I think the US Gov learned from a certain infamous propagandist out of the middle east. They killed him and he keeps inspiring people even in death because they didn't destroy is reputation if anything they enhanced it. Its better to publicly tear someone down while they're around then do them in and let them inspire people.
Welcome one and all to The Great Abortion Discussion of 2016. Everyone get comfortable and make sure you leave your keys in the bowl by the door. Aaaand...go.
Big sale on at Canadian Tire. http://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/maximum-stainless-steel-wet-dry-vacuum-30-l-0540252p.html#srp
Let me show my ignorance real quick here: What are the current guidelines for abortion? Assuming that the pregnancy is viable and appears healthy, is it legal for women to have abortions beyond the time at which live premature birth could realistically occur? I am very much pro choice and believe that if it turns out the mother can't take a baby to term or the baby is in some way impaired or not going to make it that an abortion is obviously the best outcome; I feel the same way if early on in the pregnancy the mother-to-be doesn't want it, can't afford it, etc. I have read that 24 weeks is the demarcation point where abortions can't be performed after that point in 41 states, what is the limit in the remaining 9 states?
I'll do my best to break it down between countries - US and Canada are vastly different in their legislation on this subject. Also, an important thing to remember is that the ability to access abortion and reproductive services is already greatly reduced. For those of you who think, "Oh, they'll never reverse Roe vs. Wade," it might not really matter if they do. Texas, for example, legislated a foolish loophole in 2011 demanding that all abortions be done exclusively in hospitals. Most abortion services are provided at clinics, so right now there are only four places in the entire state of Texas where the procedure can be done. For those of you aware of how huge Texas is, do the math on four offices serving the entire female population of the state, and you'll have an idea of how impractical it can be. I also want to stress: it isn't just abortions. People have the Typical Woman in mind when they think of an abortion ("She selfishly doesn't want to carry a baby to term," or "The fetus is unhealthy," or, "The mother's life is at risk." These seem to be the only conditions people think of.) However, the clinics also provide all the periphery services, too. If you miscarry and need a D&C, it's often those same doctors. Or if the baby is dying and you want to immediately have a surgery to end the pregnancy, rather than carry it for weeks and give birth, it's also that clinic. So when you restrict access you're restricting EVERYTHING associated with women's reproductive health. In Canada - Canada is the only country in the world that has no federal legislation governing the practice. Technically speaking, one could have an abortion a day before their due date here, with no restrictions. Practically speaking it would never happen. The way the lack of legislation works is exactly as it should: each case is left up to the woman and her doctor to act as they see fit. - Each province has laws restricting an abortion, and they vary. - Access varies hugely. Zero providers in Northern Ontario, the territories and Prince Edward Island. Most clinics are concentrated in city centres, and most provinces do not cover the cost. Quebec is the exception, as always. In America - The states determine the criteria that a woman can seek the service. In North Dakota, for example, the service is limited to the first six weeks of gestation. Some states cap it at six weeks, two months, but most cap it somewhere between 22-28 weeks. - A loophole many states are using right now to severely limit access is to legislate that all doctors performing abortions must have admitting privileges to a hospital. It's a Catch-22, because most hospitals don't want the circus that abortions bring with them, so it cuts off the pool of medical labour a clinic can draw from. Similarly, laws demanding that the buildings housing clinics meet the criteria of the construction codes that hospitals must abide by do the same thing and are the reason why over 30 clinics in the state of Texas shut down in 2011 alone. It should also be noted that the push to restrict access is not coming from the medical community OR the state legislature. The purpose of restrictive laws are always ostensibly touted to be, "To protect the public," but are almost exclusively from the religious right. Most medical providers strongly dislike the restrictive laws, and virtually all courts that hear such cases side with the doctors; restriction of access endangers the lives of women and children far more than accessibility to safe, legal abortions does. Here's an interesting article on US access: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...153e466a02d_story.html?utm_term=.ce0c1b7c50b9 How many people seek this service? In Canada: - Somewhere between 80-100k/year. The number 300,000/year often gets thrown around, but that number includes the D&C procedures and miscarriages. It obfuscates the truth of what's happening. - Almost all are done prior to 16 weeks. Those that go beyond that