One of my favorite pastimes is discussing politics on internet message boards. The recent assassination of Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was obviously a hot topic of debate, a conversation I joined with relish. (I’ll leave out my personal feelings towards abortion in this post – let’s just say they fall somewhere in between “abortion = murder” and “abortion=awesome”.)
In particular, I participated in this thread on KU sports website Phog.net, which has a pretty vibrant political board full of all kinds of intelligence and crazy. Anyone that’s lived in American for more than a few months can probably imagine how this debate progressed: most people felt that Tiller’s murder was wrong, with some anti-abortion folk carefully implying that it was also justified. Eventually the conversation got turned towards the question of when life begins, in which the various camps began debating whether that particular line was being crossed at birth/viability/moment of conception/etc.
One particularly obtuse poster named Buddy pulled out the tried-and-true emotional trigger method – he posted pictures of aborted fetuses (always a crowd-pleaser) and then asked the board how, upon viewing such stirring visual evidence, could one not conclude that abortion = murder? This was followed up with an opposing voice posting a picture of a fertilized egg and asking if it looked human as well. Buddy didn’t appreciate this:
Buddy: so really frank, because it doesn’t look like a human at the moment of conception, it’s not a human at some point? You see the problem here?
To which I unveiled my room-clearing fart of a response:
Human at some point. You are committing murder every time you masturbate. Therefore, Buddy is a mass murderer.
The 20 page, 400+ post thread ended five posts later. And that’s how I won the abortion debate. America, send your Thank You’s to Brooklyn. Next up: Poverty and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
1 Comment
June 6, 2009 at 3:29 pm
As a fellow pot-stirrer, this makes me smile, though I think you should give Bill Hicks a shout-out as this was part of his act back in the day.
My personal method for killing abortion debates involves repeating this statement to any anti-choice advocate in earshot: “We don’t need a new law. If you really believe the anti-choice rhetoric, bring a successful prosecution of a former mother-to-be for pre-meditated murder.” That usually ends the debate. I just cannot imagine a jury of any woman’s peers convicting her of murder for having an abortion.
In other news, Happy Birthday!