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Why should I need to justify it morally at all? Whose team should I be on if not my own? I didn't create this system, I just refuse to play along with progressives who seem to think I'm obligated to accept the bottom rung in it.
You shouldn't be on a "team", not to the extent that it directs all your actions. You should be trying to do the right thing, whatever this appears to be to your conscience.
I'd care about this more if it made any difference. Staff at a perfectly ordinary suburban high school tried to talk a vulnerable young member of my family down a path that very well could have led to her permanent sterilization and disfigurement. As far as I'm concerned it's moral to eradicate gender ideology even at significant cost to the rest of society.
This is a non sequitur. No one's saying you can't oppose gender ideology. I am saying that you can oppose multiple evil things in multiple direction; that opposing gender ideology needn't entail that you never criticize other, unrelated evils, some of which might be to your right rather than to your left.
No you can't. I get that you are really enamored with this high minded centrist/independent shtick. But electorally it fails 100% of the time, and most people have woken up that. People have a list of priorities, and if their top priority is "Make sure school doesn't start teaching my 6 year old they can choose their gender", and a combination ticket of Hitler/Genghis Khan is anti "Have schools teach kids to sterilize themselves" and they are running against Jesus and Santa Claus who for baffling reasons are pro "Elementary Teachers keep a castration kit in their desk drawer"... well I hate to tell you this but Hitler/Genghis Khan get my vote. And I'll stand by that vote in the concentration camps because they got my 23&me results and saw I had 0.7% Jewish ancestry.
I don't get to pick policies ala cart. Sadly I have to prioritize and pick the candidate that I think has the best chance of achieving success in my top priorities. And these days they are "Keep Democrats from making my life worse like they have the last 30 years".
I feel like I'm not getting through here. I am not talking about what wins elections. I am talking about what is ethical. What is right. We do not live in a perfectly convenient world where doing the right thing will always leave you better off. A Christian will tell you that this is because you must wait until after death for your Reward, an atheist will tell you that this is because the world wasn't actually designed by a benevolent intelligence, but the point remains the same. I never asked you to imagine that President Hitler an VP Khan send you to a concentration camp: that is, again, smuggling your own personal welfare back into it. What 'm saying is: if you have moral principles at all, then surely, surely you recognize that there is some amount or degree of harm inflicted to random strangers that would outweigh the welfare of your child? That, no matter how much you want your child not to be transed, it would be evil of you to put material pursuit of that goal over the lives of ten million people you've never met and never will?
But I'm not even talking about elections, here. I'm talking about criticizing and denouncing evil in your Tribe. Under sufficiently gerrymandered assumptions you might still end up voting for the very people at issue as the lesser evil - but I would like to see some acknowledgement that there is evil here, and that this is a relevant consideration, separate from your personal welfare or even that of your kids.
No.
With that cleared up, if millions could be saved if I let demons devour my child, maybe they should craft an electoral platform to accomplish that same good... without requiring me sacrifice my child! You know, The Lottery was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a manual.
I don't negotiate with hostage takers.
…Are you sure? Would you literally send every human being on Earth to Hell if it meant saving your child, and your child alone? If the answer is yes, do you believe this is a moral position? (I could sympathize with feeling that if push came to shove you couldn't press the button. But I would regard this as a case of my personal affections overwhelming my conscience. I would, in the cold light of day, recognize that I was acting immorally, even if I could not help myself.)
Not with hostage takers, no. If there were some bizarre natural occurrence where my daughter had to be dissected to provide the cure for all mankind, or everyone would die.... maybe. Maybe they'd still have to kill me first.
But if a bunch of psychopaths have decided murdering my daughter is arbitrarily inseparable from their plan for a global utopia because reasons, just shutup, then no. I chose my daughter over my dead body every time. You don't get to create a moral dilemma and then benefit from being the "lesser evil" in it. It's a lie. They are the greater evil by virtue of having created the situation in the first place, and they'll do it again!
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