Not everyone has parents they can talk to. My children are not among those. But because I'm "the cool non judgemental mom" I had all of my kids friends talking to me before they would even think of taking to their parents. And yes I do have strong opinions about this. I do not like a******n. But I also do not like anyone trying to take any rights away. Also, one of my girls was born with a heart problem. Cannot carry a baby. It would k**l her. So, if her contraception fails as that sometimes does, I don't want her right to her life taken away. Some of these people are so into the rights of a small group of cells, but not to the rights of the woman. Do they think the fetus will continue to go on if the woman dies?

The smarter we get, the more stupid we act. Someone decided that the "old ways" were outdated and in need of improvement. So, being so much smarter than our grand parents, we improved ourselves to the point where no one has a clue. Instead of referring back to a "restore point", where we KNEW things worked better, we keep trying to improve on current "bad code" and consequently, keep making things worse. We keep redefining the Constitution until it resembles nothing like the original, we keep improving criminal codes until criminals have more rights than law abiding citizens and improving our education system until kids are barely able to care for themselves after graduation. Kudo's to the improvers!

Actually, I don’t think there is much difference between Bush an Obama on most of the most important issues. The only obvious difference is his skin color and Obama h**ers profess strongly that skin color is not an issue, but most of the time, perhaps they protest too much. I also notice that true Obama h**ers have extreme difficulty citing specific things they think Obama has done wrong. There are several major things I think he has done wrong that the true h**ers seldom mention.
I think most of us are able to easily lie to ourselves and that is most of our problem individually and as a country. There is an old saying, First don’t fool yourself and you are the easiest one to fool.
The reading I suggested is a small, thin book, not a pamphlet. I will be interested in you response to the book.

I think we all see problems now and realize we have had problem from the time we lived in caves. I think we will overcome all of our present problems if we don't destroy our environment and become extinct.

I have to disagree on the Obama issue. I have major disagreements with him, but I think history will fine him to about average among our presidents. Seeing Obama as the cause or even a major cause of our present problems is not justified and it distracts us from real problems such as improving our educational systems, decreasing pollution, and taking individual responsibility.

If you are serious, I recommend a small thin book that suggests some powerful ways each of us can become powerful influences to improve our government: Gardens of Democracy by Liu and Hanauer

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Wow! What an indictment of your conservative "friends". Do you actually have any real friends who are conservative, or do you use the term tongue-in-cheek.

"When I read the Bible, I notice that the most talked about subject is charity and helping the poor. (By far) But my conservative friends seem to h**e the poor, as though they have not right to exist. Certainly they don't deserve food or medical care or the right to v**e."

Let me ask you this: How exactly do you define charity? This is one of the greatest divides the two major political parties have. The left sees charity as stealing from the person who has something in order to give it to the poorer one. The one "giving" it to the poor didn't own it to give. The victim of the theft was the owner of the gift. The thief was merely a thief - no real charity happened.

What do you see as "helping a poor person"? You might say that he deserves welfare. To an extent I agree ........ if he is down on his luck, he needs a helping hand. But if you give him welfare indefinitely, what are you actually DOING to him? You are enabling sloth and laziness and he is no better prepared to help himself than he was in the beginning. Eventually he comes to see it as his "right". Conservatives believe in giving a helping hand, and most do so without government demanding it. Conservatives are not big on advertising their generosity. Their method is NOT to get on TV and beg for donations. Some of the biggest generosity in the nation comes from quiet and unheralded generous conservatives.

The political left has lost all contact with true generosity. Generosity comes from the heart. I have never seen ANYTHING resembling generosity come from government, have you? Government has no heart and government has no conscience. But the left wants tax dollars to provide their generosity, not their own dollars. Now their own tax dollars could honestly be called "generosity", but generosity by virtue of stealing from others is hardly "generosity" - it is plain theft.

So you are of the mind that forced birth is ok, and if the infant ends up in a dumpster that's ok too?
There are many girls, not women, that end up pregnant because they get pressured into having sex so they don't loose that dreamy Then as soon as they say they are pregnant that dreamy boy runs. So, they can't talk to the parents because they feel that won't go well. And your feeling is she HAS to have that baby. What happened to that dreamy boy? He gets to go on with his life. Afterall it must have been the girls fault right?

I will agree with you that you and I have MAJOR differences in philosophies and we probably, in all honesty, always have and always will. It is not that I do not have respect for your opinions. As I pointed out to another poster recently we are all as unique and different from one another as one snowflake is to another. While I realize part of the problem is how "I" and perhaps "others" sometimes receive statements made by you, I also know what a knowledgeable and articulate individual you are and have always admired that about you. However, it sometimes feels, as it did last evening on open OPP, as if the intent of your choice of words, whether with conscious intent or not, short of being derisive, managed to be condescending. I do not always respond with my best foot forward, a point I will readily acknowledge. I guess it should just be chalked up -- for both of us -- a lesson that we are all human.

Thoughts for you. In the time of the bible and right up to present, unwanted babies were left out to die of exposure or eaten by wild animals. Read the story of Romulas and Remas. Left out for the wolves. And Moses got lucky. Really a baby floating down river in a sinking reed basket.
So you are against a******n. Have you ever seen pictures of unwanted babies? I have. I'd much rather the child had been aborted than tortured to death. I read about one baby girl the was put in a frying pan and fried. New borns in dumpsters.
I don't like a******n either, but if it is done in the first three months, when most are done, it is at that point about an inch long and looks like a polywog. No heat beat yet. No nerve endings to feel anything. Yes, some are done later in the pregnancy but then only because something has gone wrong. My cousin had one at seven months. Her son had died and was starting to decompose. Poisoning her. They took him all in one piece and there was a funeral.