Following up on my previous post, The Low Personal Cost of Sacrificing Others in Defense of Your Principles, here are at least two other examples off the top of my head.
1) Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the late-term abortion decision that “on principle” decided that all women would really prefer to be denied life-saving medical care if they only understood what late-term abortion entailed.
“It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know”
It’s easy to sacrifice actual women for one’s idealized principles about motherhood when one is neither a woman nor a mother.
2) Neoconservative women’s-studies professor Donna M. Hughes, who scorns “accommodationist schemes that normalize prostitution and merely try to distribute a few condoms.” Easy to sacrifice harm-reduction over abolition-only policies when your principles define prostitution as a fate worse than death. It’s an even easier sacrifice when you know it’ll never be your death you’re putting on the line.
Other examples welcome in comments.
In my country, where the
Submitted by svollga (not verified) on Sun, 2010-05-23 12:41.In my country, where the foster care system is actually dangerous for children because they grow up without social skills (if they survive poor food, lack of medical care and abuse from peers and adults), there are people who declare a) that we should never give children into foreign adoption because Russian children should be Russian, and b) that homosexual parents should never be given the right to adopt. Some even develop this line of thought to the idea of taking biological children from homosexual parents and placing them into orphanage.
Svollga, I’m chocked to hear
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Mon, 2010-05-24 06:48.Svollga, I’m chocked to hear that.
Here there are many who oppose giving homosexuals the right to adoption, because they are afraid that some countries won’t allow adoption to the country anymore. Personally I think it’s a rotten argument and it’s too easy for them to say that homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed adoption, when they aren’t homosexuals themselves. Same with saying they won’t change the marital laws, because the church should decide for itself whether it wants to marry homosexuals, while having a current law that forbid the church to make that decision for itself.de