number are usually the most tragic cases. - Depending on the census you use, yearly women access this service at a rate of 11.6-14.7/1000 (women 15-44) So roughly 15 out of every 1000 women will need this service each year. In the US - In 2012 the abortion/childbearing woman ratio was 13.2/1000 women, so about the exact same range as Canada. - The rate has been decreasing substantially in the last few years, reaching an historic low in 2012. This is due to the clamp down on accessibility. - As in Canada, over 90% were prior to 16 weeks gestation. The numbers essentially work out to about 20% of all live births. So for every 1000 pregnancies there were 200 procedures sought. If that doesn't illustrate how necessary access to it is, maybe this will: Romania severely restricted access in the 60s with the implementation of Decree 770. It made obtaining an abortion almost impossible, unless you were very wealthy. After it came into effect, the maternal mortality rate spiked massively. Romania in this time saw a female mortality rate up to 10x higher than neighboring countries, and ultimately stopped reporting the rate to the UN. The fallout of this, aside from the thousands of women who died while accessing illegal abortion procedures, is that the country now has an inflated generation that will not be supported as they retire. The children born in this time were mostly born to poor families, and when reproductive services resumed in the 70s, the subsequent generation is much smaller with a corresponding tax base. What that country will do when the Decree 770 generation tries to retire is anyone's guess. So yeah. I know this is long, and it's only skimmed the surface. What I'm interested in stressing is this: do not think that overturning Roe vs. Wade is the only threat. The services provided are already gravely endangered, specifically in the States. Also, please don't fall into the judgemental attitude of, "I only think X women should be able to obtain one, and only under Y circumstances." It presumes that women and doctors, left to their own devices, would not act safely or ethically. I can assure you, they will, and if you find yourself as a woman suddenly needing the service, a bunch of interference from the government is the very last thing you need.
Tap-Dancing: the headline. I wonder how many more horrific and similar incidents I'll read about in the next few weeks where the response will be "Nothing bad whatsoever is happening, move along."
Two questions: - What is a sexual emergency? - Will the answer serve as a pickup line in a non-rape situation? OK, three questions. Are there sexual emergency rooms?
I forgot to address this, but there are nine states that do not legislate any guidelines about the gestational limit on an abortion procedure. Personally, I believe this is 100% the way to go, and here's why: no doctor in his right mind is ever going to grant the procedure if the status of the fetus/baby is murky. Let's imagine for a moment a country with absolutely zero restrictions whatsoever, and let's also imagine cost is no factor. A woman in that country at 8 months gestation decides, "Nope, I changed my mind." She might be 100% for the idea of seeking a very late term abortion; realistically she will NEVER find a doctor to perform that procedure. The same way the ethics of heart surgery don't need to be enshrined in legislation for the practice to remain safe, I don't think abortion has a place there, either. The whole, "No abortions after X number of weeks unless the mother/baby are at grave risk," is redundant and/or a strawman argument. Virtually no woman has ever sought a late second trimester abortion or early third trimester abortion without some kind of catastrophe unfolding. Without any legislation whatsoever, these kinds of abortions/terminations only really occur in the gravest of circumstances. So there's no need to legislate away the selfish bitch who decides to pull the plug six months in. Again, my opinion only, but late term abortions should be THE most protected and easily accessed ones, because they are 100% of the time the situations where the fetus is discovered to not be viable, or the mother is near death. The alternative right now that most women face when this happens is one of two things: - They carry the pregnancy until their body naturally terminates the pregnancy. When this happens, she will go through all the motions of labour and delivery, including a vaginal birth. - They carry the pregnancy until their lives are in acute danger, at which point an emergency surgery is performed. This is obviously the riskiest option, because it requires her to survive both the crisis and the surgery. I will also stand corrected on this, but I believe as I type this there are only three doctors in all of America who will terminate a pregnancy in its third trimester. Yes, three individual physicians in the entire country. Also, I think they're all in their late 60s/early 70s, so when they retire I guess that's it. How fucking terrifying is that? God forbid your pregnancy is discovered to be non-viable seven months in. You must fly to their state, pay tens of thousands of dollars for the procedure/trip/stay, and then you have to endure the procedure. So, yeah. Not all states legislate a timeline and I think that's the wisest thing to do.
