Punished with a Baby
Filed under: 2008 elections, Feature — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on March 31, 2008 @ 11:10 am CEST
“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”
“Punished with a baby?” Punished?
For such an eloquent guy, Barack Obama really knows how to say stupid things, doesn’t he?
“Punished with a baby.”
This is for the first time in history that anyone would say something like that and not be scolded for it. Quite sad.
Yes, I understand what he may be trying to say - that it’s rather difficult to raise a child when you’re 16, and that it’s wise to teach your children about sex and the possible consequences of having sex when they’re reasonably young - but the way he said this… ouch.
Perhaps Obama should talk to some 16-year old mothers, to ask them whether they considered their baby “punishment.”
1 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 3:08 pm CESTI’m with Obama on this one. The number of teen mothers in this country is far too high. One of the reasons for that is that our society now attaches very little shame to the condition.
If he were talking about particular, existing babies, then yes, it would be a callous statement. But speaking in general, I’m perfectly fine with suggesting that babies, like STDs, are a punishment to those who engage in premarital sex.
My cousin and his girlfriend had baby in high school. They eventually got married, about 6 years later, and of course everybody loves the little girl they had and wouldn’t give her up for anything, but the fact remains that their lives took a very different course from the moment that little girl was conceived, and the experience has mostly made their lives’ roads harder and more expensive.
Plus, he’s talking about what to tell kids who are ages 6 and 9 about sex and the consequences. You’ll only confuse them if you say: "now if you should get pregnant, it’ll be a great blessing and having a baby is the most wonderful thing in the world, but of course you should NEVER get pregnant until you’re married because you’ll have negative consequences." There’s nothing wrong with talking about babies as punishment BEFORE the baby arrives.
So I say, kudos to Obama on this one.
2 Michael van der Galien
March 31, 2008 @ 3:18 pm CESTI’m not. Incredibly crude, heartless. A baby isn’t a "punishment."
3 Claudia
March 31, 2008 @ 3:26 pm CESTOhhhhh fer cryin out loud. This is ridiculous, even the most rabid Hillary surrogate has never been THAT silly. What a way to try to twist someones meaning into something awful. Yes Obama considers babies to be punishments, that’s why he had two of his own. C’mon, as gotcha moments go, this one doesn’t even rate a 3.
4 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 3:45 pm CESTHe could probably have avoided much of the disconnect with prolifers if he’d phrased it:
"I don’t want them to be punished with the responsibility of parenthood" or "responsibility of carrying and/or raising a child". The problem is, what he actually said reflects the way many people on the prochoice side think: that babies who are wanted are a blessing, but those that come about unplanned are a curse. If you have a prolife mentality, all babies that are conceived have a right to life and it doesn’t matter whether the parents who conceived them want them or not- they could be a blessing to someone else if the biological parents aren’t willing or able to take on the responsibility. That’s why it doesn’t sound right from my perspective, to say that a girl/woman who gets pregnant unintentionally is being punished with a baby rather than saying that the punishment is the responsibility to deal with the care of that baby when you are unequipped for that.
5 Michael van der Galien
March 31, 2008 @ 3:49 pm CESTExactly Christine. Again, for such an eloquent guy he sure knows how to stay offensive and / or silly things.
6 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 3:53 pm CESTBetween the comments by Obama like this one, and ones by his wife Michelle, I think the issue is that some people who espouse liberal/progressive ideals truly don’t understand the other perspective. When they say things, they have no idea how those things sound to people who have different values than they do. I can often see where the common ground would be, and I think that’s because even though my perspective is quite conservative, I’ve bothered to take the time to understand other viewpoints.
7 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 4:54 pm CESTChristine, I think you have to stretch to see prolife/prochoice issues here. He’s not talking about abortion and preserving the right thereto. If he were, I might agree with you.
But he’s not. He’s talking about how to talk to a 9 year old to convince her to avoid getting pregnant and to avoid getting STDs. That is NOT the time to be talking about what a blessing babies are. If I were talking to my 11 year old sister about this topic, I might or might not use the word "punished," but I SURE wouldn’t be talking about how wonderful and great babies are. I’d at the least be talking about the drudgeries of diapers and how you get no other life for many years and how expensive they are and so on and so forth.
