Category Archives: Ron for 37th

Older posts about my 2018 bid for congress. Go to ronfor37.org for the latest on my campaign.

Conception is between a man and a woman

So I suppose this article is flamebait, and honestly, there are very few issues I could care less about than the gay marriage debate.  But like with a lot of issues, it seems like things get so heated that people tend to forget certain baseline facts when they launch their tirades.  So I just want to clarify this one fact:

Conception requires a man and a woman.

Let’s clarify this.  Anybody can love anybody.  Anybody can associate with anybody.  You can love men, women, your pets, your plants, heck I know a scientist who cries when her petri dish cultures collapse.  And I certainly don’t care what other people do with their lives.  Give people who want to marry/cohabit legal standing, provided there’s no abuse or coercion involved.

But, to make a new human baby, you need a human man’s semen and you need a human woman’s egg.  You need the two to connect, and you need a woman to gestate that fertilized egg for nine months.

Of course, there are all sorts of technological ways to do this, like a third-party sperm donor, or a third-party egg donor and/or fourth-party woman to gestate your fertilized egg for you. (you decode that last part)

But barring any help from technology, the way it happens is a man inserts his erect penis into a woman’s vagina and squirts his semen at her cervix.  It then needs to connect with a fertile egg of hers, which she then needs to gestate until she gives birth.

Whether the man and woman are actually in love, or are married, is irrelevant here.  I just want to make sure we understand this fact.  If a man and a man marry, or a woman and a woman marry, they still can’t conceive kids with each other.  They need to do an end-run around this inconvenient biological truth to procreate.

Maybe the reason people apply this to marriage is that it’s supposed to be an institution that revolves around conception.

But even that is irrelevant.  The relevant question I’m asking is this: is it possible to point out the fact that a baby comes from a male’s sperm and a female’s egg, without coming off like a bigot?

Why I’m voting NO on 37

I guess it’s my fault.
I’ve stayed silent on these things way too long. I’ve watched with helpless disgust while the politics around me shifted from the deeper social understanding of mass-movements into the isolated politics of drug legalization, spiritualism, and foodie-ism.
At a certain point though, I gotta call some people out, and my firm NO ON 37 stance is a good place to start. You might know that this is the Proposition that aims to require labeling of genetically modified food. The “right-to-know” act. My basic issue is this. We require labeling for things that have a scientifically demonstrated impact on our health. Genetic modification has no proven effect on our health, and the only demonstrations that may show a correlation are problematic studies by people with demonstrated political leanings.
I could stop there. But it goes so much deeper than this for me, it’s a deep annoyance with this “paranoid mother” social milieu that’s pushing this stuff. I’ve been watching the GMO debate for a while. And it’s full of rhetoric. I basically agree with this guy:

Meanwhile, the anti-GMO argument goes more like “it’s icky” as demonstrated by this well-rehearsed 13-year old:

And it doesn’t end there. It’s one kid after another paraded in front of the camera, begging on behalf of their paranoid mothers. And it goes further. It’s one conflation after another. Monsanto opposes it. GMO farming is big agribusiness which is bad for the environment. And a bunch of other reasons I really can’t think of nor care to right now.
Thing is, people aren’t opposed to curbing Monsanto’s power, or making big agribusiness more sensitive to the environment. But none of those things have anything to do with labeling GMOs.
I could go on and on, but I won’t. I’ll just say this:
Look, you have a right to know what’s in your food, it’s true. You have a right to buy gluten-free organic non-GMO vegan food produced in ground plowed by unicorns under a full-moon in mid-april and irrigated with Fijian artesian water. Work with the farmers you like to develop some trusted labeling system so you can live your perfect little ultra-food lifestyle.
But none of these things have any demonstrated effect on our health. Food is food. Your body grinds it up, breaks it down, and rebuilds it. It doesn’t matter what the original form was. Everything else is in your head, as far as the rest of the world and I are concerned. Leave the rest of us out of your games, don’t force the rest of us to to deal with your fantastic understanding of food.