Before I get into all the abortion stuff, you do realize, right, that rape is not a crime reserved for brown people and immigrants? And that there are plenty of cases that are dismissed, in both of our countries, where white men are raping white women and somewhere along the system - from the police it initially gets reported to to the judge - the accusations get tossed out because there wasn't enough proof that they didn't say no or do enough to stop it? And that when those cases get big enough there are tons and tons of people of all races and levels of citizenship who think that's perfectly fair - or at the very least, sucks a lot but is reasonable - including a good amount of people on this board? I have mixed feelings when it comes to issues with immigration/refugees and concerns about terrorism, but this concerntrolling about immigrants and rape drives me nuts, especially when it so often comes from the same people who casually dismiss the problems we have with rape in our own country from our own people. If you bristle at the notion that American women fear that rape is inevitable and are conditioned to be at least a little suspicious that male strangers are rapists unless proven otherwise because Not All Men and But That's Sexist Too maybe apply that line of thinking to that other population of people too before forming your opinions about immigration based on the fact that sometimes Middle Eastern people rape. Spoiler: Abortion law discussion got a lil long The most straight-forward answer in terms of limits is that the cut-off point is supposed to be 24 weeks across the country, which is based on viability. But, when I was working at PP, there were only a handful of providers that went up to 24 weeks - a few in NYC, a few in California, one in DC, one in Austin (believe it or not, although that closed before I left), and I think there was one or two in Chicago that we referred to. For most of the states, the available providers would only go up to 12, 14, 18, or 20 weeks. This is all for "elective abortion," i.e no questions asked, you can just get one if you want one, doesn't have to be a scary and/or sob story. Anything after 24 weeks it's because of serious medical issues for the fetus or mother, or it's the procedure for a miscarriage (which is the same thing as the procedure for an abortion so it gets lumped in). I think there are a couple of states where technically, legally, if they really really wanted to take a stand about it and got enough medical professionals to sign off on it their laws are written so that if someone did an abortion past that point for reasons other than serious medical issues it would be legal. But that doesn't happen. Either literally doesn't, or statistically low enough that it basically doesn't happen. Like maybe it happened once since Roe V Wade. Yeah, the not straight-forward answer to Oden's question is that even with the legal limits being what they are, with state-by-state restrictions being taken into account those federally legal rights are basically meaningless, and some states have basically effectively reversed legal access to abortion altogether. For the first half of the year, there were 445 new restrictions proposed with 46 passing in 17 states. I know there are people who think that even if abortion went to being a state issue that it would still basically be legal, but if you pay attention at all it's pretty obvious that it would not be an option in every red state. But, the Texas bill you're referring to isn't quite right. It was the other kind of restrictions that you talked about elsewhere, where abortion providers needed to have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of them and meet the same building codes as a hospital (things like having halls and doorways wide enough to get stretchers and what not through, even though that isn't a thing that needs to happen in abortion clinics). And, it was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court this summer with an incredible dissent by RBG! However, over half of the providers in the state had closed due to the law passing before it got to SCOTUS, and it's unlikely that that many of them will be able to reopen, so the law was still pretty successful in leaving only 19 providers open, most of which are in the cities. The ND law was overturned too, but one thing I want to mention is that whenever we're talking about time limits, these numbers are from the first day of the woman's last period not, like, 6 weeks after she finds out she's pregnant or even 6 weeks after the pregnancy actually starts. So an abortion can't even be done before 4 or 5 weeks since they need to be able to take an accurate pregnancy test and have something show up on the ultrasound so they can date it. So a law like the ND one sounds bad as is, but is actually effectively making abortion illegal in the state. (Except for, I guess, the few lucky women who happen to take a pregnancy test at just the right time, live near the one single abortion provider in the state, and are able to get an appointment within that week where it's legal that also allows for the 24 hour waiting period before they can actually go to have it done.) This is something that politicians rely on a lot when it comes to abortion laws, where on the surface it might not seem THAT bad for the vast