One of the reasons poor teens get pregnant is because they feel unloved by their parent and they figure if they have a baby, they’ll have somebody to love them, and it’ll be a great big blessing. Terrible, terrible reason to choose to have a baby. Bad for them, bad for the baby.
Again, if Obama were describing a conversation with a pregnant daughter and telling her, after she got pregnant, that this was some punishment and so forth, I agree that would be cruel. But that’s not the context. The context is trying to convince a 9 year old not to have sex or, if she does, to use protection to reduce the risk of pregnancy or STDs. Do you really think that’s the time to be talking about the blessings of having babies?
8 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 4:57 pm CESTChristine, your #4 suggests part of the problem caused by the huge divide on abortion in this country. In order to be considered inoffensive by the pro-life side, you want Obama to throw in 10 or 12 extra words as a qualifier when he’s not even talking about babies other than in the context of what we ALL agree on, that 9 year olds shouldn’t be getting pregnant, period.
To take offense at this language on prolife grounds strikes me as the same sort of offensensitivity of which we often complain when exhibited by the left.
9 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 5:11 pm CESTQuite honestly, I do, Pat- you can easily talk about babies being wonderful blessings that also come with huge responsibilities attached. Even a 9 year old can grasp that (and she’ll have several more years in almost all cases before she’ll even be biologically equipped to have any possible risk of having to deal with the distinction anyway.)
Of course. But then obviously the problem there is that the girls felt unloved (and to some degree, that they didn’t understand the magnitude of the responsibility), not that they believed that babies were blessings. The solutions there are to improve the parental relationship and to educate the teen about the responsibility as well as the blessing.
I’m not trying to be hypersensitive to the language here, but my gut reaction to what he said is quite negative and there’s just no getting around that. It is what it is- and I’m pretty sure that the reason for my reaction is because it touches on that disconnect that I see on the prochoice side which says that babies that are wanted have rights that are not given to babies that are ‘unwanted’. Because I find that attitude to be such a problem, the way the words slip out as evidence of that attitude is a problem too.
10 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 5:49 pm CESTWell, I do agree that how things are phrased casually can reveal inner thought patterns on occasion. I just don’t see it here.
I realize that the pro-choice crowd often claims that the pro-life side wants to "punish" women who have sex by forcing them to remain pregnant. (see, for example, here) So perhaps you’re right. Obama often speaks in code, to communicate a subtextual message that undercuts his "moderate" rhetoric, which only the true believers are supposed to pick up on.
From a political standpoint, there’s no need for Obama to walk on eggshells to avoid offending the pro-life voters. They’re not going to vote for him, period. And if you want to oppose Obama on pro-life grounds, there are plenty of far more substantive statements he’s made, positions he’s taken, on which to do so.
On the whole, though, I don’t see this as being up there in the same realm as Mrs. Obama’s "proud of America for the first time" blunder.
11 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 5:58 pm CESTOne issue, staunch prolifers, yes, but that’s not so for the many prolife Catholics who represent a demographic group that he needs to gain more support from (and potentially could, from those who oppose the war for example and feel that the moral implications of the war counterbalance the leanings on abortion.) Now, maybe the ones who are persuadable like that wouldn’t have the same reaction to it as I would, but I don’t know that.
I agree that this probably doesn’t resonate as much as some of Michelle’s statements (and it’s more than just that one, actually- there have been several that seem to be that type of slip that betrays underlying thought patterns.)
One more point about your comment #8. The thing is that I agree that there’s a huge divide, and that strong feelings on both sides are the reason for that divide. But that’s precisely why people who feel strongly shouldn’t be told that their feelings don’t matter, which is what I think is conveyed by unsensitive language like that. When attempting to find common ground, it’s really important to use vocabulary that won’t alienate certain people; for example, I consciously try to avoid using "mother" and "baby" when discussing abortion with a prochoice person, and although I think prochoice itself is a misnomer I’ll still defer to people’s preference for that and ask that they defer to our choice for the term ‘prolife’ instead of what some on the other side prefer to call it (ie, anti-abortion or anti-choice.)
Words do matter, eh?
