Is it the Y chromosome?
Honestly, I know enough biology to know that it can’t be. It just can’t. And yet how else to explain the sudden ignorance of a guy as sharp as Bob Somerby? He’s talking about Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow beating up on Stupak for tribalistic, Village reasons.
Somerby finds that inappropriate.
For ourselves, we think pro-choice groups have every right to bail on the bill if they decide it ends up affecting choice in unacceptable ways. But then, we also think that anti-abortion groups have the right to make the same sort of decision. That is, to jump ahead just a bit: We assume that different people, acting in good faith, may judge the morality of a measure in different ways.
Leaving Olbermann and Maddow aside, this is the first time I’ve seen Somerby completely miss a question of right and wrong.
What if the amendment read, “Hair straightening is unnatural and immoral. No medical costs associated with complications can be paid for using any Federal tax dollars.” Would he be as tolerant of that viewpoint? Male circumcision is an unnecessary procedure whose only health benefit comes from compensating for poor hygiene (or, in the case of AIDS, from the unnaturally thickened skin of the glans). Would he be as quick to understand people with moral objections to the deformation of men? (Note to the humor-challenged: I’m paralleling anti-abortion attitudes, not actually arguing for a specific kind of anatomy.) If I felt it was immoral and harmful to everyone to overpopulate the planet, and attached an amendment saying that no Federal money should ever be spent on pregnancy, childbirth, or infants after the second child, would he sagely say my morality could become law if I had the votes?
I could have all the morals I want about these things. As soon as I tried to make anyone else live according to them, I would be wrong.
Stupak and Pitts deserve disgrace for trying to take away our rights. It has nothing to do with morals, Stupak’s, mine, or the man in the moon’s. Rights. The right to control our own medical procedures. The right to control our bodies. Rights. Get it?
So, no, “different people, acting in good faith” may not judge a law about rights in different ways. Not even when it’s a law about women’s medical rights.
What is so hard to understand about this? Even with the handicap of a Y chromosome?
Stupak, rights, human rights, politics
The handicap of the Y chromosome? I see this article is outdated given scientists have discovered that the Y chromosome is the most quickly evolving part of the human genome discovered so far.
Might want to actually have some data to back up your statements before being a petty sexist.
Ian on January 16th, 2010 at 02:18
Ian, did you happen to notice the first line? “Honestly, I know enough biology to know that it can’t be. It just can’t.”
The flippant “Y chromosome” stuff is a minor and mild way of putting the shoe on the other foot, since it’s good to feel how other people live. Somebody who’s as strong against sexism as you are no doubt comments as strenuously against all the flippant comments aimed at women, and even more so against all the humiliating, downright despicable, and cruel ones. That’s great. We need more men with a sense of fairness to speak up.
quixote on January 16th, 2010 at 11:28
(Btw, the rapid rate of change on the Y chromosome has been known to biologists for years. The next big discovery, no doubt, will be that overall female morphology is the human template, and that male morphology is derived from that. That’s why Turner’s syndrome (XO) people look female, although they’re not fertile. You need the second X for that.)
quixote on January 16th, 2010 at 11:34