majority of the population who aren't in the know about these things and aren't going to bother to look into it themselves, but would often be the same people who would get upset if they just came right out and said they were trying to make abortion as illegal as possible, or restrict it so much that it is essentially no longer an option for solely political reasons. Like those hospital laws, for example. I mentioned this in my Mississippi abortion access post but it's worth mentioning again, because those are the kinds of laws that they've most successfully managed to pull off the "it's not that we want to limit abortion, we just want to protect women" line of bullshit. First of all, since they have that geographical limit for where the hospital can be, that automatically shuts down tons of clinics, especially in a state like Texas or anywhere else that's mostly rural and the PP or other abortion provider may be the only healthcare provider within that area at all, let alone having any hospitals nearby. Then, even if they are near a hospital, they usually don't qualify for those privileges. Part of it is that hospitals don't want to deal with the political mess of abortion, part of it is that a lot of hospitals are religiously-affiliated and can sometimes refuse to provide abortion services based on that, but a lot of it has to do with money. Part of the deal with getting these admitting privileges is that the provider needs to send a certain amount of patients to the hospital per year for it to be worth their time financially, and abortion providers pretty much never meet that because it's that safe and complications are so rare. It's also a really expensive process, so if they're legally required to apply for those privileges knowing that they won't qualify for them, that could run them into the ground. Same goes for the renovations for medically unnecessary building requirements, which might pretty much mean a center needs to flatten their building and start over. This is a tangent, but a related one, but it's things like this that piss me off about the whole "Trump wants women to be punished for having an abortion" line, not only because they do the thing that so often happens with Hillary where they're just leading you to believe he said that off the cuff about women today under the laws we have now but isn't quite so terrible when taken in context, but because that's a line they didn't even have to spin when being forthcoming about it. Same goes with what he was saying during the debate - it's not like this rhetoric is new or unique to Trump. I've always thought that the reason Republican politicians hate Trump is that he's blowing their cover by accidentally telling the truth, because he's not a politician who knows how to mince words and code his language and manipulate the conversation, so he keeps blurting out these platforms and policies and reasonings they've been playing with all along but have been able to hide because they know it sounds bad when put so bluntly. (And the same goes for his supporters, who don't realize so many of the things they love about Trump are already in play because it's been all politics and not just "telling it like it is.") Stop saying Trump wants to punish women for having an abortion [if they were made illegal] and change the conversation to this is actually what the whole anti-choice Republican platform has been wanting all along. The fact that all these Republican politicians - especially Pence - now get to clutch their pearls and distance themselves from the bumbling idiot who surely can't actually represent the GOP and say "Oh no we would never punish women for wanting an abortion" makes me fucking sick. And they've been getting to do that for race and immigration and all other kinds of issues this whole time too. Anyway. While I'm sure this is part of it, to look at it from a positive angle, the women's health community is seeing it more as aligning with the lower pregnancy rates in general, especially with teenagers, which they attribute to higher access to birth control and sex education, and the increase of popularity of longterm BC methods like the IUD. There are 4 of them, at least who are open about it, and yes they're all super old. There used to be 5, but Dr George Tiller was murdered in 2009. It should also be noted that, even in these medically-necessary late term abortions, that "partial birth abortion" and the language that's used around it is both not a thing and illegal. So not only is a lot of the rhetoric that's flung around lumping in medically-necessary late term abortions and later term elective abortions with the same women who are aborting an embryo the size of your thumbnail, but it's completely inaccurate. What actually happens during an abortion freaks and grosses me out just like every single thing that happens in a doctor's office or hospital freaks and grosses me out, but it's never as goddamn ghoulish as these people would have you believe. (Oh and by the way, ripping the baby from the womb the day before it's supposed to be delivered is called a C-section, not an abortion.) For all of the above: I double-checked basically everything, but it's possible things are a little off because laws and what not have changed since I left PP a little less than two years ago and have not been as immersed