Wednesday, November 28, 2007

More slogan co-opting

When I clicked on my Christian Government Newsletter this morning, I was so startled I almost spilled my tequila sunrise. Oh shit! Check out this sexually-charged metaphorical demand, if you dare:
Whoa, settle down there, pally, nobody's forcing anything... don't get excited. So what we have here is "secular humanism" positioned as a religion just as extreme as conservative Christianity. "Secular humanists" worship at the un-church and try to dictate how people live their lives -- by "secular humanist" values, which include forcing everyone to have abortions and be gay, I guess. Unfortunately the argument doesn't quite hold up because "secular humanists" don't "promote" anything other than giving everyone a place at the table -- even religious nuts, as long as they can restrain the urge to stuff their noses in everyone's crotches. (Otherwise, it's out to the yard for them.) But it makes for good copy ("secular fundamentalists! SHRIEEEEK!") and Xtian Government's readers will likely eat it up like a nice hot bowl of stupid on a blustery day.

Of course it's just another example of the lack of original thought that leaves these people no option but to co-opt the ideas of their opponents in the hopes that doing a little coattail-riding will garner them some of that elusive "credibility" stuff. Proponents of Fetal Homicide laws have been doing it for awhile, using the word "choice" to bolster their argument and position the "choice to give birth" on the same footing as the "choice to abort": "Protect a woman's Choice to give birth". "Why" they ask, "is a woman's Choice to have an abortion more worthy of protection than a woman's Choice to give birth?"

One need not be an expert in the science of rockets to detect the lameness of that argument. Neither choice is more "deserving of protection" than the other; but only one of those choices is under assault by a million fetus fanatics who'd ban it in a hot second if they could. That can't be said for the choice to give birth. Nobody's trying to ban it, nobody's out protesting in front of maternity wards, nobody's even trying to regulate it (apart from We At Birth Pangs, in a purely satirical sense). So to position the choice of abortion on the same footing as the choice to give birth is as disingenuous as positioning secularism as a "fundamentalist religion".

But then, that's kind of what we've come to expect of them, isn't it?