While I an no expert on the subject, I suspect that Catholic moral theology is more nuanced on abortion than the Texas Penal Code. I recall overhearing a back of the sanctuary conversation about the local Catholic hospital performing abortions. Whether that would extend beyond ectopic pregnancies (guessing) I don't know.
Tim - any thought of recommending some get out the vote programs? Maybe an organization like https://votefwd.org/ where people can remind people to register and vote?
Tim and Mike: Thank you for the frank conversation. Mike, I have followed you since I bumped into you on “X.” As a Latino, I am really disappointed in what is happening with the 3rd generation. I am a foreign born Latino from South America. A Catholic. What I have seen since I arrive in America has been a transition of Hispanic/Latinos. I agree that this recent generation of Latinos have become populist and I fear that they will “cut their nose” by helping to elect Trump. What is not sounding thru is that Trump populism is the “cut paper” from Woodrow Wilson’s apartheid administration. This time it will the Latinos that will take it in the shorts. I am getting less and less optimistic that America will stay the course.
Tim, I respect your pov on abortion but I’d like to share a story about my own mother. As a young mom of a toddler, she contracted polio. It was after that she learned she was also pregnant. At that time in the late 1950’s, the doctors told my father that their was no way the baby would be viable but their hands were tied. They never discussed any of this with my mom. She had to fight polio while being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. The baby died moments after birth. My father shared the agony they went through with me while he was on some drugs post open heart surgery that made that taciturn Texan chatty as a teenager girl. Late term abortions are due to horrible circumstances and the myth of some woman deciding at 8.5 months that, oops, I changed my mind and don’t want a baby is just that. If there is one such case in 100,000, not great, but the ignorance about how nature determines that certain pregnancies are not meant to be viable is like trying to ignore that everyone eventually will die. I’m so tired of hearing people bemoan late term abortions and layering on a moral judgment for women facing these heartbreaking situations. It also strikes me if one believes in an omnipotent god, then none of this is a mistake.
Good show. I do want to say that I think the fundamental problem with abortion legislation is that you're taking a subject that has far reaching effects on women's healthcare and putting it into the hands of non-medical folks who tend to come at it from an ideological perspective, and that is guaranteed to hurt women. The problem with Tim's thinking on the matter is that it follows the 'one is too many' line of thinking that is so often the province of liberal paternalism. In your quest to stop the small percentage of 'elective' abortions you cite through government coercion, are you not putting us on the path toward a form of authoritarianism you seek to avoid? Isn't the true 'conservative' position to avoid legislating something so complex and personal?
Abortion is literally a matter of life and death. Our democratic political process deals with such questions all the time. Abortion might have a medical aspect, but so does the drug addiction. Would you say we should leave it to the medical establishment to deal with the opioid epidemic? Of course not.
People have different perspectives on abortion. Duh, right? Tim Miller's perspective when he and his husband sought to adopt a baby was that what they saw in an ultrasound came from the desire for a baby. This view is romantic. A woman who is pregnant might have the same perspective or, if she is financially strapped or in a bad relationship with the sperm donor or already has a couple of kids or is very young could well have a different perspective. The latter one is not the romantic view. Who are we to say that one perspective is more valid than another?
The thing is, I don't think Tim is a bad guy at all, but I do find it interesting he was still basically unwilling to say when he thinks the state should force a woman to go through with a pregnancy.
The reality, like a lot of squishes on this issue, he probably just finds the issue yucky and probably still has some pro-life propaganda about women using it for birth control in the back of his head, and that effects him still.
He has said before that he’s grossed out by the whole idea of a vagina. I expect his understanding of the female reproductive system is pretty sparse.
Having spent a lot of time dissecting the reproductive systems of males and females in Gross, I’m basically hostile about the amount of misinformation and sheer ignorance spread by the other side.
The majority of surgical abortions and all medical abortions don’t involve a fetus at all, but an embryo. A fetus doesn’t exist before the 10th week of gestation. There is no heartbeat at six weeks, just non-specific electrical activity in what will eventually be a heart. If you gave me a 9V battery and some undifferentiated cells I could make them jump too. The “heartbeat” everyone hears at an ultrasound isn’t the sound of the embryo or the fetus, but the machine itself. A third of early gestations spontaneously abort.
And no one has the right to tell a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant for any damn reason or no reason at all that she must pop out a kid at the end. We aren’t vessels.
