I’m having trouble parsing this. Williamson isn’t a mere contrarian. He’s rabid.
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I was saying, it’s getting hard to find a contrrarian who isn’t rabid, because any less-than-rabid position is already mainstream.
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Ah, got it, thanks. Good point about a scary state of affairs.
I’d like to say that it’s never too late for them to come to their senses, but that would be an easily demonstrated falsehood.
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I can’t speak for other Delawareans, but I prefer flogging as a punishment to permanent incarceration or permanent economic and social marginalization..
It seems to me that humans who make mistakes can often go on to become outstanding, admirable people if they are permitted to expiate and move past those mistakes. Flogging, which may well be a cruel and unproductive punishment in many circumstances, is a single event in time. It lets a malefactor and the community both move on and become better, rather than instituting a permanent system of retaliatory torment and abuse.
Kevin Williamson wrote a ‘lovely’ article about Appalachia describing it in terms of meth and welfare. He manages to be pretty universally terrible.
For me the reason the distinction is still meaningful when it’s a writer is that Williamson tells us he is a conservative and a pro-lifer, but by his words shows us he is just a guy who hates women so much he wants to watch them hang. I think when people tell us things about themselves they often, by doing so, show us something else about themselves, sometimes something contradictory to what they tell us.
Anyway, as I said, to others that might sound like pure pedantry, and other people probably take the same meaning as i do while using the other word.
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And he’s probably not the only one either on the pro-life side who don’t actually give a fuck about babies, but really just hate women.
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Has anyone tipped-off Cannibal Witch that Atlantic has a job opening? (And that they’re not too picky.)
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"More recently, Bob Nonini, a state senator from Idaho and candidate for lieutenant governor in the state, said during a candidate forum on Monday that “there should be no abortion and anyone who has an abortion should pay.” When asked if he supported the death penalty for abortion, he nodded, and he confirmed that position in a later interview with the Associated Press.
He appeared to reverse his position a day later, saying in a statement that “prosecutions have always been focused on the abortionist.”
“There is no way a woman would go to jail let alone face the death penalty. The statute alone, the threat of prosecution, would dramatically reduce abortion. That is my goal.”
However, others in Idaho have brought up the idea of prosecuting women, according to the AP. The group Abolish Abortion Idaho is backing a ballot initiative that would charge both women and doctors with first-degree murder in the case of an abortion. Idaho state Sen. Dan Foreman tried to introduce similar legislation last year, but it never got a hearing.
More mainstream anti-abortion groups have generally avoided calls to punish women for getting abortions, instead often casting women as victims whose lives are harmed by the act of ending a pregnancy. However, the Trump administration’s reproductive health policy, which has included an embrace of anti-abortion groups and individuals as well as the appointments of many federal judges considered friendly to the anti-abortion cause, may have emboldened state lawmakers and others to push more punitive legislation.
A bill introduced in Ohio in March would ban all abortions and allow criminal charges against doctors as well as patients who get the procedure. The bill would categorize an abortion as a homicide, meaning doctors and patients could get life in prison or the death penalty, according to NPR.
Williamson may be gone from the Atlantic, but the point of view he espoused is alive and well. Now, as when he was hired, suggesting that women be punished for getting abortions is not an idle speculation or flippant joke. It’s an all-too-real proposal being floated in multiple states, and one that had the support, at least at one point, of the man who is now our president. That’s something no one should forget, no matter what Williamson does next."
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Assholes. If they want to reduce abortion, then they’d support easy access to birth control and comprehensive sex ed. They are nothing but authoritarians.
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Indeed, Planned Parenthood is probably responsible for preventing more abortions than any other organization in the country.
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And still they manage to recognize how critical it is to provide those services, especially in places where there is not actual support for young women.
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If I interpret that correctly the state senator is still advocating the death penalty for women who have abortions. He’s just certain that will be such a deterrent it will never be necessary.
I hope we’ll never see his belief put to the test.
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This is what I usually think about people who want laws against abortion. I take the charitable interpretation of their views: they have magical beliefs about what the effects of those laws would be. They don’t imagine putting women in prison in droves or putting women to death, they imagine that abortions would be curtailed. They probably also think the reason we don’t go around killing each other and stealing from one another all the time is because people know it’s illegal.
When someone starts talking about hanging my charitability goes out the window. If you are talking about hanging women you’ve got a picture in your head of a woman hanging. If you say we should do it you like that picture in your head.
I’m guessing that the idea of watching a woman die before his very eyes makes Williamson excited, maybe the way watching his favourite sports team win makes him excited. He’d probably put it on a bucket list.
I could be wrong. Maybe he’s just a solipsist who considers other people to be more theoretical than real.
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