Pencil, 5½×3½ in. » ©2008 Sharon Rosa
I try to keep politics off my site. It’s an art site. If i want to rant political, i’ll start a politics blog.
But… i know many people, fundamentalist Christians i guess you’d call them, who don’t like McCain but are voting for him anyway. On “the life issue” (abortion).
Now, i don’t generally care who people vote for, but voting based on one issue when you don’t otherwise like the man vexes me no matter who the vote’s being cast for. You would not believe how many times during the primaries i almost smacked people who were voting for Hillary “because she’s a woman” or Obama “because he’s black,” without knowing anything about what either candidate stood for.
This, of course, led to a conversation between me and my mum (a fundamentalist Christian who, amazingly, is actually undecided.) Why, i asked, do so many fundies consider McCain pro-life? He’s for continuing the war in Iraq! How pro-life can that be? Does he genuinely expect “unborn children = valuable life” but “Iraqi children = disposable” to fly?
Mum had no answer to that, so i turned to the Internet. I did find one very intriguing article which points out a person can be both pro-life and pro-war, under certain circumstances. After all, unborn babies haven’t done anything to deserve being killed, but sometimes our enemies are actively looking to kill us… as well as many more people. The whole essay can be summed up with the line, “The purpose of war is not to kill the enemy, but rather to deprive the enemy of his ability to wage war and to destroy others’ rights.” Which, admittedly, is often best done by killing them…
Remember the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11? It was supposed to be heading to the White House, but some of the passengers decided to fight back against the hijackers. If the hijackers had won, everyone in the plane (as well as quite a few people in the White House) would have died anyway. The way things went, only the people in the plane died. And i’m willing to bet if the passengers and crew had managed to regain control of the plane before it crashed, they’d have killed the hijackers outright (lest the hijackers try to take over the plane again), and only the hijackers would have died. It makes sense. Killing our enemies saves lives.
Of course, that’s presuming the essay mentioned in the article is actually correct when it says, in war, “innocent life is never targeted, and that makes all the difference in the world.” In most wars that’s probably true, but in the Iraq war… there are so many child victims, i can only assume we are targeting them, or our soldiers have really, really bad aim. I know it sounds sarcastic to word it that way, but i’ve heard quite a few stories of young soldiers being thrown into battle before they were fully prepared (this is not a diss against America, it’s just something which happens once wars reach a certain point, too much fighting, not enough soldiers, not enough training time), so i’m honestly not sure.
But, okay, i’ll give the fundies a point on this one. Yes, McCain can be considered pro-life, and pro-war, without it being contradictory.
But i still don’t like it when people cast their vote based on a single issue.