in this kind of news. When it comes to updates and stats and laws, the Guttmacher Institute is a good source if anyone's interested. We also used the CDC. Discussion of laws aside, I did want to speak to why it's such an important issue for me. It's very unlikely that I'll ever need an abortion because I have an IUD and plan on replacing that thing every 6 years until I hit menopause, so it's not particularly a personal issue no matter how grateful I am that if there was ever a terrible stroke of luck I'd have that as an option. But if there's one thing that unites all of my political beliefs, it's that I'm not voting just for me. I'm voting for the direction of the country and everyone in it, and I try to consider what will do the most good for the most number of people. And the thing that I don't like about the anti-choice platform is that it so fails to think outside these people's individual bubbles, and they don't take the time to stop and think about how maybe there are people in this country who don't have the exact same life, and lifestyle, and beliefs, and perspectives, and points of view. They don't stop to think about the consequences they're having on other people's lives, and the lives of the kids once they're born, and on the economy, and all the other far-reaching effects of abortion access or restriction. The line of thinking stops at "well I would never get one because I could just do this if I got pregnant" and that's that. (Of course, that's not taking into consideration all of the people who throw all of that right out the window the minute they get pregnant and don't want to be.) So if a politician is fighting on a platform of restricting abortion access, to me that for one thing reflects a myopic world view that I don't want applied to the rest of politics. (For whatever it's worth, this is also why I veer off the liberal beaten path when it comes to guns. It's easy to support tons of gun control when I don't give a shit about them and don't personally feel protected in their presence and have always lived where the police were just a few minutes away, but I'm also going to believe - up to a point - why they're necessary in people's lives far different from my own.) I also consider restricting access to abortion as saying that women - real inarguably alive sentient women - have less rights than a cluster of cells that would cease to exist without that woman incubating it, and I think that's ridiculously fucked up and doesn't bode well for how that politician is going to legislate anything else having to do with women. Plus, I believe that when you drill down to the abortion issue at its core, it's really just an issue of punishing women for having non-procreative sex, and I don't want that kind of attitude affecting politics either. So, yes, I care about reproductive rights specifically, but it's such a big issue for me because it's like this handy shortcut for analyzing how a politician is going to behave and legislate in office across the board. It's similar to how I care about gay rights, but prior to last year immediately distrusted politicians running on an anti-gay marriage platform because it showed me that they did not at all respect the separation of church and state (because I haven't seen any anti-gay opinion boil down to anything other than Because God), which is something that's very important to me.
What I don't like is we have men deciding what women's reproductive rights are. That is happening in the catholic church, many other religions and this country. Why don't we allow women as a collective to decide policy and ethics on this topic? Do we assume women can't figure this out or do we allow the powers that be who are predominately men and who are physically unaffected by these topics, to make policies? I do see some chauvinism here. Protect women from themselves, let men protect the herd. When it comes to women's reproductive rights, I will not have an opinion and if I am forced to have one I will agree with what the majority of women decide.
Sorry, but this is pedophilia. A 20 year old male having sex with a 10 year old boy is pedophilia. There is no argument about that, there is no discussion. It is pedophilia. This is not an adult male raping an adult woman, this is a man raping a child. Trying to draw some parallel to how a different society treats unwanted sexual relations between two adults is some weird form of cultural relativism that is really fucked up. So anyway, a society that determines they do not have enough evidence because they aren't sure the boy said no strong enough, is a society of complete moral bankruptcy. There shouldn't be any ambiguity about whether or not there was a crime, if the argument is that he may or may not have said no strongly enough. A society which opens the flood gates to another culture that accepts pedophilia as common practice (amongst other barbaric behaviors) is a society heading towards their own peril. It would seem the voters in Europe understand this and have had enough. The politicians responsible for this shockingly naive behavior are going to be out a job soon enough; while their societies look for a way to cope with the influx of people, shut their borders, and somehow try to assimilate a group of people who have shown no desire to take part in their new home's cultural norms.
