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by nantes 3450 days ago
Apologies in advance for cherry-picking points to respond to, but ...

> * Age 26 under the parents health care plan, fine, but damnit kid, get a job. Do something with yourself.

I don't think you can simply equate having a job to "do[ing] something with yourself". Neither can you equate not having a job to not "do[ing] something with yourself". As always, situations (especially in the macro) are complex and subtle and solutions can't be boiled down to a simple directive.

Adults < 26 are often not the ones responsible for not being able to obtain a job. Yes, they may have chosen a field of study that's not in demand (even though many were probably told to "do what you love"), but they've also likely had very little opportunity to impact things like domestic economic policy, employment trends, or even employers not recognizing shifts in demographically driven skill-sets.

> * Birth Control, yes and no. We should be able to opt out paying for it, especially if it goes against my religion and frankly it does, but I won't stop others from opting in and paying for it.

In a system where much (most?) health insurance is provided as an employer paid benefit, why should my employer get to decide whether I'm opted in or out of a particular thing based on religion?

Ideally (from my point of view), religion plays zero part in health care. What is wrong with a benefit being available to all and only used by those that want to use it? Is this so different from the "in the privacy of my own bedroom" argument?

1 comments

Religion plays a part in birth control, especially for the forms of control that kill after inception. Think on it.
Why should religious belief get any privileged position in this matter?
If you're running over someone's conscience on a matter involving human life and death, why do you care that their conscience is based on religion?

Personally, if someone is morally opposed to what they perceive as killing, I don't care if their morals are based on religion, atheism, or just squeamishness. Preserve their moral objection to killing. It's too valuable to society for us to trample on it.

> Preserve their moral objection to killing. It's too valuable to society for us to trample on it.

I can't opt-out of supporting the military with my taxes - how is this any different?

I am not religious in any reasonable sense of the word. What possible reason can you give that your religion should have any sort of say in what care is available to me or, much more importantly, my children?

And, while you're at it, please answer my original question rather than throwing out strawman arguments.

> why should my employer get to decide whether I'm opted in or out of a particular thing based on religion?

I am also not religious (and generally agnostic about the so-called supernatural), but it seems pretty obvious to me why religious beliefs play a major role in the debate over abortion. It all comes down to my favorite subject: the Explanatory Gap.

Setting aside arguments that abortion is permissible even if the fetus has a right to life (e.g. Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"), for many people the crux of the matter is whether or not a fetus is a living human being. The problem is that current science cannot tell us exactly when a clump of cells becomes conscious; we don't fully understand consciousness, so assigning it to a given object can be contentious. We simply have no good way of knowing when there is a person "in there", so to speak.

Since science cannot answer this question, religion has filled the void with beliefs about when someone's life actually begins. If we understood consciousness and could detect when it "starts", I suspect this debate would be much less dramatic.

>I suspect this debate would be much less dramatic.

Not when pro life means human life begins at conception.