Ever since the colonies gained independence from the domineering will of the British, bringing universal freedom to all has been the primary modus operandi of our nation’s leaders. Foremost is the right of conservative politicians to share whatever asinine ideas about women’s reproductive rights their baffling minds can conceive.
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul has already found himself pressured to join the ranks of peers making declarations and falsehoods regarding abortion and the party’s desire to pass a national ban thereof.
As if being a Republican weren’t already qualification enough to weigh in on what control women may have over their own bodies, Paul feels some additional confidence as a former eye surgeon to know when life starts.
He understands that the argument of life at conception is the aspect of abortion that causes a lot of the controversy. He speaks from his own experiences with neonatal patients.
“Some of them are small enough that I can put them in the palm of my hand, sometimes a pound, sometimes under a pound. And nobody really questions whether they have rights ... because everyone is in agreement; that baby’s alive. But the way our society is now, and the way our rules are written, if you’re a five- or six-pound baby in the womb, you don’t have any legal rights.”
Sticking to numbers tends to be a safe rhetorical strategy and is probably second nature to our medically minded presidential hopeful. However, using weight as the justification for human rights is an unorthodox new angle.
This also highlights how the conservative right insists on framing abortion as something that happens seemingly exclusively to third-trimester, nearly full-formed, practically crowning fetuses. Of course, that’s because it’s harder to demonize abortion when the thing you’re trying to protect looks like a tadpole.
As the Editorial Board, a part of our hearts — he can have our left ventricles — go out to Paul as we know he probably didn’t want to be talking about this hot button issue so soon after his official announcement to run for office. Our curly-headed, Alan Cumming political look-alike tried to keep the discussion to protecting life and its sanctity and keep away from the specifics such as applying exceptions in the cases of rape, incest and protecting the life of ?the mother.
“I think people get tied up in all these details of, sort of, you’re this or this or that, or you’re hard and fast one thing or the other,” ?said Paul.
Someone’s been taking clarity evasion lessons from Mike Pence.
But who can blame him? Paul and any other GOP candidate hopefuls are going to have a rough go of things, especially when it comes to issues like abortion and marriage equality.
They need to satisfy their party by being a hyperconservative champion who thinks that petroleum was created when Jesus converted dinosaur blood into oil. But if they win that battle, they lose ?the war.
The kind of person — or Romney-bot — the GOP like to select is often going to be too alienating for the quickly growing liberal ?population.
Paul is allowed to believe whatever he wants about the genesis of life. He can think that his medical background makes him more qualified to determine something purely philosophical. He cannot hide from the fact that even the stances he takes on such issues early on are going to set up an uphill battle down the campaign road.
After all, he’s seen what happens when his fellow conservatives take strong stances on reproductive rights and string together some of the most elaborately contrived and offensive statements.
