The baby-killer fallacy

It may have been the cap. It was displayed on the shelf when the grandkids came over. I don't remember the provocation exactly, and whatever it was doesn't matter. 

My family hates it when I tell this story, but I'm not blaming him. I'm sitting downstairs in front of the keyboard, when my grandson, age five, comes bounding in and jumps in my lap. That part is wonderful. 

Somehow he sees something--maybe it was the cap, who knows what it was exactly he saw? He doesn't really bother to look at me, so what he delivers is not a lecture but a mantra: "Obama is a baby killer."

He's five years old. He goes to kindergarten in a Christian school, but I honestly cannot believe his teacher would dish that out to a room full of kids. I'm guessing--still do--that one of his little friends passed it along as God's truth. 

If my five-year-old grandson could deliver the goods that simply, it didn't take a genius to know that to some at least, "Obama is a baby killer" was gospel truth.

Some years later, President Trump, who campaigned on tossing Rowe, gets a spectacular (some would say providential) break when three justices require replacement in his only four-year term. He goes to a conservative judicial think tank for potential justices, sails all three through a Republican-majority Congress, and, sure enough, the new Supremes dump Roe like a bad habit. 

Trump is, of course, transactional. Nobody really believes he reads USA bibles he hawks. He's not really pro-life; even evangelicals know he just wants their votes. He just made a deal. "Biden's a baby-killer."

But things don't turn out well. Most Americans--for good or ill--don't believe that abortion law should call an end to "test-tube babies" or force women to carry to term pregnancies that endanger their lives. Kansas says no BY A TON. Ohio says likewise, both of them bright red states. 

Now Trump's got a hot potato (more than one actually). "Listen," he says last week, "the best way around this problem is for states to determine what the law should be." 

Anti-abortionists are either confused or furious. They're now clearly out of the will, and it's a mess, a horrible mess all over. The dog finally caught the car, as they say; and as if it's not bloody enough, the Arizona Supremes vote to hold on to a Civil-War era law that was part of a wild west code written long before Arizona was even a state and aimed, really, at men who wear the pants, rule the roost, whatever. The 1864 law is lots more than antique. It's loony, and even Kerri Lake says so.

So what we've got is a horrible mess, a handsome majority of the American people convinced that getting rid of Row was a bad deal, period. 

Pro-lifers finally won big--and then lost even bigger.

All I'm saying is that if a five-year-old can stop an argument cold with a single sentence--"Obama is a baby-killer," don't trust the line. It's textbook proof of ye olde either/or fallacy; things are rarely either/or.