...Not sure how you're interpreting that as me being totally cool with pedophilia, but okay replace every time I said "rape" with pedophilia and it's all still the same. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news here, but people rape children in the U.S too. The "society of complete moral bankruptcy" you're referring to there is Austria when it comes to mishandling rape/pedophilia cases, and that's also perfectly applicable to the U.S too. (Here's just one example that circulated widely last year.) "I hate this group of people and don't want to let them in because they're rapists/murderers/pedophiles etc" has been an argument used toward basically every single immigrant group in our history, along with arguments for keeping black people as slaves or legally second-class citizens. And with every single one of those groups there were enough people raping and murdering to build up a case for it, because people are the fucking worst everywhere. Should we not let in immigrants from Africa and Asia too? There's some really fucked up shit going on in a lot of those countries when it comes to rape and murder and pedophilia and women's rights and gay rights, but once you start saying you don't think we should be letting in any more black people or Asians suddenly things feel uncomfortable.
I'm pretty sure I didn't accuse you of being cool with pedophilia. I read it as you drawing parallels between pedophilia and rape between two adults, as well as weaving in treatment of the browns in some odd moral relativism argument. Which is wrong. Again, your new example is not a good one either: California is California, they have problems....this was an example of a miscarriage of justice for the 3 year old in question, but at least they convicted the cocksucker. Austria couldn't even pull that off. Separately, you touched on the shitty things that go on around the world and how we paint all of the potential newcomers with that brush. You are right, we do, or at least I do. Again, though, you are going down the relativism trail in drawing a parallel to slavery with how we view the influx of Southwest Asians and North Africans(I won't call them Syrians because I doubt half of them are actually from Syria). I don't live in a big city surrounded by liberally-minded people. Call me jaded but I've spent more than a decade out on the edge of this empire where we are bringing "democracy and freedom" to the rest of the world. I have spent plenty of time in places of high-minded liberalism and don't begrudge anyone for feeling the way they do but I can tell you from experience that your perception of the world is incongruent with reality. It really boggles my mind that the same people who fervently fight for women's rights and equality are fighting "Islamophobia." That's probably a different discussion for a different day. Here's reality though; you won't go to Iraq, you won't to Afghanistan, you won't go to East Africa to see life out there. You won't understand that pedophilia, mistreatment of women (putting it lightly), mistreatment of homosexuals (again, lightly) is the norm. It is not the exception to the rule performed by a small minority of the people of these countries. The people who are here in America from these places (people I call friends, people I have helped with the immigration process) are the best and brightest from these regions. They do not represent the population of their homeland at large. Banning immigration isn't the answer, banning the influx of refugees is the right answer. With immigration, in theory, we are getting people who come here to better themselves for educational purposes or starting businesses. With refugees, you have no idea what you are getting. If we continue to allow people from the shitty parts of this planet to just give up and run away from their countries then nothing will ever get better. We will always have this problem. These people need to stand and fight for what they believe in and make their countries some place they want to live. Just like we can't police the entire world any longer, we cannot care for everyone; they need to do for themselves.
Wait, are you saying ban refugees entirely? Or are you saying ban Muslim refugees? Our country has a long history of accepting refugees from all over the world and they have a long history of contributing to our society. In fact, a Vietnamese refugee just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Does that count as contributing? What about all the food processing Somalian refugees do? They process a helluva lot of beef and live and work in the heartland of America without doing enough for those communities to say get the fuck out. Minus the crazy racists who wanted to blow them up, there don't seem to be many problems. I hate to go all Godwin's law on you, but what about WWII. In hindsight should we have accepted more Jewish refugees? Or was it a good thing that we didn't so they could just try and stay to make things better for themselves?
I'm having trouble following most of this so I can't really respond to it, and I am just so diametrically opposed ideologically to the last four sentences - especially with half of my family being Jewish and the other half being here because of the one single person who managed to flee Stalin - that I doubt it would be worth a discussion, but I'll say this and just hope it at least somewhat touches on what you're talking about: I've been getting the impression from the whole conversation about this issue (not just on this board) that the perception of the liberal stance on it is that it's bad to hate all of these kinds of crimes in these countries because the people who are committing them aren't white. I'm sure there are people out there who are, but in general people aren't unaware of these issues or waving them away or excusing them. The issue is that condemning an entire group of people based on their worst instead of treating them as individuals is pretty much the definition of racism and bigotry. I think there are a lot of fair conversations to be had about immigration and the refugee crisis, and I'm not going to be one of those people that's going to accuse every person who's at all opposed to anything but completely open borders as being racist but, yeah, that line of thinking in particular is. Then again, I live in the most diverse and immigrant-filled city in the world and spend all of my time living in this nightmare scenario of being neighbors with undocumented and unvetted immigrants but am doing just fine. I go to my little neighborhood park and am the one white person surrounded by women in burqas and Orthodox Jewish families and black people speaking patois, and I feel infinitely more comfortable there than when I was in New Hampshire for a weekend and saw nothing but white people, so I may not be the best person for empathizing with those kinds of fears.