I also want to admit some ignorance here as to the meaning of "elective." In medicine, elective indicates a procedure that is not immediately life-saving. For instance, a kidney transplant is generally considered to be elective, even though it is clearly life-saving in the long term. So I would ask, what is the definition of an 'elective' abortion?
There really is no such thing as an elective abortion. There are abortions that are to save the life of the mother and then there are abortions that don’t. Tim is a Catholic-raised gay man with a darling adopted child. This issue will never touch him directly. I guarantee it will touch some woman he loves, or it already has.
It always kills me when gay men who have no skin in this game at all opine on this issue. I would go 10 rounds on this with my gay BFF for years before he saw the light.
No one has the right to question WHY any woman has an abortion. The implication in “elective” is that women use abortion as birth control, which is a myth of the RW.
It’s the fundamental problem: leaving medical decisions, life decisions, to a politician in a smoke filled back room writing legislation is never going to end well
Agreed. I'm not convinced that some of these supposedly pro-life politicians are actually concerned about "unborn life." Over the years they've seen a segment of people who are genuinely passionate about the issue, enough to become single-issue voters on it, and pre-Dobbs found signaling pro-life bona fides through various legislative efforts to be an easy way to get and keep those votes in their column. The fact that they had no interest in what happens to those children once they're born, zero interest in their mothers and little to no understanding of all the complications that can occur at any point in a pregnancy underpins my belief that for these legislators it's about staying in office, with the added benefit of controlling women.
The NYT’s latest poll shows Trump bleeding black and Latino support since his conviction.
I rarely care about what the Times thinks about anything but a month ago we were all supposed to be on the cusp of seppuku because of the Times’ *last* poll.
And yet, we heard nothing about this today, or the immigration EO, or really anything. I like Mike a lot and I hope he sells lots and lots of books but a conviction helps no one, not even the Burnt Sienna One.
Latino men and black men are every bit as misogynist as white men. They like that in MAGA. They may support LGBTQ even less than white men. Also a MAGA selling point. I could go on.
But what they won’t support is the idea that if they had been convicted of 34 felonies that it’s ok that they couldn’t work at Arby’s but Donald J. Trump can be president, no problem. Frank Luntz just ran a focus group for the Times, post-conviction, and a group of really disparate 2x Trump voters were done with Trump because he was convicted.
It sounds as though the Dems are reaching Latino women. Black women have always been the base of our party. I’d hate to make up some BS to reach men and as a result lose the women.
I can’t wrap my head around this. You trust the institutions, distrust the parties, but vote for the guy who is saying overtly that he wants to take dictator style control over these institutions / break them.
Someone explain this shit to me…
Also, this is really becoming a men v women thing. It’s cultural. Culture is hard to move, and I guess the only way to handle this is to have messengers who can speak to this stuff.
Of course on the flip side the alternative is screaming “tear it all down, it’s all rigged” while robbing these people blind, passing policy that harms them, and blaming the gay person or college educated woman. Sigh.
Yep it is very very much about men vs. women. Men (not me) fundamentally believe that they are being displaced (which they are). They either need to find a balance or they are hosed. I see it in my father. He is on his 3rd wife. First, his age. Second, 15 years younger (his secretary). Third, his age. It’s like watching his mind struggle with women who have choices
Young-ish Latino men—2nd, 3rd, 4th generation— are just as much young-ish men as they are Latino.
A lot of the identity politics focuses on race and ethnicity and really downplays the fact that gender and age has more to do with voting tendecy and preferences.
Show me any under-35 year old, and I’ll show you a person bathing in social media for everything from culture to politics to news.
Responding to the response about Trump’s influence in the 2028 election. Lara Trump is a co-chair of the RNC. With that in mind it seems that the Trump family and the GOP are intertwined and will be for some time.
Mike said out loud what I hear in my head every time someone says 'non-college educated voter'..... it's 'uneducated voter'
While I an no expert on the subject, I suspect that Catholic moral theology is more nuanced on abortion than the Texas Penal Code. I recall overhearing a back of the sanctuary conversation about the local Catholic hospital performing abortions. Whether that would extend beyond ectopic pregnancies (guessing) I don't know.
Tim - any thought of recommending some get out the vote programs? Maybe an organization like https://votefwd.org/ where people can remind people to register and vote?
