Killing gay babies
This must be one of the cleverest “divide and conquer” and “reductio ad absurdem” political strategies I've seen in a long time—a move by Brian Duprey, a conservative politician in Maine, to legislate against aborting a foetus carrying a genetic indicator for homosexuality. (See report.)
Putting aside the issue of whether such a thing as a “gay gene” actually exists, this proposal is very clever because:
(1) It demonstrates the possibiity that pregnancies may be terminated for all sorts of prejudiced reasons. It just sounds wrong to terminate merely because a baby may have a genetic predisposition towards homosexuality. But is that any more unjustified than terminating a baby because it is a girl or because it has Downes Syndrome?
Once you move away from saying that the right to abortion is an absolute right, and that the mother's reasons are irrelevant, you've undermined the foundations of the pro-abortion case.
and
(2) It potentially gets the very powerful gay lobby arguing the case that ‘gay’ babies should be protected. Once that becomes accepted, it is impossible to deny that same protection to ‘heterosexual’ babies. To do so would create two classes of citizens: those worthy of protection and those not. Surely an intolerable distinction.
Duprey has been accused of “political gamesmanship”. This may be true; I don't know what has motivated him and whether he thinks his legislation has any chance of passing. But it is certainly a strategy that fights the pro-abortion lobby at their own game.