sublimelysensual
Posts: 298
Joined: 7/25/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: slaveluci quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad There's a saying that, if one cannot explain something to a nine-year-old, one does not understand the thing to be explained. Of course, adults are more likely to "block out" an explanation than kids are, but apart from that obstacle, I've found that it generally holds true for things like this as well. Since I don't understand it, but would like to, and he doesn't understand it, but you do, why not try? Hello Aswad, I don't believe that you, of all people, don't "understand" why it's not appropriate to pay crack-addicted people to go get sterilized. I can try to explain my feelings about this but I really don't have the time or energy to get into a moral debate about it. People with addictions - to crack or any other mind-altering substance - are not exactly in the right frame of mind to make life-changing decisions such as to whether or not to get sterilized. And to assume that they are some lower life form who SHOULD be sterilized is, in my mind, akin to the eugenics and ethnic cleansing used by the Nazis (though not based on ethnicity, of course). To me it is the height of arrogance to take it upon yourself to decide that crackheads should all be sterilized and so you go out and offer them money (the one thing they are most desperate for) in order to get them to do so. What if they were to actually go through with it and then got clean and straightened their lives out and regretted it? There's just no way anyone can justify such behavior to me. I think there's lots of folks who shouldn't breed but it's not necessarily based on the fact that they are currently battling addictions that they may eventually overcome. I don't know what to say. I'm just kind of rambling because I just can't imagine that anyone could really defend that. Wanna take a stab at it? .............luci Let me preface this by saying I added the bold because that's the part of the post I wanted to address. A few questions..were they in the right state of mind when they chose to take the crack/meth -name your substance- the first time? How about the second time ? The time after that? They made a life altering decision the moment they chose to take an illegal, commonly known to be addictive, substance...unless someone had them tied up..which is a whole different perspective (sorry, couldn't resist)..anyway, point being, if they don't have the sense to not do crack..do you want them raising children? Do you want to pay medical expenses for said child born to a crack addicted parent? As for the whole eugenics comparison..come on now, none of those people chose to be Jewish, to live under Hitler's reign, etc, etc..it wasn't about choice period. The same goes for the periods in time when people with mental retardation/developmental disabilities were forcibly sterilized as recently as the 1950's. There's just no comparison. Just my two cents, as always... -a
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"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object." -Simone De Beauvoir -'The Second Sex'
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