Tim and Mike: Thank you for the frank conversation. Mike, I have followed you since I bumped into you on “X.” As a Latino, I am really disappointed in what is happening with the 3rd generation. I am a foreign born Latino from South America. A Catholic. What I have seen since I arrive in America has been a transition of Hispanic/Latinos. I agree that this recent generation of Latinos have become populist and I fear that they will “cut their nose” by helping to elect Trump. What is not sounding thru is that Trump populism is the “cut paper” from Woodrow Wilson’s apartheid administration. This time it will the Latinos that will take it in the shorts. I am getting less and less optimistic that America will stay the course.
We need to keep normalizing the idea of trump jail time. Discuss it until it becomes real, the maga method.
Great conversation. Would love Sarah having a Focus Group with that 3rd gen Latino group.
Apologies that this is a day late, but the Apple Music Playlist is up to date
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/bulwark-pod-songs/pl.u-0embfxV15e
Tim, I respect your pov on abortion but I’d like to share a story about my own mother. As a young mom of a toddler, she contracted polio. It was after that she learned she was also pregnant. At that time in the late 1950’s, the doctors told my father that their was no way the baby would be viable but their hands were tied. They never discussed any of this with my mom. She had to fight polio while being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. The baby died moments after birth. My father shared the agony they went through with me while he was on some drugs post open heart surgery that made that taciturn Texan chatty as a teenager girl. Late term abortions are due to horrible circumstances and the myth of some woman deciding at 8.5 months that, oops, I changed my mind and don’t want a baby is just that. If there is one such case in 100,000, not great, but the ignorance about how nature determines that certain pregnancies are not meant to be viable is like trying to ignore that everyone eventually will die. I’m so tired of hearing people bemoan late term abortions and layering on a moral judgment for women facing these heartbreaking situations. It also strikes me if one believes in an omnipotent god, then none of this is a mistake.
As Pete Buttigieg says, by the time a third-trimester termination occurs, a name has been chosen and nursery furniture picked out.
Happy to hear Mike Madrid today!
Good show. I do want to say that I think the fundamental problem with abortion legislation is that you're taking a subject that has far reaching effects on women's healthcare and putting it into the hands of non-medical folks who tend to come at it from an ideological perspective, and that is guaranteed to hurt women. The problem with Tim's thinking on the matter is that it follows the 'one is too many' line of thinking that is so often the province of liberal paternalism. In your quest to stop the small percentage of 'elective' abortions you cite through government coercion, are you not putting us on the path toward a form of authoritarianism you seek to avoid? Isn't the true 'conservative' position to avoid legislating something so complex and personal?
Abortion is literally a matter of life and death. Our democratic political process deals with such questions all the time. Abortion might have a medical aspect, but so does the drug addiction. Would you say we should leave it to the medical establishment to deal with the opioid epidemic? Of course not.
Ah, yes, our famously humane and effective drug laws. Solid counterpoint...
People have different perspectives on abortion. Duh, right? Tim Miller's perspective when he and his husband sought to adopt a baby was that what they saw in an ultrasound came from the desire for a baby. This view is romantic. A woman who is pregnant might have the same perspective or, if she is financially strapped or in a bad relationship with the sperm donor or already has a couple of kids or is very young could well have a different perspective. The latter one is not the romantic view. Who are we to say that one perspective is more valid than another?
Well put…but shouldn’t we call what we want to stop is “Government mandated pregnancies”….?
The thing is, I don't think Tim is a bad guy at all, but I do find it interesting he was still basically unwilling to say when he thinks the state should force a woman to go through with a pregnancy.
The reality, like a lot of squishes on this issue, he probably just finds the issue yucky and probably still has some pro-life propaganda about women using it for birth control in the back of his head, and that effects him still.
He has said before that he’s grossed out by the whole idea of a vagina. I expect his understanding of the female reproductive system is pretty sparse.
Having spent a lot of time dissecting the reproductive systems of males and females in Gross, I’m basically hostile about the amount of misinformation and sheer ignorance spread by the other side.
The majority of surgical abortions and all medical abortions don’t involve a fetus at all, but an embryo. A fetus doesn’t exist before the 10th week of gestation. There is no heartbeat at six weeks, just non-specific electrical activity in what will eventually be a heart. If you gave me a 9V battery and some undifferentiated cells I could make them jump too. The “heartbeat” everyone hears at an ultrasound isn’t the sound of the embryo or the fetus, but the machine itself. A third of early gestations spontaneously abort.
