Yesterday I was thinking about something Ron Paul said:

I have never met anyone who did not support our troops.

Sometimes, however, we hear accusations that someone or some group does not support the men and women serving in our armed forces. This is pure demagoguery, and it’s intellectually dishonest.

At the time I was thinking about this, I was reading the following article on a San Francisco based Liberal group’s blog:

Good News: Iraqi Freedom Fighters Down Occupation Aircraft

Iraqi freedom fighters killed nine occupation war criminals by shooting down RAF Hercules with ‘ageing anti-aircraft gun.’

Perhaps Ron Paul needs to get out more.Personally, I know of dozens of people who think that “Iraqi Freedom Fighters” (the ones who want to force their Islamist politics on their countrymen) should kill as many “sadistic, anti-social, puppy killing war criminals” as possible. After all, the argument goes, it’s not like they were drafted against their will. They volunteered, and as such they should be dealt with accordingly.

Anyhow, that’s not the subject of my post today.Today I want to discuss the sabotage being perpetrated against the Pro-Life movement by the Religious Right.

First, what is the “Religious Right”?

It’s the right-wing answer to the Humanist Left. On the Left we have our “humanist” friends who want ever bigger, ever more intrusive government, funded coercively by all taxpayers to carry out an agenda of imposing their morality on society and violating individual freedom.

On the Right, we have our Christian friends doing the same. Laws prohibiting gay marriage, for example, have no basis in an individualist (non-collectivist) ideology.

More on that at a later date. Today I want to focus on one issue: Abortion.

Outside of philosophical circles, the abortion debate appears to be perceived of as freedom-vs-religion. The Religious Right promote this image when they go around demonstrating against abortion with scripture on their placards.

Every time I see this, it just makes my blood boil. Abortion is no more a religious issue than any other form of homicide.

If you’re going to oppose an injustice on religious grounds, you ought to know your arguments are going to be summarily dismissed by the opposition.

Last I checked, the vast majority of even pro-abortion philosophers admit that abortion is murder, and that is a much more persuasive ground upon which to protest abortion than religion.

In the Peter Singer book, “Should the Baby Live?”, the Princeton bioethics professor suggests that parents be allowed 28 days after birth to terminate the life of their newborn.

A newborn infant is “clearly not a person”, and as such should not be “accepted as having the same right to life as others”.

So who is Peter Singer?

According to the New York Times, “No other living philosopher has had this kind of influence.” He is a founder of the animal rights movement, and The New England Journal of Medicine said he has had “more success in effecting changes in acceptable behavior” than any philosopher since Bertrand Russell. The New Yorker called him the “most influential” philosopher alive.

Maybe they are overstating his influence. Perhaps we’ll get stuck with just a week or ten days in which we can, um, how do you say? “Postpartum abortion”?