12 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 6:02 pm CESTOh, I forgot to add: the reason I find this somewhat of a blunder is that I agree with the main point he was making, that abstinence shouldn’t be taught exclusively- so it’s an opportunity to highlight the common ground. But then he blew it by speaking in a way that I find offensive, and that’s what I find annoying. It’d be like me talking to a mostly prochoice group of people, explaining why I agree with them about trying to prevent as many teen pregnancies as possible, and then winding it up by saying, "After all, why should we let the abortion industry profit from the mistakes of teenagers?"
13 Tully
March 31, 2008 @ 6:28 pm CESTI don’t think Obama’s speaking in code at all there. He’s talking about the reality of inner-city life, and how ignorance leads to severe adverse consequences that comprehensive sex education (as opposed to abstinence-only sex-ed) could help avoid. The context of the remark makes that clear–this was NOT commentary about abortion, but about comprehensive sex education versus abstinence-only sex-ed. A low-income 16-year-old who gets pregnant and keeps the baby is coming close to guaranteeing themselves a lifetime of struggle and a perpetuation of the urban poverty cycle, and if comprehensive sex-ed does a better job of avoiding that than abstinence-only sex-ed, we should teach it. Simple enough, and undebateable in the statistics that teen pregnancy is a major driver in poverty.
The exchange appeared to be prompted by Obama’s earlier comments that he does not favor abstinence-only education, but rather comprehensive sexual education that includes information on abstinence and birth control.
"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information."
Clearly he’s talking about sex-ed there, not about abortion. The reporter placed Obama’s predictably sex-ed comments after his predictably pro-choice abortion comments in the original article, even though they were made before the abortion comments. Allahpundit proceeded to try to turn the earlier sex-ed remark into a pro-abortion remark. It wasn’t.
Of course, the likelihood that favoring comprehensive sex-ed will alienate pro-lifers more than it will pro-choicers is real, but comprehensive sex-ed and abortion advocacy are NOT the same thing, and conflating the separate remarks is dishonest.
14 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 6:37 pm CESTI don’t think it’s deliberate coding, but I also don’t think it’s a dishonest attempt to conflate the remarks with an underlying attitude toward abortion. I can only speak for myself and say that I’m not deliberately trying to do that, I’m only expressing my visceral reaction to his remarks because to me, even though I KNOW he’s talking about sex ed, the way he expressed himself revealed an attitude that I find common among many prochoice people and it’s an attitude that I feel is wrong. The babies that result from unplanned pregancies aren’t a ‘problem’, even though it’s a problem that babies come with great responsibility that some individuals are unable or unwilling to bear. I find that an important distinction, but Obama apparently doesn’t- thus his remarks revealed a lack of understanding of people who are on the opposing side of the abortion issue from him, even though the remarks weren’t specifically about abortion.
There could be a bit of coding there though that I hadn’t even picked up on until I read Pat’s comment. That’s the fact that many on the prochoice side think that the rationale for prolifers is to say that sex is sinful and thus the women who get pregnant are getting what they deserve, a punishment for their wanton lust. So in a way, probably not consciously, but still…Obama calls up this kind of thinking by making it clear that HE’S not one of those Neanderthals who would think that way.
15 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 7:36 pm CESTChristine, did you read the comment on its own in a news report first, or is it possible that your reaction to it was colored by the placement and editorializing made by Allahpundit, Michael, and others? I mean, do you think you would have had the exact same reaction had you just been watching Obama’s remarks or reading a transcript which had not been called to your attention as being a comment on abortion and the value of unborn babies?
16 Tully
March 31, 2008 @ 7:37 pm CESTthe way he expressed himself revealed an attitude that I find common among many prochoice people and it’s an attitude that I feel is wrong
Christine, while that may be an "attitude" among some pro-choice people, among the inner-city poor it’s not an attitude. It’s a reality. Teen pregnancy and poverty go hand in hand. They are both cause and effect, a self-perpetuating cycle with massively increased odds of lifetime adverse outcomes for both mother and child…and society. That’s not an "attitude" or a political opinion. It’s just the cold hard truth.
That’s the fact that many on the prochoice side think that the rationale for prolifers is to say that sex is sinful and thus the women who get pregnant are getting what they deserve, a punishment for their wanton lust.