I'm unsurprised that I'm now being indirectly called a racist (even though people from the ME are white) and a bigot. It's cool, I've made peace with it, this is how we have adult conversations in 2016 in America....name calling and referring to the Nazis. To answer both of you with one reply relative to refugees, I will say this: Not specific to Muslims but without a plan to address a massive influx of people from a culture that does not wish to integrate to their surroundings, but would prefer that their surrounding bend to their will, then the answer is yes. Stop it until you can figure it out. Doing something without a plan, without an understanding of the ramifications of the act is foolish. Look at George W. Bush if you want to see what happens when you act without a plan. Elsewhere, Europe is in midst of trying to figure out the refugee problem after they have already committed themselves to an unmanageable situation. Again, something else to consider, if you favor bringing these people to this country, don't you at least expect them to follow the rules of this country? The niqab for instance, do you think the women wearing niqabs around America ALL choose that for themselves? If you believe in women's rights and equality, how can you accept that? Here I go with ugly truth for you again: You want to draw parallels to the Jews but won't accept that you are comparing apples to oranges. Jews don't have schools where they teach only the Torah, program children to believe that killing in the name of their sky wizard is just, and send them off in suicide vests. If they did, the Greatest Generation would have told them to fuck off.......but there it is: We are proving in generations since not to be great. Another dose of reality for you: there has been a lot of suffering and death in the ME. Moving forward, there is going to be a lot more death and suffering. We can't take them all in, it won't happen. They might as well make their death mean something and fight to make their world a better place for future generations. Something else to consider if we are going to start talking about the Nazis, WWII, etc. The UN is here for a reason now, it is not our fucking problem to babysit the entire fucking planet. Refugee crisis? The UN is supposed to be the front line on this, you know where the second line should be? Regional nations in the affected area doing their part but I bet you will find that most of them aren't exactly pulling their own weight or worse, causing the problem to begin with (I won't even start on how much of this I think we actually own - another conversation all of it's own). From a liberal's perspective, what is the answer to this problem? If as you claim you don't accept the violence and mistreatment of women, homosexuals, etc. how do you balance the want to take in refugees with these cultural differences and real threat to the current level of tranquility of life in America?
I brought up the Nazis because it's appropriate to do so in reference to refugees. It is one of our country's many failures in hindsight. It's fair to talk about. I'm not saying "don't have a plan; open all the borders!!!" However, it is worth looking at the ramifications of yours as well. Namely that many more more men, women, and children will die senselessly and in unimaginable horror. This will happen with the added benefit of feeding into anti-Muslim rhetoric that is surely a boon for terrorist organizations. Isn't it much easier to paint us as the bad guy when we say, sorry, you're not good enough for our country since you are a Muslim? [I'm saying Muslim as it's obvious you believe that they are a culture who would wish that their surrounding bed to their will] What "rules" of this country are you referring to? Because last I checked it wasn't illegal for a niqab to be worn. Do I think women are choosing that for themselves? Some do, yes. Do I think it would be right to eliminate their freedom to worship in the way they choose based on attire? No. I can accept women's rights and equality by supporting them if they don't want to wear it anymore. I think supporting that is much easier here than in a country with laws that require it. Don't you think? I support a women's right to receive an abortion, but you've never made the argument that I should protest women going to a Catholic church or that they should be kicked out of the country. Why is that? Yes, our country's greatness is proven by our willingness to say, "Sorry, children, you must die because we are too scared of you." I think we all understand that there will be a lot of suffering and death in the ME. Is it unreasonable to wish and lessen that? And just as a matter of strategy, wouldn't it be a good idea to have less children in those schools and more in our own? Seems like an ounce of prevention would be worth a pound of cure. There is no easy solution to the problem. Accepting a reasonable number of refugees would be a good place to start I imagine. Zero is not a reasonable number. And I don't accept the violence and mistreatment of women, homosexuals, etc. Arrest and try them if they break our laws. That seems simple enough. As far as disrupting the level of tranquility of life in America, plenty of Muslim refugees are here already and life remained plenty tranquil. Much more tranquil than it is in Aleppo at any rate. I do find it odd that you can look back at WWII where the lesson most clearly was "holy shit, we fucked up because we were scared of Jewish people," and not have it give you much pause at all in regard to this.
