Houston clears Planned Parenthood... and indicts prolife activists instead.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Wouldn't 60 Minutes have been indicted about 500x under this principle?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Wouldn't 60 Minutes have been indicted about 500x under this principle?

Did you actually read what the charges are?  I don't think 60 Minutes is printing fake government IDs.

I thought it was in the fourth paragraph of the article, but I guess not.  The strangely worded first sentence threw me off of what it was saying.   I don't have a NYT subscription, so I like to save my free page views for interesting essays and such.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Wouldn't 60 Minutes have been indicted about 500x under this principle?

Not sure what you are referring to but apparently the felony component of the government document thing required malicious intent.  So, no, 60 Minutes would  not be indicted under any "malicious intent" circumstance.  You may not like whatever 60 Minutes did to get your panties in a bunch but no "malicious intent" was involved on their part.

The government document falsification wasn't something I picked up on as being the crux of the legal issue initially.  But "malicious intent" would not be a difference here. 60 Minutes and other investigative journalists go undercover to expose people and organizations they believe are involved in wrongdoing, and that is the same as here. The difference would be the means.

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This is not about abortion. It's about using deception and fraud to advance your political views. I hope we can all agree that's a bad thing even if you support the views in question.

If you are deceiving an organization in order to expose that they are doing something unjust and destructive, it may well be justified.  If you mean deceiving the public in order to present you point of view, that is wrong, but normally it is not something that carries a judicial penalty, but is left open for the public to debate as to the facts of the matter. 

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

It seems very obvious from her various posts than she fell under the influence of some religious cult.

Maddy/Nathan has been under the influence of Christianity for a long time now. Amazing that you are just now picking up on this.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

A family cannot a burden imposed by someone else?  That's funny, I don't remember choosing to come into existence into a family.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

A family cannot a burden imposed by someone else?  That's funny, I don't remember choosing to come into existence into a family.

Um, that's my point, the experience of being a parent is distinctly different from being a baby; having a child without that being an active choice is a pretty terrible/disorienting/horrific experience. Being a child without choosing to be a child is, well, it's what everyone has been through.

That was my point: being a mature adult is qualitatively different from being a child and it's very different from being a fetus. From a moral standpoint, different rules apply, and the moral standing of a fetus is clearly different form the moral standing of a mature adult who can do Calculus or cook a tasty bowl of pasta or whatever. Our legal system acknowledges this distinction, as it should.

Am I saying that parents should be allowed to kill their children? No, of course not, children are also qualitatively different than fetuses seeing as, you know, they're not physically dependent upon their biological mother or surrogate mother.

If it is truly horrific to have a child without it being an active choice, that points to larger conditions or expectations which make it so.  It doesn't make sense from our nature that it would be so in itself (absent certain biological risks).   We were made to find fulfillment in reproducing and caring for offspring, it is in some sense inherent in who we are, even if this drive is not always nurtured in healthful ways. It is better for it to be an active choice, but the vast majority of humankind has not I would guess been conceived under such circumstances.  Horror need not follow from having not the opportunity to make an active choice. Many a mother and child have come to love each other without such options.  We have a basic need for liberty, though this liberty must be consistent with the preservation of life and our duties to one another; even still we are at our core dependent creatures, with inescapable relations that are not fully under our immediate control.  Otherwise you have neither family nor society. 

Some members are more directly dependent than others, it is true.  But how does this play out?  It is one thing to say that a parent has certain authorities over a child in order to strengthen and support a relation between them, acknowledging both the reality of the dependent relationship and the value of each member of that relationship.  This is a very different kind of claim than saying that one with a more total dependence on another may therefore be destroyed with political and moral approval.