Which wouldn’t have much weight if there wasn’t some truth to it. Some people do indeed believe that extramarital sex of any kind is a major sin and should be punished by with the "natural consequences" of same, including pregnancy and STD’s, and say so loudly. I hear from them frequently. (Indeed, in some quarters it’s one of the main drivers behind the push for abstinence-only sex ed.) I am thankful that they are not nearly as numerous as they are vocal.
But I come back to Pat’s point–it simply wasn’t a "coded" statement, it was something people on both sides of the abortion issue can and do widely agree upon, whatever the outliers in those groups think. Namely, preventing teens from getting pregnant in the first place is a Good Thing, and teens getting pregnant is in general a Bad Thing. You may object to the unfortunate choice and framing of the word "punishment" (and I obviously think you’re reading WAY too much into that one word) but in real life and in practical terms having a baby as a teenager carries with it major life penalties for both mother and child, ones that are well-documented and unquestionably present. Avoiding those pregnancies in the first place is a LOT better than having to deal with the results of them, whether it’s abortion or the perpetuation of poverty. Same with STD’s among teens–an ounce of prevention beats worrying about tons of cure. In my humble O, that is.
Frankly, I don’t think Obama is quick enough on his feet to intentionally frame that way on an extemporaneous basis in the first place. His rhetorical skills lie more with set pieces and teleprompters.
17 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 7:55 pm CESTPat: I read Ed Morrissey’s account of it first. I have no idea if I’d have reacted the same way if I had been in the audience at his Q&A, but I don’t think Ed’s account was highly biased or pot-stirring. I also don’t think my reaction is as big as it might come across with my comments here- I’m commenting repeatedly just to try to clarify and respond to the discussion points that are coming up, not because I think this is statement of his represents some crucial point in the campaign.
Tully, I’ll assume you aren’t willfully misreading me but rather that I’m not expressing the point well enough. Not sure how else to say it though; I simply see a distinction between babies being labeled as a problem and the responsibility involved in raising babies as a problem. The latter, as you assert, is a no brainer, and yes, an undeniable reality. The former though, is a viewpoint in that it implies ‘blame’ for the responsibility part onto an innocent (incipient) human being, and although some people don’t see the difference, it is an important distinction for me.
The part about the truthiness of implying that prolifers are knuckledraggers who want to punish unwed women for getting in the sack is equally true of my comment toward the predatory/opportunistic nature of some segments of the abortion industry. The point I made still stands; if you really want to be the one to bridge two sides that strongly disagree with each other, you have to tread lightly and try not to assume that all of the people on the other side of the issue are represented by the worst of them. And to repeat, I’m not claiming that Obama was calculating in his use of that phrasing- I’m only saying that it shows that he didn’t calculate enough in a good way-to be a true centrist with respect to the sensitivities on each side. That may be asking too much, as few people seem able to do that on the issue of abortion; and even if Obama did so perfectly, he’d still have his voting record to answer for and there’s nothing rhetorically he could do to win me over on that.
18 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 8:46 pm CESTChristine, we’ve obviously hashed this out enough, but just to toss in my bottom line… I think we contribute to the problem of divisive and difficult politics when we essentially demand that our politicians watch their words THAT carefully on pain of basically assuming the worst about what their word choice implies.
IF Sen. Obama had been talking about abortion with that language, I think you might be right in what you said with your last paragraph. But since he wasn’t talking about abortion, I think we should cut him some slack and not demand that he consider every possible interpretation or misinterpretation of his words while he is saying something which, substantively (as Tully points out), we all agree on, that it’s bad for teenagers to get pregnant.
If you really want straight talk from politicians (or anybody else, for that matter), you can’t parse their words THAT finely. If you do, they’ll simply clam up and never deliver anything except carefully prepared, canned speeches. I defended Rush (who I don’t like much) when Michael and the liberals where claiming he was calling soldiers who opposed the war "phony soldiers," and I’m defending Obama (who I don’t like much) here. In both cases, I’m saying not to read too much into an unscripted series of comments.
