wrong. Although they did issue an apology for supporting slavery in 1995,

Why is slavery not like abortion?

1. With abortions, nobody is profiting by causing the misery of others.
2. Abortion is not a form of State sponsored terrorism against one race of people.
3. No babies are being taken away from their loving mother and sold as slaves.
4. No women are being used as "breeders" to produce "goods" to be sold.
5. Abortion does not promote rape, it tries to correct the results of rape.
6. No people are kidnapped on the streets or in their homes to be sold into abortion.

Now for some speculation on the the attitudes toward abortion back in the "good" old days of the Southern Baptists. African women knew how to do abortions, because they had been doing it for thousands of years and still do it in Africa. I am speculating that it must have galled the slave owners that they could not stop or even detect most of these abortions. The only time they could punish a black woman was if she decided to let the masters know she was pregnant, and then later on didn't produce the baby. As a pregnant slave, she would qualify for a little extra food, and was given a slightly less burdensome workload. Many women told their masters they were pregnant for these advantages, and carried on the pretense as long as possible before getting the inevitable whipping.

African women, as accustomed as they were to infants dying shortly after childbirth, did not consider the fetus to be a person even when the umbilical cord was cut. They would wait a while until they were more certain it would live. This contrasts with the current religious view that the first meeting of a sperm cell and an egg constitutes a "person" with all their protections and rights. Ironically, without the despised scientists, today's religious extremists would not have a clue that a sperm even met an egg, let alone when it happened.

Slave women used their ability to perform abortions to gain some control over their lives, and this was maybe the only thing that the slaves ever successfully pulled off that the slave owners could not find any way to control through terror and violence. The slave women had created a bargaining chip, and used it with some finesse. Even to admit that the slave women were intelligent enough to get away with this scam undermined the current slave owner view that slaves were less intelligent than the white owners. So I am assuming this game was tacitly understood but never clearly stated. In 1808, the importing of any new African slaves was prohibited, this gave the slave women even more power. Which I am again going to assume they knew, even though the slave owners took great pains to prevent the slaves from learning anything. I would bet that that the slave women figured out that no new African slaves were being imported. they would know that this made their breeding work more valuable to the slave owners. If you don't think that African women understand the law of supply and demand, go shopping at a market in Sierra Leone.

Now this brings us to today, when the original slave owners religion is trying to make abortion the most important issue for American voters. You have to wonder whether it isn't a little bit of payback for their impotence in the old days. In my opinion, that is the real connection between slavery and abortion.

If the anti-abortion crowd was actually interested in saving lives, about a million infants die each year in Africa, along with 250,000 mothers in childbirth (in Sierra Leone, one mother in eight). It has been estimated that about a billion dollars a year would save 800,000 lives a year in Africa. That's equal to all the abortions in one year in the USA.

Abortion as a Voting Issue

Conservatives have found a voter gold mine in the anti-abortion issue.

It is the type of issue that is ideal for the conservatives because it sways liberals into voting for the conservatives.

Outlawing abortion is an issue that is aimed straight at the bleeding heartstrings of a typical Kumbaya liberal who is all about protecting the poor and the weak. Once the liberals are hooked on the anti-abortion issue, it is possible to reel them in to vote for the conservative political party. Even though that is the party whose true concerns are to help the rich get richer and to build a military to crush anyone who rises against it.

A typical rich, militaristic conservative does not really care about the welfare of a fetus. Conservatives are the people who typically support the sale of assault weapons to the public. Conservatives also love landmines and cluster bombs, both of which kill and maim thousands of children for year after year. Conservatives never worry about fetuses being killed when they drop bombs on pregnant mothers. Have you ever heard of a collateral damage report that counted dead fetuses? Also, conservatives like the right to pollute the air and water, and as a result, more fetuses die.

But then why do conservative support a ban on abortion? Because this issue sucks in liberals to vote for the conservative political parties. Real conservatives never have to worry about back alley abortions. They just fly off to Europe. The only people who suffer from anti-abortion laws are the poor, and conservatives don't care about the welfare of the poor.

The liberals can't use the abortion issue, because unlike the conservatives, they are also concerned with the rights of the mother, and the rights of the poor. So although they may not like abortion, they cannot wish to punish every woman who wants an abortion without considering the reason.

With heaping dollops of propaganda, conservatives can convince many good hearted liberals that the only issue worth voting for is abortion, and that their jolly warmongering (but fetus loving) selves are the lesser of two evils.

The abortion debate is an example how propaganda can win elections by leveraging a one-way issue. Once you have found it never let it go. Think of how much better off the world would be today, if the conservatives had never stumbled across this voter gold mine.