Thank you Anonymous for your comments. Considering that you were kind enough to respond to my posting, I thought I should return the courtesy.
In disagreeing with my notion that “many of the arguments on the left boil down to we know what is best for you”, you propose that :
the "left" argument is more along the lines of personal choice - the exact opposite of that statement. Take one of the hottest topics going: abortion. The "left" is not saying that every woman should have an abortion. They are saying that every woman has the choice. Theoretically, the only thing that a left society imposes on it's citizens is the burden of providing options, whether it be through taxes, laws or a charter of rights.
I guess my first response would be one of semantics. You are arguing from a personal choice vein. I would say this is more rightly a libertarian position, as opposed to left or right. My sense of things is that libertarians tend to associate themselves with right leaning movement more than left ones. But that is just based on my experience, and I could be wrong on that point.
When I say that the left thinks that they know best and I am thinking from a Big Government vs Small Government approach, or more specifically what is more effective, central planning or free market economies. But again semantics, so let me comment on your abortion contention more directly. Implicit in your discussion is that those who are opposed to abortion are anti-choice, which is the rhetoric that the abortion lobby now uses. Although it is effective rhetoric, I am afraid that it is just not true. I think that the reason that this is “one of the hottest topics going” is that there is no way for one to be demonstrable correct over the other. This is because the positions are not opposites, they are entirely different paradigms.
In my mind it boils down to first assumptions, if we are to take a Cartesian approach to the subject. Those who are opposed to abortion are not doing so to take away rights and freedoms, they are opposing it to protect rights and freedoms (follow me if you will). If one were to believe that a fetus is not a human than fair enough, you are correct, the right (or probably more correctly the religious, as there are left leaning people of faith who believe that abortion is wrong, again semantic, sorry…) is taking away an option. If you believe that upon conception that the fetus is given a soul, then it fully human and subject to the rights and freedoms of any other human. In this case that means the right to live. If you believe that life begins with viability then a fetus is not quite human and is just an extension of the mother. In which case denying her access to abortion is restricting her rights over her own body, which of course is unacceptable. First assumptions change everything. Do I know which one of these positions is absolutely correct? No. Does anyone really? No. We have our beliefs on the matter, but no way of knowing absolutely in the here and now. So I would say it is not as simple as providing or taking away options in the case of abortion. One side believes you are killing a human (an unacceptable “option” in our society, except in the case of self-defense) and the other that you or not (grossly oversimplifying of course).
There is a lot more I could say about which side supports “choice” and which side thinks they know better, but this post is already quite long. I am curious if you could come up with another example of how the right takes away choice to continue this discussion.
