From: niepornt@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (David Marc Nieporent)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.elections
Subject: Re: NBC News Blackout on Black Senatorial Candidate
Keywords: slavery, pro-life
Date: 8 Nov 92 01:56:15 GMT
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <nyikos.720712856@milo.math.scarolina.edu> nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos) writes:

>Last night, NBC Nightly News carried information about women and minority
>candidates.  It said that there were 11 women candidates for the US Senate,
>and over a hundred (I forget the exact number) for the House.  When it
>came the turn of Blacks, however, all we were told was that there were
>approximately 60 candidates for the House.

>But there is at least one Black candidate for the US Senate.  If there
>is only one, it is easy to see why NBC news chose not to even hint
>at his existence.

What do you call Carol Mosley Braun, if not a Black candidate for the Senate?

>Alan L. Keyes, the Republican Party candidate for the U.S. Senate
>seat from Maryland that is up for election, is pro-life.  To make
>matters worse for him as far as media coverage is concerned, he
>is running against an incumbent who is a woman and is radically pro-choice.  

To make matters even worse for him, the Republican party has been
ignoring him, not even helping him with fundraising, let alone
campaigning.  (*HIS* accusation, not mine.  He claims that it's racism.)

>[A bit later in the same newscast, a Black woman was interviewed and asked
>by Derek Utley what the effect of court nominees on the abortion issue
>would be, and to compare the nominations Bill Clinton would make with the
>ones Bush would make.  She totally ignored the first question and only said
>that Clinton could be expected to make more women and minority nominations
>than Bush.]

>The state of Maryland also has the most radically pro-choice laws
>on aboriton, outstripping Roe v. Wade and even FOCA, the so-called
>Freedom of Choice Act.

Yeah, right.  All it does is codify Roe v. Wade so that if RvW is ever
overturned, the old anti-abortion won't take effect.

It was a referendum, BTW, so you can't claim that people don't support it.

BTW, does anyone know by how big a margin it passed?

>And Alan Keyes is a committed pro-lifer, who has evidently given the
>matter far more thought than George Bush has, because he has voiced his
>opinions in long thoughtful articles on the subject.

>A brief excerpt from his article, "Uncivil Liberties," which appeared
>in the March 1990 issue of _Crisis_, follows, closing this post.  

>	  The notion that slavery is wrong, that one human being
>	cannot have property in the life of another, is today a 
>	fundamental tenet of the moral creed from which we Americans
>	derive our shared identity as a people.  It is therefore a
>	basic tenet of our civic morality.  If we abandon it, we
>	abandon ourselves.  If we assert our freedom in a way that
>	violates it, we undermine the very doctrine that allows us
>	to legitimate that assertion.  In short, we return to the 
>	state of fundamental self-contradiction that made the 
>	Civil War a tragic inevitability.

What made the Civil War a tragic inevitability is that people disagreed
on the slavery issue.  If they had all supported slavery, the CW never
would have taken place.

>	  This is the danger that we face from the abortion issue.
>	The pro-choice advocates contend that a woman's body belongs
>	to her, is her property; that the fetus is part of her body,
>	and therefore also her property.  But once a person is convinced
>	that the life of the fetus is a human life, he cannot accept
>	the pro-choice position without accepting the view that, in this
>	case, one human being can have property in the life of another.
>	This violates the anti-slavery principle.

Well, he might have thought about it more than Bush, but that doesn't
make it accurate.  All pro-choice people do *not* contend that a fetus is
the property of a woman.  They simply claim that the right to control
her body is absolute.  It overrides a fetus's claim of a right to live
inside someone else.  Once the fetus leaves her body, she certainly
can't do whatever she wants with it.

If you wake up one morning and find yourself attached to another person
through tubes and such, and are told that if you detach the tubes, that
person will die, you still have the right to detach the tubes.  

(And, of course, this begs the question of whether the fetus *is* a
human life.)

>	  Unless the anti-slavery principle holds true absolutely, other
>	exceptions to it will also be possible.  If, for instance, we
>	argue that the exception in this case is justified because the
>	fetus cannot survive independently of the mother, then 
>	independence (rather than simple humanity) becomes the criterion
>	for deciding whether slavery is justified or not.  If someone
>	comes along who can prove that there is another case in which
>	one human being is dependent upon another as the fetus is upon
>	the mother, that case, too, must be excluded from the anti-slavery
>	principle.  Slavery then ceases to be a matter of fundamental
>	human rights and becomes instead a subject for intellectual
>	debate.  Someone could cleverly manipulate the concept of
>	independence to prove that human beings may justly be deprived
>	of their freedom if they use it irrationally, in a way that 
>	violates the doctrine that establishes their right to be free.
>	After all, ancient philosophers such as Aristotle held that
>	irrational beings are, by nature, wholly dependent upon rational
>	ones and can, therefore, be justly enslaved.

-- 
David M. Nieporent   | Mike Mussina 1992 AL Cy Young Winner
niepornt@phoenix.    |------------------------------------ 
   princeton.edu     | "I still believe in a place called Hope."
Clinton/Gore '92.  Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
Newsgroups: talk.abortion