From my liberal perspective, there is no threat. Every immigrant group in the history of this country has eventually assimilated to mainstream US culture, without exception. The most (in)famous organization of organized crime in the US, the American Mafia, was founded by Italian and Sicilian immigrants, and even during the peak of its influence the country didn't collapse into anarchy. So I just don't see what possible threat there is. Sure, there are going to be bad apples, but they're not going to bring anything into this country that we don't already have. You mentioned niqabs. So what? For every American woman who's coerced into wearing one there are probably 1000 woman who are coerced into staying in abusive relationships. Singling out a piece of clothing as problematic seems arbitrary. And if my interactions with the Somali community are any indication, for every voice preaching the conservation of the old ways there was a voice calling for the discarding of them an embrace of a more modern way of thinking. Like I just said, if they stay in this country, our culture will win in the end, guaranteed.
Yeah, no one's talking about laying back and hoping our country turns into Saudi Arabia, and I think conflating "letting some refugees come here while they're fleeing warfare" and "it'll only be a matter of days before Sharia Law is the lay of the land" is the problem here. There are, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants living in NYC and somehow they're preserving parts of their culture like their dress, food, religion, and music and even conservative customs like not drinking alcohol without me feeling any pressure to conform to their ways of life rather than the other way around. I'm also not hearing of too many honor killings and stonings and dragging gays out of the Stonewall Inn to throw them off buildings. You're talking like there won't be consequences if they commit crimes while they're here. That's obviously not the case.
I had a conversation with my Mother-In-Law over dinner the other day on essentially this very thing. While shes a lovely women and not intentionally a racist, she is a little shall i say 'old fashioned' in her thoughts and takes pretty much anything she reads or hears as gospel (and she reads/watches a lot of trash) and our media do make a big deal about the 'refugee crisis'. She'd been on a big rant about how all these refugees from the ME would affect the Australian way of life and before long they'd take over and impose Sharia Law. So i asked her what she thought off the top of her head the current percentage of Muslims is in Australia, she thought about it for a few seconds and blurted out 20%. According to the latest census results we have its actually 2.5% (and the fastest growing religion here is actually Hinduism if you discount the growth of people moving to not affiliating with any religion). Its even lower in the US according to this, only 1%: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/06/a-new-estimate-of-the-u-s-muslim-population/). She was shocked, and if the figures i cited hadn't come directly from our government census i think she wouldn't have believed them. A population of people that small is never going to inflict their will on the rest of a western society. Sure they'll likely keep some of their own conservative customs in their own homes, as every culture generally does, but the vast majority aren't out there trying to convert the non-believers by force. They just want to live in a place where they aren't likely to get fucking shelled, or beheaded or set on fire by whoever the current local asshole is.... and eventually their kids, or their kids kids will start to drop some of those customs (one of the most Aussie guys i know is a 4th generation Muslim who is now an Atheist, sounds more Aussie than i do and loves himself a big fat Roast Pork roll with slatherings of gravy and a big pile of crackling) The practicing Muslims i do know from work are all great people, they come to the pub for lunches like everyone else on a Friday. They just have a water/soft drink and stick to food their religion allows, there's no judging, although one guy commented the other day that the Pork Belly id ordered smelled fucking amazing (it was). There's always some bad eggs in any group. I know more white dickheads with offensive stupid beliefs than i do brown people.