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Thu.Aug.25.2005

12:54 pm EDT        89°F (32°C) in Texarkana, AR

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Well, well, well, the Wacko Satanic Anti-American Righties have been proven once again to be the lying sacks of shit they really are. If you’ve done any traveling, particularly in the South or in some of the more backward parts of the Midwest, you have very likely seen the billboards that feature babies juxtaposed with such unproven claims as “I could wiggle my toes 8 weeks from conception” and “Heartbeat at 3 weeks — Brainwaves at 6 weeks.” Although I can’t recall having seen it on a billboard, another one of the claims they make in their attempt to control women is that even embryos, let alone early-stage and mid-stage fetuses, feel pain during abortion procedures — in fact, they are working on crafting a federal law that would require clinics to repeat such lies to women seeking abortions after 20 weeks.

Yesterday’s edition of USA Today included an article about the results of a study published in yesterday’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study, which was conducted by obstetric anesthesiologists at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), showed that brain and nervous structures involved in feeling pain do not begin to function until roughly 28 weeks, or 6½ months, of gestation. Previous research has shown that these structures may exist well before 28 weeks, but until now, there has been no evidence in either direction as to whether such structures are actually functional.

See, there’s a reason why the Wacko Satanic Anti-American Righties are so opposed to legitimate scientific truth: it consistently and invariably proves their so-called “‘Christian’ beliefs” (which, in truth, are far from Christian) wrong. They cannot offer any logical reasoning to support these beliefs; all they can do is (a) threaten people who believe in scientific truth, usually with medieval-sounding “Biblical” threats; (b) launch highly misleading attacks against the body of evidence, or make false claims that the researchers are biased; or (c) create pseudo-scientific “facts” to suit their argument.

Reality-based scientific investigation works under a time-tested method that we appropriately call the scientific method. Under the scientific method, a hypothesis (in the form of an if-then statement) is crafted. Exhaustive experimentation, designed to remove the effects of all factors except the one(s) being tested, is then conducted to discover whether the hypothesis holds true. Once the experimentation is complete, a review of the evidence is undertaken, and the findings of fact are based solely upon the conclusion(s) that the evidence can logically and completely support.

The false “science” conducted by so-called “family,” “moral,” and/or “Christian” groups, on the other hand, works completely the other way around. The “facts” are already decided beforehand, most often based upon “religious” beliefs; “experimentation,” if any is actually conducted, is set up to do nothing more than support their “facts.” Frequently, these pseudo-“scientists” like to twist numbers to come up with intentionally misleading statistics; one excellent example of this can be found in the “studies” some of these groups have done on the incidences of homosexuality and HIV/AIDS.

Let me use the following numerical assumptions: the total U.S. population is 300 million, of which 5% (or 15 million) are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered; and the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS is 1 million, of which half (500,000) are GLBT. A real scientist will report from these hypothetical numbers that 3.3% (500,000 out of 15 million) of GLBT people have HIV/AIDS; on the other hand, pseudo-“scientists” such as Paul Cameron and the “Family” “Research” Institute will report that 50% (500,000 out of 1 million) of people who have HIV/AIDS are GLBT. While both of these figures are technically correct, based upon the numbers I used, one has to bear in mind that Cameron and his ilk begin their “research” with the goal of supporting conclusions that they have already formulated — in this case, that GLBT people everywhere are just dying left and right from AIDS, and that you’d better keep your distance from those sodomite faggots lest you catch AIDS and die a horribly painful death. It is quite obvious to anybody with even one functioning brain cell that the 3.3% figure (again, using my hypothetical statistics — I don’t know what the real numbers are) paints a far more accurate picture of the incidence of HIV/AIDS in GLBT people, but that doesn’t stop Cameron-ites from publicizing the 50% figure, nor Wacko Satanic Anti-American Righties from believing it.

Sometimes, as in the case of the “intelligent design” argument, they don’t even bother to conduct any “research”; instead, they merely substitute their “religious” beliefs in place of the proven scientific truth. A stunningly large number of Americans are actually stupid enough to claim “proof” that the world was created during the span of one week roughly 6,000 years ago; that the entire world flooded for just under six weeks, killing all but one male and one female member of every species on earth; that a handful of men lived lives more than 900 years long; and that, by logical extension from Genesis 4:17, mother-son incest is responsible for all present-day human life. (Adam and Eve only had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain murdered Abel, at which point humankind was down to three members. If we are to assume that the phrase “Cain knew his wife” in Genesis 4:17 does not contradict the rest of the creation story by showing that God had not, in fact, created everything, then only one conclusion can be drawn: Cain fucked Eve’s brains out.)

Can evolution be completely proven? No, although we do have reams of evidence to support it, and in fact, it has been partially proven in the specific cases of certain species. At the same time, I must ask, does all of the evidence supporting evolution contradict “intelligent design”? Not at all. It is completely possible to believe that God kick-started the process several billion years ago, and has let the universe develop on its own ever since. The only thing that all of the evidence for evolution contradicts is the notion that the creation stories in Genesis are literally true; considering that I showed in the above paragraph how a literal interpretation of Genesis is absurd, anybody who continues to argue against evolution does nothing more than prove himself/herself to be a complete moron.

