My Hugeness in Japan, Continued<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Forgot to mention yesterday this Brad DeLong riff on my Rapegate comments. DeLong, an economist from UC Berkeley, says some things that I should probably\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jeremylott\/2012\/08\/my-hugeness-in-japan-continued\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Hugeness in Japan, Continued\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Forgot to mention yesterday this Brad DeLong riff on my Rapegate comments. 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{"id":743,"date":"2012-08-25T13:35:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T20:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jeremylott\/?p=743"},"modified":"2012-08-25T13:35:03","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T20:35:03","slug":"my-hugeness-in-japan-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jeremylott\/2012\/08\/my-hugeness-in-japan-continued\/","title":{"rendered":"My Hugeness in Japan, Continued"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Forgot to mention yesterday this Brad DeLong riff<\/a> on my Rapegate comments. DeLong, an economist from UC Berkeley, says some things that I should probably address.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll set this up as a point-counterpoint to save time. Some readers might detect a whiff of anti-Catholicism in DeLong\u2019s remarks but I\u2019ve decided to turn the other cheek on that score:<\/p>\n

DeLong:<\/strong> \u201c[I]t looks like Todd Akin and Paul Ryan \u2014 and many other Republicans who follow bishops \u2014 really do want to take away condoms and the pill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lott:<\/strong> According to Wikipedia, Todd Akin is a Presbyterian. They have presbyteries, not bishops, but grant for the sake of argument that DeLong meant \u201cfollow\u201d in the sense of \u201clook to,\u201d since Akin\u2019s take on abortion is closer to the the Catholic Church\u2019s position than the PCUSA\u2019s position.<\/p>\n

Question for DeLong: What legislation have Akin and\/or Paul Ryan supported that would make condoms or the pill illegal? You could argue that a personhood amendment would make 4U-486 illegal, but RU-486 isn\u2019t the pill. <\/p>\n

DeLong:<\/strong> \u201cThere is a good \u2014 or at least a not-terrible \u2014 answer [for what to do about children conceived of rape] from the ensoulment-occurs-at-the-moment-of-fertilization perspective. The rapist is guilty. The child-to-be is innocent. The mother-to-be is imposed upon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lott:<\/strong> No serious objections so far.<\/p>\n

DeLong:<\/strong> \u201cThe least-bad answer from the ensoulment-occurs-at-the-moment-of-fertilization perspective\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Lott:<\/strong> OK, stop! DeLong keeps using that ungainly formulation and it offends more than just my literary ear. Ensoulment is not the issue. Humans, most of us would agree, have souls, but there\u2019s no way to know precisely how that works.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Catholic Church has said that human persons deserve legal protection. For an understanding of what a human person is, it has looked to science. Science tells us that when fertilization occurs you have a unique thing that develops into a unique human being. <\/p>\n

Everybody reading this: The thousands of sperm swimming toward the egg, that was not you. The egg on its own was not you either. When the two joined together, that was you<\/em><\/strong>. Where or when the soul belongs in this process is not terribly relevant. But let\u2019s get back to DeLong\u2019s proposal.<\/p>\n

DeLong:<\/strong> \u201cThe least-bad answer\u2026is to say that this is what the government is for: have the public fisc pay the mother-to-be handsomely to bear and if she wishes raise the child.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lott:<\/strong> One could propose alternative means of funding such a system, but OK, not the worst answer.<\/p>\n

DeLong:<\/strong> \u201cBut nobody, literally nobody, who claims to hold to the ensoulment-occurs-at-the-moment-of-fertilization perspective will ever go there\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Lott:<\/strong> Why the hell not? It\u2019s a little technocratic but in a post Roe v. Wade America I could see, say, the Conference of Catholic Bishops backing such a proposal. And \u2014 who knows \u2014 some of those \u201cRepublicans who follow bishops\u201d might even go along.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"