Pints With Aquinas - Bonus #MarchForLife episode (responding to BAD pro-choice "arguments")

Episode Date: January 20, 2018

G'day! Welcome to this bonus episode of Pints with Aquinas. You and I usually pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy, but today you'll be pulling up a stool next to me and my Twitter account so we can make fun of stupid pro-choice arguments. Stupid pro-choice arguments. Let me preface this by sharing a few tweets that I've shared over the last few days. The first thing that I shared is this one. This was the day before the March for Life. Those atheists who will march for life tomorrow will demonstrate themselves to be free thinkers and courageous, willing to follow science where it leads, even when it clashes with secular dogma. All right, seriously,

if you're an atheist out there and you marched for life in DC the other day or somewhere around the country, you are awesome. Because you've been so often atheists talk about being free thinkers. I don't think a lot of that makes sense to me. Sometimes I think it sounds like you're just falling in line with an echo chamber on YouTube somewhere. But seriously, if you're an atheist who is going up against secular dogma that says abortion is good and fine, you're an awesome human being, at least in this respect. So good for you for doing that. The next thing that I said that apparently people found rather controversial was the pro-life position couldn't be simpler. It's always wrong for big, strong people to kill little, innocent, weak people. That's it.

That is the argument, right? It's always wrong for big, strong people to kill little, innocent, weak people. And in response to this, there's just been an absolute metric crap ton of nonsense spouted back at me. Like people trying to say that a fetus isn't a person is stupid. Look, if it's growing, isn't it alive? Well, yes. Okay.

And if it has human parents, isn't it human? Well, yes. I mean, this denial of personhood, right, is where we get into the Hitler analogies, the Nazi analogies, right? It's not bloody human. It's a black person. It's not human. It's a woman. It's not human. It's a gay person or a gypsy. Stop denying people their personhood. If it's growing, it's alive. And if it has human parents, it's human. All right. Okay, so another person is saying like,

you shouldn't tell women what to do with their bodies. I'm not telling women what to do with their bodies and neither are you, except for when your body intentionally hurts another body, right? Like I have the right to do with my body whatever I want to do with it, unless it starts hitting you in the face or dismembering you. Then all of a sudden, I've lost my right. All right, what else have we got here? What else of this beautiful, magic, logical brilliance of people spouting? Okay, so here's this one person. She says,

people spouting. Okay, so here's this one person. She says, in response to my tweet, she says, but you support war and removing healthcare from children, laugh out loud. First of all, I'm not really sure what you mean by those two statements. We'd have to be a little more nuanced, don't you think? But this and statements like it commits what's called in logic the two-quo-que fallacy, which is Latin for you too, where you essentially accuse someone of being a hypocrite. But this is a version of the ad hominem fallacy, where you attack the person making the argument instead of the argument. And this is bad logic. Because I could be a racist hypocrite, like an awful human being who hates children, right? That I support war. I think innocent people should die. You know, maybe I'm for rape and pornography. Even if I was a horrible human being and was for all those things. It still hasn't begun to address my point,

which is it's always wrong for big, strong people to kill little, innocent, weak people. All right. It still isn't an argument against abortion. And so what I did is I pointed out that this person was being illogical. And so let's go down the chain of tweets here. I pointed out that this is the two-quote way fallacy. And she says, it's not a terrible argument. She says, it's a fact. Lots of people who claim to be pro-life are also pro-destructive things. Yet that's exactly the point. You're committing the two-quote way fallacy. So I said, the point is, just to reiterate what I said, I could be a hypocrite. I could be massively immoral and it would still be wrong to kill small innocent people. And then I told her to go Google ad hominem. Would you? I

said, that's the fallacy you don't know you're committing. And then I said, well, are you pro choice? And she says that she is. I said, right. It's sad that you're pro people having the choice to kill innocent little people. She says, now you're making a terrible argument. Oh, I haven't even read this yet. I'm reading this live on air. Here we go. She says, again, I believe that women have the choice to make the decision that best aligns with their morals and religious beliefs. That's a stupid argument. What if I thought it was a moral thing to hate gay people and just kind of physically humiliate them in public?

You know, and maybe that was part of my religious beliefs. Well, there you go then. It's stupid. She says here, but I will never support infringing my religious beliefs. This is the other thing the pro-choice community want to do. They want to turn this into a religious issue. And the reason they want to turn this into a religious issue is they've got absolutely no scientific leg to stand on. We all know when human life begins, right? That's why we call it conception. To go back to that simple argument a moment ago, which you may

have heard before, if it's growing, it's alive. But as human parents, right, it's human. So, either just say you're okay discriminating and killing certain human beings. Just say that, all right? Here's another thing that Planned Parenthood, what a wicked, wicked institution. I cannot wait for their downfall. It's going to be a bloody glorious day. Here's something they tweeted out again the other day, and this is absolutely bloody Orwellian in its language. They said, anti-women's health extremists can have today. We'll take November 6. Anti-women's health extremists. Yeah, how frigging extreme, right? To think you shouldn't dismember and kill innocent human beings. Seriously, the pro-choice community have no logic or scientific leg to stand on. And so,

all they have is ad hominem attacks, right? Red herrings to quoque fallacies. Getting into an argument with someone who vehemently is pro-choice very often it's like arguing with an insane person or someone who's massively drunk again I would have more respect for these people if they said yeah some human life is better than other human life so we should and we should be able to kill some human lives even if they're innocent right that would make you a wicked human being but at least it would make you logically consistent. All right. Thanks for listening to my rant today on Pines with Aquinas. This had nothing to do with Aquinas, of course, except that Aquinas was logical. But if you want to get a fantastic book, this is what I'm going

to leave you with today. Something that's a little more than a rant. You got to get Trent Horn's book, Persuasive Pro-Life, how to talk about our culture's toughest issue, persuasive pro-life. In the meantime, here's a bit of advice for you, okay? If you're on Twitter these last few days and you're going insane at the amount of irrationality out there like I am. Here's something to remember. The nice thing about muting Twitter trolls instead of blocking them is that you get the satisfaction of knowing that they're probably banging angrily away on their keyboards at two in the morning at you and you've moved on. So, don't be afraid to mute conversations. It's important to recognize when you're arguing with an irrational

human being, at least on this particular topic, and to move on. And I think I'm going to take my own advice, mute a few people and move on. God bless you. Let's keep up the fight against this pro-choice BS rhetoric. It's stupid, it's irrational, and it's evil. Now, in case there's any irrational people listening to my podcast today, you'll notice I didn't call these particular people making irrational arguments stupid. I mean, they might be stupid, but what I'm interested in doing is attacking stupid arguments. I did say that you'd be a wicked human being if you were for the destruction of human life, and I'm fine saying that. But you don't dismiss people by calling them wicked. You dismiss arguments by showing why the argument is

illogical. That's what we should do. And I know Trent Hornsburg is going to help you do that. All right. Have a good one. Chat with you on Tuesday.