Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Why is choice not an important issue for 'liberal' TV show hosts?

I have been watching "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" online rather than doing my homework. In so doing, I have noticed something very disconcerting. There is a certain amount of admiration for republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Yes, Ron Paul voted against the Patriot Act, yes he opposes the war, yes he opposes government intervention into people's private lives, and yes he says he is a constitutionalist and will fight to maintain the integrity of the American constitution. Liberal guys like Jon Stewart seem to be just eating up Ron Paul's rhetoric.
What they continually fail to mention is that Dr. Paul is strongly anti-choice. He claims that he wants to uphold the constitution and that he wants to keep the government out of private affairs but yet he stops short of considering women to be people. Women do not deserve bodily integrity or bodily privacy. This MAJOR discrepancy continually goes un-noticed. And that is not a first for Colbert and Stewart who love to stir the political stew but don't want to bring gender issues onto the table.

I love both of these shows and am very disappointed by this trend.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

My mother used to always tell me that if a man gave birth, there would never be any debate as to choice. I hate to think of all men as viewing women as property that they can dictate to, but in this instance I'm going to have to agree with my mother. Its my body. My choice. There isn't a man I know who would let anyone tell him what he could or couldn't do with his body. I don't see why women should be viewed any differently.

Anonymous said...

You know that is very scary because I think the liberals or people who watch those shows actually will take into consideration what they are saying and it could sway their vote. Let's just hope that this doesn't happen!

Cortney said...

That is exactly why I felt the need to comment. It just seems as though these guys are heralded as being such champions for the liberal cause and they do seem to do some great deconstructive work. They challenge notions of what consistues 'news' and they make politics interesting for many young people. Still they are upper class white men and that means that they have a good deal of privilege and not a lot of insight into many forms of oppression. In this case: gender oppression. And that is really disappointing precisely because they are so widely viewed and well-regarded.

Anonymous said...

I have a question. I am a woman, and I am not pro-choice. I don't like the term anti-choice, because it implies things I don't believe. Some things are not just either/or. My question is this: How does not supporting abortion equal "You obviously don't think women are people"? Why does disagreement on abortion mean you clearly hate women?

I'm not coming to condemn, so I don't expect condemnation in return. It's just a question I've never had answered.

Cortney said...

The reason that I said that he does not believe women to be people is because his stance is that people's constitutional rights to things like privacy should be protected (I am not a political science major so I don't know all of the logistics on that) but then he goes on to say that he is anti-choice which to me implies that everyone has constitutional rights except women. It is a major fallacy in his logic. He says everyone but then contradicts himself by not including women.

This post was not intended to address all anti-choice persons just him and his politics in particular.

Anonymous said...

Cortney, thank you for your response. I can see where you are coming from with that.