Now before y’all start goin’ all Pat Robertson on my ass </ebonics>, claiming that I am “leading the fight for the destruction of human life,” let’s clarify what I think about abortion here. If, for example, my sister (although I know she would never do that — I’m only making a hypothetical example here) or a female friend came to me, just having found out she was pregnant, afraid and unsure of what to do, and asked me what I would think about her getting an abortion, I would counsel her against it. In the majority of cases, there are far superior alternatives such as carrying the baby to full term and putting it up for adoption upon birth. However, I would also realize that in the end, the choice is not mine, but hers (as it is her body), to make; and I would respect any choice she made, even if that choice was abortion.

I really don’t think that it is wise to take one “blanket” position on the abortion debate. As always, life is chock-full of gray areas, and every pregnant girl/woman’s situation is different; you have to consider a whole host of surrounding factors. Perhaps we’re talking about a 13-year-old girl with distant or emotionally unavailable parents (a leading cause of low self-esteem), who has been conned into having sex by a boy who told her, “if you love me, you’ll have sex with me.” Should she be punished (by being forced to be a mother before she is emotionally or psychologically prepared for it) for the boy’s trickery, or for her parents’ failures in cultivating a healthy self-esteem in her?

There are plenty of young girls out there who have become pregnant after being tricked into sex just because some boy wanted to get off, who can honestly say (and fully mean it), “If my father finds out, he’ll kill me.” Should we implicitly encourage such parental rejection or even violence against these girls by prohibiting abortion, or even requiring parental notification or consent? (It is for this reason that I oppose parental-notification or consent laws regarding abortions for minors. Just because a girl is under 18 doesn’t mean that she should not be allowed to exercise total dominion over her own body — while I admit that a better time for that would have been before having sex in the first place, hey, better late than never.)

Let’s consider the case of two adults who want (and are fully prepared) to have a child, until the amniocentesis results come back indicating that the child will suffer from some terribly painful, debilitating genetic disease. Should such a child be forced to live a life of utter pain? Should the prospective parents be forced to assume the astronomical monetary costs of keeping the child alive?

It annoys the living fuck out of me when any person tries to tell any other person what he/she is allowed to do with his/her sexual/reproductive organs, whether that takes the form of “you can’t get an abortion — you’re the slut who opened her legs, so you get to live with the consequences” or “you’re not allowed to touch his penis, nor let him touch yours.” It even further infuriates me when they create and/or promulgate scores of lies intended to intimidate weak-minded people into agreeing with their point of view. These people go on and on about how they represent a so-called “culture of life,” but in reality, what they are advocating is truly a culture of control. It is no wonder why they are pushing so hard to position the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas: they want to enforce this culture of control in which they can imprison people for seeking abortions or having sex with the same gender.

The culture of control can be seen quite clearly through the lens of the embryonic stem-cell debate. To make any logical sense whatsoever in the stem-cell debate, the Wacko Satanic Anti-American Righties must repudiate their “life begins at conception” claim and replace it with “life begins at fertilization” or even “life begins at ejaculation” — because if life begins at conception, which happens when the fertilized egg (embryo) implants itself in the uterine wall, then life has never begun for the embryos used in stem-cell research. The eggs are culled from a woman’s ovaries via minor surgery, and the sperm are obtained by giving a man a Playboy, a petri dish, and 20 minutes of privacy in a room at the clinic. The vast majority of embryos that are created this way in the laboratory are destined to be thrown in the garbage, after the couple in question has decided they are done having children. If these embryos are in the freezer or the garbage, then by definition they are not living beings (assuming that life begins at conception, of course), since conception and therefore the beginning of life can only occur inside the womb.

You see, they have to backtrack and come up with a different claim to appear to have any consistency in opposing embryonic stem-cell research. There is a name for doing this: HYPOCRISY. The only argument they can come up with is consistent not with logic, but only with their culture-of-control ideals. The whole “embryonic stem-cell research kills babies” argument can only be supported (and not very well at that) by the “abortion kills babies” arguments that they like to use.

Hell, I can go on, even though this is getting long. Hormonal birth control such as “the Pill,” “the Patch,” and “the shot” work largely by preventing both ovulation and conception (they act to thicken the uterine lining, making it impossible for an embryo to implant). The same is true of the so-called “morning-after pill”; if taken within three to five days after unprotected sex (the sooner the better), it prevents pregnancy by making it impossible for the embryo to implant, much like once-daily hormonal birth control does. Let’s remember: if conception (implantation) does not occur, life does not begin — yet the Wacko Satanic Anti-American Righties flex their culture-of-control muscles by condemning these methods, and even go so far as to (illegally, and in breach of their code of professional ethics) refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and the “morning-after pill.”

I’m going to close by asking this question, a question that many “Christians” like to wear on bracelets or other fashion accessories: what would Jesus do? One thing is for certain; Jesus would not spread a veritable cornucopia of lies and illogical arguments, like so many people who (obviously, falsely) claim to “follow” Him.