Rod Dreher's Gay Obsession

Rod Dreher says he is so not obsessed with gays and anyway God says that gaydom is bad so he's right to be obsessed with gays.

I have an idea. Let's see what else the Bible says about sex. Okay, if you capture a woman during war you can have sex with her. So our soldiers who raped Iraqi women were a-okay. If you have sex with a married women, you both die. If you have gay sex, you die. If a man rapes a virgin he must marry her. If a childless woman's husband dies, she must have sex with his brother. If you can't have kids, you can have sex with your slaves or servants to have a child. If a mob wants to rape your house guest, you can offer them your virgin daughters instead. And of course you can have as many wives and slave "wives" as you wish.

All that's right there in the Bible, and yet somehow I haven't been to a Newt Gingrich stoning lately. Maybe we discard what we don't like and keep what we like, and maybe that's the sane and equitable thing to do. Or maybe we can just cherry-pick whatever pleases our egos and demons, and try to force everyone else to go along with our obsessions and fears.

Feminism

Let's make this short because there are much more important things going on than McArdle. You are not a feminist, Megan.

Bear with me. Most traditional feminists would say that being pro-life is an automatic disqualifier for calling yourself a feminist. I find this argument dramatically uncompelling. Fetal personhood is a quasi-empirical value judgement that should not be made for instrumental reasons--we can't decide that six year old children aren't persons simply because this would possibly make it easier to advance female equality.

...

To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons. To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation.

Megan is not a feminist because she she doesn't think about or understand power. She's an authoritarian, and assumes power belongs to the powerful. The question is not "is a fetus a child." The question is, who decides what a woman does with her body, she or someone else?* Who owns a woman's body? The answer is pretty obvious, to a feminist.


*Women will kill their children, legally or illegally. Abortion doesn't disappear when it's outlawed. And if all abortion were magically eradicated somehow, the child would be killed after birth instead. That's reality. Just as men (and women) will kill foreign babies if they want to wage war against a country. If every baby's life is sacred and none must be allowed to die for any reason, war must be eradicated as well as abortion. Good luck with that.