19 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 8:56 pm CESTPat, I get your point and agree to a degree- but frankly I find that too frequently Obama lets slip his underlying attitudes (which are quite liberal) even though he says that he understands the need to hear out opposing viewpoints. He uses language that tends toward a dismissive or even derisive attitude toward people who hold differing views (and seems tone deaf to how this would sound to a conservative ear), and since some of those attitudes of derision are so often repeated, they’re almost accepted as a given in all future debate. That poisons the atmosphere for any kind of meeting of minds. So it’s in that general sense that I find this kind of thing problematic, and that’s why I don’t get the compartmentalization that you and Tully seem to feel about whether this statement was about sex ed or abortion rights.
And I think the comparison to Limbaugh is apples to oranges, because regardless of the particular point that you defended him for, there’s no point defending him as someone who’s not divisive. He’s intentionally devisive, but Obama isn’t supposed to be.
20 steve
March 31, 2008 @ 9:33 pm CESTI don’t think Obama thinks babies are a punishment, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone on the right refer to birth, even an accidental birth, as a punishment.
21 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 9:34 pm CESTThe compartmentalization is that if he were talking about abortion, we would properly expect him to choose his words with more care, to think through each word before saying it with an eye toward how it would come across to partisans on both sides of the issue. But since he wasn’t talking about that, I don’t expect him to go through the same scrutiny of his words to consider their impact on the average pro-life or pro-choice partisan.
I certainly agree with you, and have posted and commented many times, about how Obama subtly destroys and gives lie to his arching "moderate" comments with his subtle and coded message which is always to the effect that his liberal side is the calm, rational one. This one just doesn’t strike me as an example of that general behavior.
And I don’t think it’s apples and oranges. Limbaugh wasn’t being accused of being divisive, he was accused of saying something he didn’t actually say. Your comment about divisiveness is only relevant once you accept that Obama really was trying to send a coded message, or was at least revealing that in his heart of hearts he really does think unwanted babies are punishments. But I’m not by a long shot convinced he meant anything of the sort, and so to me, Obama is here, like Limbaugh with the phony soldiers issue, being accused of saying something he just didn’t say.
There are far more and better examples of Obama cutting down Bush, Republicans, and anybody not really liberal while nominally espousing a "new politics." This one just doesn’t strike me as a terribly good example.
22 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 9:47 pm CESTWell, Pat, I think it’s in the eye of the beholder, you know? If there’s a particular point on which you believe that the people on your side of the issue have been trashed- to the point that they’re seen even by people who are pretty moderate as though their position has no real merit- then you get a bit more sensitive, and I don’t think that’s hypersensitivity. To me it is an example of that overarching tendency to belittle conservatives (which I actually think he does more unconsciously than you seem to think- I don’t believe he’s coding but rather that he actually thinks that way and can’t help himself, and doesn’t even really try because he presumes that the vast majority of his target audience agrees with him- and unfortunately he’s probably correct.)
And I understood what you meant about compartmentalization; I guess instead of saying I didn’t "get it" I should have said that I don’t agree with it, because for example in this case he still ended up dissing prolifers even though he wasn’t directly addressing abortion. That comes back full circle the next time abortion is the topic of discussion.
23 Tully
March 31, 2008 @ 9:50 pm CESTGee, Christine, maybe that’s because Obama IS left-liberal, and his talk about unity is really just…talk? Are you truly complaining that he wasn’t disingenuously calculating enough in using his words?
But what Pat said. I don’t think I’m misreading you at all. I just think you’re reading entirely too much significance into one single word offered in an extemporaneous and unscripted Q&A session. Trying to force it into deeper meaning and broader context is silly.
24 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 9:52 pm CESTAnd arghh…I feel frustrated that on this, just like in many conversations about Wright, there’s this misunderstanding that people like myself are concerned that Obama himself believes something that he probably doesn’t believe.
I don’t think that Obama believes that babies are punishments. What I do think he believes though is that unwanted babies are punishments, and that’s actually a logical conclusion if one doesn’t actually think of a human fetus as a baby- the fetus is unwanted, it’s not a human being so there’s no problem in thinking of IT as the problem- IT actually is a problem for the pregnant woman. But for someone who believes that the IT is actually a baby, it’s very troubling to assign blame for the mother’s problem of caring for him/her onto the baby. Again, it gets to what is a disconnect for me in that it makes no sense that many people feel that a wanted fetus has some rights and is a blessing while an unwanted one has no rights and is strictly a problem.
