Sunday, May 24, 2020

How can anti-lockdown protesters and anti-abortionists be the same people?

I don't know, and I have no evidence to support it, but I imagine that the intersection between anti-lockdown protesters (who are more interested in opening up their economies and asserting their personal liberties than in protecting the health and lives of the ild and vulnerable) and anti-abortion people (or pro-lifers, as they probably prefer to refer to themselves) is quite a stong one. And I have been trying to figure out how that works.
The pro-life crowd make a virtue out of the sanctity of life at all costs. "Every life is valuable", "respect life", and all that. But the anti-lockdown crowd are making a deliberate decision to put the economy and mitigating a financial recession before the sanctity of life, because it is clear that opening up economies will come at an unspecified cost of lives lost.
If these people are in fact the same people (and to a good extent the seem to be, Donald Trump is just one well-known example), then how do they square this cognitive dissonance with their consciences? The anti-lockdown protests have certainly attracted anti-abortion protesters too, including women dressed as Atwoodian handmaids without any hint of irony.
I'm not the only one to ponder this question. After I posed it to myself, I found other articles asking the same question, with just as few answers. It would be interesting to hear a rationalization of the paradox. You could call it hypocrisy, but I just don't think these people have thought it all through to that extent. The anti-lockdowners are neoconservative libertarian types who are just reflexively responding to what they see as excessive government control; whether the government control is in the interests of saving lives does not come into their calculations at all. Strange.

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