I had a long discussion with a highly religious conservative and he simply denied that I was conservative because I wasn’t a “good Christian” like he was.

Of course, my first response was “fuck you” because that’s warranted, but he’s right, I am not a religious conservative, I am a political conservative, mostly anyhow, and a lot of people, especially on the far religious right, don’t understand the difference.

So let’s do some exploring.

This really came up over a discussion on abortion, where I said I was firmly pro-choice and he said that meant I couldn’t be a conservative at all. Again, there goes the “fuck you” response. When I stopped being a Christian, all of the views that I had that were only based on religious belief, all of those got re-evaluated in light of a non-religious view of the world. “God says it’s bad” evaporated since I no longer believed that any god was real. I had to look at things from a purely secular, non-religious perspective and I’m sorry, but anti-abortion doesn’t really exist as a worthwhile context in the secular world.

So let me explain what I told him and expand on it because it’s a whole lot easier to do it here than in the moment in an impromptu conversation.

Everyone has a right to their own bodily autonomy. That goes for all rational, real and capable individuals. For those that are none of those things, then others have the legal and ethical responsibility to speak for them. I have friends with a highly autistic daughter. She’s 15 now, but her mental state is somewhere around 4 and always will be so. She will never be a rational adult actor. Welcome to the real world. You don’t have to like it, you just have to deal with the reality.

Then he goes “what if your wife decides to abort a baby that you really want?” Okay… so? Ultimately, it is her body being most directly affected and, let’s be honest, if you can’t have an adult conversation with someone, then you probably shouldn’t  be in a relationship with them and you certainly shouldn’t be sleeping with them.

He didn’t like that much. He liked it even less when I asked him if she could insist that she have a baby that he didn’t want, and force him to pay for its care until it was an adult? That was pretty much where the conversation ended. He doesn’t care about the woman, he only cares about himself. He wants women to be subservient to men and sorry, they’re not.

This is, or course, where things often go sideways for the religious and why I had to rebuild my entire take on abortion. I don’t think I was ever that bad when I was a Christian, although my former church still doesn’t ordain women as clergy, but I don’t remember thinking I was a man so I was in charge, because my imaginary friend says so. I would never have gotten married to someone that I didn’t respect and I would never have “laid down the law” like a lot of the hard-core fundie memes tend to do. My wife and I decided together that we were going to have kids, when we were going to have them, how many we wanted, etc. It was all a mutual decision.

Maybe that explains why the religious divorce rate is so high, because they don’t treat each other like partners. The men, often, treat their wives like property.

There is something else that I want to bring up because personal responsibility is so important to me, as a conservative. In a perfect world, there would be no need for abortion because no one would get pregnant that didn’t want to. Situations wouldn’t change. There would be no birth defects or health issues. Anyone who is using birth control as contraception is an idiot. When I say I’m pro-choice, I mean I’m pro-intelligent-choice.  Actions, at least potentially, has consequences. Birth control fails. Those are realities that any sexually-engaged couple needs to understand and deal with. Keep in mind that any time you engage in sexual activity, you can cause a pregnancy. You need to have a plan in place ahead of time and “we’ll just have an abortion” is not a good plan. Sometimes it is necessary because, as I said, this is not a perfect world, but you can’t just live your life as though you can just throw it away. Acting irresponsibly is not living responsibly and living responsibly ought to be the goal, even though, let’s be honest, we all know it isn’t for most people. That’s why the world is so screwed up.

That’s why we need to accept that abortion needs to be an option, because there are so many dumb, irresponsible people out there. It’s not like adoption is a credible alternative because we can’t find homes for all the unwanted children that we already have. Take care of that problem first, then we’ll talk. That’s why abortion needs to remain an option, at least until we make the world a better place and make people better people.

I don’t think we’re even trying to do that most of the time, which I think is utterly pathetic, but so long as the world we live in is what it is, abortion has to remain on the table, no matter how sad it might make some people. Too bad, so sad, grow up.

’nuff said.