Friday, February 13, 2015

What can we learn from the lawmaker who used the word "beautiful" to describe a child born from rape?

West Virginia state representative Brian Kurcaba infamously said:

For somebody to take advantage of somebody else in such a horrible and terrifying and brutal way is absolutely disgusting. But what is beautiful is the child that could come as a production of this.
My mom, Ann Althouse, has some incisive points about this:
[W]e are all descendants of rapists, aren't we? In the genetic line that led to each of us, there must be ancestors who were the product of a rape. How could it be otherwise? . . .

If every woman who was raped in all of human history and pre-history had had the ability to abort and had done so, not one single person who now lives on the face of the earth would exist. We all contain the inheritance of rape, and if life is beautiful, Kurcaba had a point. But it's a point they can kill you with in our aggressive American political discourse. That's the lesson here.

Imagine the completely different set of persons who would populate the earth instead of us if no rape-conceived child had every been born. What would they be like?!

Another perspective is: What are we like? What part of our cruelty and selfishness comes from this genetic inheritance?

A third thought experiment: If, beginning now, every woman would terminate every pregnancy caused by rape, how would humanity change?
I posted this to Facebook and one of my friends said my mom's "What are we like?" point was very interesting. I added:
Yeah, and it's the kind of interesting point that our conversations would happen upon more often if most people weren't so stifled by the prevailing political correctness.

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