20 January 2012

I suspected something like this would happen eventually...

...but, apparently, I was among the few.

Lifesite News has an interesting story up.  Planned Parenthood is actually celebrating Tom Tebow's story, and claim it exemplifies "the health care environment that Planned Parenthood promotes — a world in which women and families are supported in the medical decisions they make for themselves and their families without government interference,"

The reaction from the Pro-life side has been, generally, outrage.  Tebow has been their poster boy for prolife, and now he has been co-opted by the pro choice lobby to strike a blow against the pro life lobby.  For the Pro-choice lobby to claim Tebow is actually on their side has the pro-lifers crying foul.

The pro-life side has long accused the pro-choice side of of only approving the choice to abort.  The pro-choice side has now responded by saying they do respect a woman's right to choose life, and have claimed the current biggest symbol of the prolife side as their own.  If this was a game of chess, they have taken a pawn. 

I say a game rather than a debate.  A debate has rules.  One can challenge the honesty and veracity of a statement.  One uses rhetoric and logic to score points and sway the audience. There are almost no public debates any more, not in politics, not here. What is happening here is jargon, cant, euphemism and the repetition of slogans. In our world, slogans trump truth. One side shouts the other down.  A move is made, then countered. A game, perhaps, but one with no rules, no endgame, and huge stakes:  life itself on one side, billions of dollars on the other. 

I am not a good chess player, but I do understand a little of the strategy involved.  A weak player will make a move, and hope the other guy doesn't realize what is happening, and fails to respond.  A strong player will make their moves in such a way that the other player is forced to make the moves the stong player wants them to.  A fool makes a move and expects no response at all.

So Planned Parenthood has done what Pro-lifers has always said it didn't: pay honour to a woman's right to choose life.  They have countered a prolife move with one of their own.  To say:  "hey, that's not fair!" or start calling them liars and deceivers or otherwise calling them names for them doing exactly what we said they wouldn't do is not a really good move.  A better move may be to say: "'without government interference'? You mean, like getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the government sort of interference?"  Or some other move.  Make it a good one.  And do understand that, eventually, they will make a response.

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