25 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 9:53 pm CESTWell, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one, Christine.
I will say my searching has brought me a little more sympathy with your point of view. Searching for having a baby as punishment for sex [without Obama] brings a lot of hits, and at least in the first 6 pages, just about every single one is a pro-choice person suggesting that it is pro-lifers who view babies as punishment for having sex, and that’s why they oppose abortion… to make sure that the woman is punished.
I’m going to have to leave it to Tully to refute Steve’s comment; I’m certain that there are plenty of folks, if only of the Fred Phelps variety, who are nominally pro-life and yet speak of pregnancy as a punishment for pre-marital sex, but I’m having trouble finding any concrete examples.
26 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 9:55 pm CESTNo, only claiming that the fact that he’s not calculating in a way to be cognizant of how his words sound to those with opposing viewpoints proves that he is disingenuous about unity. As Pat pointed out (and I think your post also implies), you guys see that in other examples of his rhetoric. I see this as another example of it.
27 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 9:59 pm CESTThanks, Pat- that is in fact what I’m getting at- that this is a common canard that needs to be addressed by anyone who is presenting him or herself as a uniter on this issue, and it’s relevant to Obama’s comments on sex ed because there too, there’s a common misperception among the proponents of comprehensive sex ed that there is widespread opposition to that among prolifers and that that opposition is similarly based on a desire to exact punishment on fornicating young women.
28 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 10:06 pm CESTChristine, it’s just that I am pro-life, and think that babies are blessings, and even unwanted babies are miraculous gifts from God. But Obama’s comments just don’t hit me the same way they do you.
I could easily see myself saying something similar, and I’m certain I’ve seen plenty of conservative, pro-life types who think we should try to bring back the shame that used to be associated with teen pregnancy, as a way of reducing its occurrence. I know for certain that I’ve seen reviews and commentaries on the movie Juno (the most pro-life movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time) which suggested that they made teen pregnancy seem too easy, too care-free, just not HARD enough.
In the mind of a teen, if you suddenly had to do 10 extra hours of chores each day, weren’t allowed to go to the movies with your friends, couldn’t go on dates any more, etc., etc., wouldn’t you think you were being PUNISHED?
Yes, as adults we can explain how that’s not punishment but the natural consequences of behavior, but then going to prison is pretty much a natural consequence of some behaviors, too, and we know that that’s punishment.
Plus, notice that he DIDN’T say: "punished with either having a baby or having an abortion." No, the natural conclusion he reached was that if you got pregnant, you were going to have a baby. If we’re going to parse his words that carefully, then why not parse them that way, instead?
29 C Stanley
March 31, 2008 @ 10:10 pm CESTPat: I agree you could parse it differently, and I completely accept that it didn’t hit you the same way even though your views might be similar to mine. But that doesn’t change the fact that it DID hit me the way it did, and I’ve tried to explain the reasons that I think it did. Fair enough?
30 PatHMV
March 31, 2008 @ 10:25 pm CESTOh, absolutely fair enough, Christine. I’ve got no problems agreeing to disagree. And, as you said earlier, it’s not like you claimed that this was a HUGE issue which ought to disqualify Obama all by itself; we’ve all mostly just made observations. It’s been a fruitful conversation, I think.
31 Tully
April 1, 2008 @ 12:49 am CESTFair enough, Christine. In my case Obama lost me long ago anyway. I heard him speak in person.
Yes, as adults we can explain how that’s not punishment but the natural consequences of behavior, but then going to prison is pretty much a natural consequence of some behaviors, too, and we know that that’s punishment.
Yup yup. But most people don’t think that deeply, the natural-consequences-as-God’s-punishment meme is indeed widespread in evangelical circles, and there’s a big pre-supposition of natural consequences being God’s will and "moral law" in matters of extra-marital sex of any kind. Anyway, that’s all kind of off the point, save to note the mindset is indeed very very real in some quarters. It’s not a canard, it’s just not as universal to the "other side" as those that use that shorthand suggest.
In a perfect world not all people on one side of an issue would be tagged with the views of the more extreme people on that side of the issue. Not there yet.
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