And no one has the right to tell a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant for any damn reason or no reason at all that she must pop out a kid at the end. We aren’t vessels.
I also want to admit some ignorance here as to the meaning of "elective." In medicine, elective indicates a procedure that is not immediately life-saving. For instance, a kidney transplant is generally considered to be elective, even though it is clearly life-saving in the long term. So I would ask, what is the definition of an 'elective' abortion?
There really is no such thing as an elective abortion. There are abortions that are to save the life of the mother and then there are abortions that don’t. Tim is a Catholic-raised gay man with a darling adopted child. This issue will never touch him directly. I guarantee it will touch some woman he loves, or it already has.
It always kills me when gay men who have no skin in this game at all opine on this issue. I would go 10 rounds on this with my gay BFF for years before he saw the light.
Sadly, whether they think so or not, they all know and care about women who have had abortions.
If they’re on the wrong side, the women just haven’t told them.
Elective abortions are those that are done for non-medical reasons like the health of the mother and the child.
Abortion is medical care. It’s not done for “non-medical” reasons.
No one has the right to question WHY any woman has an abortion. The implication in “elective” is that women use abortion as birth control, which is a myth of the RW.
Yours is a good comment. Thank you.
It’s the fundamental problem: leaving medical decisions, life decisions, to a politician in a smoke filled back room writing legislation is never going to end well
Agreed. I'm not convinced that some of these supposedly pro-life politicians are actually concerned about "unborn life." Over the years they've seen a segment of people who are genuinely passionate about the issue, enough to become single-issue voters on it, and pre-Dobbs found signaling pro-life bona fides through various legislative efforts to be an easy way to get and keep those votes in their column. The fact that they had no interest in what happens to those children once they're born, zero interest in their mothers and little to no understanding of all the complications that can occur at any point in a pregnancy underpins my belief that for these legislators it's about staying in office, with the added benefit of controlling women.
The NYT’s latest poll shows Trump bleeding black and Latino support since his conviction.
I rarely care about what the Times thinks about anything but a month ago we were all supposed to be on the cusp of seppuku because of the Times’ *last* poll.
And yet, we heard nothing about this today, or the immigration EO, or really anything. I like Mike a lot and I hope he sells lots and lots of books but a conviction helps no one, not even the Burnt Sienna One.
Latino men and black men are every bit as misogynist as white men. They like that in MAGA. They may support LGBTQ even less than white men. Also a MAGA selling point. I could go on.
But what they won’t support is the idea that if they had been convicted of 34 felonies that it’s ok that they couldn’t work at Arby’s but Donald J. Trump can be president, no problem. Frank Luntz just ran a focus group for the Times, post-conviction, and a group of really disparate 2x Trump voters were done with Trump because he was convicted.
It sounds as though the Dems are reaching Latino women. Black women have always been the base of our party. I’d hate to make up some BS to reach men and as a result lose the women.
I can’t wrap my head around this. You trust the institutions, distrust the parties, but vote for the guy who is saying overtly that he wants to take dictator style control over these institutions / break them.
Someone explain this shit to me…
Also, this is really becoming a men v women thing. It’s cultural. Culture is hard to move, and I guess the only way to handle this is to have messengers who can speak to this stuff.
Of course on the flip side the alternative is screaming “tear it all down, it’s all rigged” while robbing these people blind, passing policy that harms them, and blaming the gay person or college educated woman. Sigh.
Yep it is very very much about men vs. women. Men (not me) fundamentally believe that they are being displaced (which they are). They either need to find a balance or they are hosed. I see it in my father. He is on his 3rd wife. First, his age. Second, 15 years younger (his secretary). Third, his age. It’s like watching his mind struggle with women who have choices
Young-ish Latino men—2nd, 3rd, 4th generation— are just as much young-ish men as they are Latino.
A lot of the identity politics focuses on race and ethnicity and really downplays the fact that gender and age has more to do with voting tendecy and preferences.
Show me any under-35 year old, and I’ll show you a person bathing in social media for everything from culture to politics to news.
Responding to the response about Trump’s influence in the 2028 election. Lara Trump is a co-chair of the RNC. With that in mind it seems that the Trump family and the GOP are intertwined and will be for some time.
Yay we can eat “hate chicken”
Tim, thank you for your honesty on the abortion issue. I’m pro-choice and affirm your words. Thank you.