I feel genuinely upset about this.
I have responded to this but my response keeps on getting deleted.
Let me try again. You are "pro-choice" (ick, I don't want to use that term), yes? What do you find upsetting here, then?
Facepalm dude. Facepalm.
Please nobody be a whiny POS and report Simfan's post. It is a perfect example of flawed Republican thinking.
Yes, Tony is pro-choice. And yes, he probably would've been okay if his mistress decided on her own to get an abortion. However, fact of the matter is that the guy pressured her to do so to cover up his affair which is kind of a dipsh*tty thing to do, regardless of what your thoughts on the right to choose are. In fact, given Tony's position on the way society treats women, it makes perfect sense for him to find this guy abominable, given that he was pretty much a douche who pressured his mistress to get an abortion most likely for his own convenience.
I personally don't see nothing wrong with a man advising a woman to get an abortion. I have seen enough teen pregnancies and shotgun weddings between people too young and too stupid to think that could've been ended before they started if some people had enough pressure to get an abortion rather than keep it out of fear of being ostracized by their overly conservative communities (which I guess is why they prefer instead to keep it and admit to all of their church elders that they had an affair with the local mechanic. . . . . .yeah). I really wish there was at least one or two very liberal British Literature or Drama teachers who had enough balls to say "You know Mary, maybe it's not such a good idea for you to be a mother at 16 years. I'm just saying."
However, what Desjarlais did was very different. His sole motivation was convenience for himself and not really any consideration for the women he was with. While it's definitely not "anti-abortion", an argument could be made that it's in some way "anti-choice".
So even if we ignore the obvious hypocrisy, I don't see how a poster like Tony is supposed to be okay with Desjarlais given the optics. Tony has some pretty strong feminist views and I don't see how he's supposed to not be upset about a man who bullies a woman into getting an abortion she might not have wanted in the first place.
Tony's pro-choice, not pro-abortion.
And yes I know I know, the woman ultimately was the one who decided to get an abortion. He didn't show up with a gun in his hand and demand that she go to a doctor nor was she guarded by armed guards armed with AK-47s. I'm just arguing that, from a Tony perspective, there is almost no reason to like this guy even if you ignore the hypocrisy everyone else has mentioned. Personally, his affair happened awhile ago (though there is no telling what his political views were back then), but I have not seen any serious efforts by Desjarlais to seriously condemn his past self for such moral failure. And more to the point, if he had that bad of a skeleton in his closet the question deserves to be asked as to why he ran for office in the first place? It's not like he could've stood on the sidelines and actively campaigned for a more sound candidate who had a much less controversial past (which is why I guess somebody is always trying to primary him).
It might seem unfair to Desjarlais that everyone is bringing up his douchey behavior from a decade ago every couple of years up, but that is what happens to people who run for political office. I mean the guy was a fInksking doctor, he could've done as much to promote "conservative" interests by standing on the sidelines and throwing a few thousand dollar donations and hosting a few events for another TN Republican rather than going to Congress and subjecting himself and his family to the usual round of inquiry that has the potential to lose him and his allies millions of dollars of support. It's not like that out of the hundreds of thousands of other people who reside in his district that he's the only one who has the political savvy to be a Congressman.
If you cannot label him a hypocrite, please at least have enough common sense to label him dumb.
EDIT: Original post was filled with a lot of factual errors. Please forgive me, it's 7:37 in the morning and I haven't had coffee yet.
