@blatham,
Thank you. We are coming down out of the clouds of occasionally vapid abstractions and down to families of concrete issues.
You make some judgments about the relative merit or harm between requiring people and groups to buy insurance covering abortions and requiring women seeking abortions to uderego medical exams, and later an assertion of the equivalence (moral?) between requiring an unwilling woman to have an abortion and denying one to another who wants one. You don't state the standards on which these judgments are made, but I believe both are arguable, both ethically and morally. Abortion involves destroying, as a minimum, what will become a human life, and doing so without the consent of that life. It is one thing to make abortion legal and available, but quite another to force someone with moral objections to it to participate. For a woman seeking an abortion a medical exam no more intrusive than the procedure she seeks, hardly seems like anything more intrusive than denying the religious and moral rights of another. In the second instance denying the right to an abortion is hardly the equivalent of requiring one for someone unwilling to sacrifice the life within her. I have a hard time grasping the moral/ethical standard that might support your judgments here, but if you care to define one, I'll think about it seriously.
In these areas I believe tolerance is a virtue. Access to abortion should exist, but democratic government should have some ability to regulate it as it already does generally equivalent activities, and no one should be forced to participate in it against their consciences.
Calling an idea "religious right's agitprop: and refusing to discuss it is much like .... how shall I say it ? ... the worst behavior of intolerent religious zealots.
I like our constitution and all it implies ... individual freedom; strictly defined and limited Federal government powers; the separation and balance of powers of the three branches of that government; the reservation of powers not assigned to the Federal government to the states and the people. If you want to call that a form of social organization that's OK with me. However, I am not in favor of bypassing the prescribed method of changing that constitution or of misusing the powers of the Federal government to create a materially different one (or social organization if you prefer).
I would be quite OK with the resurgance of a political party advocating a Marxist view of the world. (You haven't seen me calling for any suppression of Bernie Sanders have you?) The only justification for our former limitations on and investigations of the (then legal) Communist Party USA was that it was (and was later shown to be ) a tool of a truly dangerous and hostile external Power, the USSR. Without that it should have been left alone to whither and die. The same goes for Nazis and White (or Black) supremicists. In the first place, absent a cooperating hostile external power, these things are self, limiting. In the second we can't suppress them without endangering our own freedoms.
I believe the intensity of the accusatiuons of partisanship and non-cooperation on the part of Democrats and Republicans have been about equal and that both have ample justification for it. I think you are vastly overdramatizing a meeting you didn't attend (and believe that noting that was not sleazy at all), and note that the collision that ensued was already forecast in the rhetoric of both parties in the election. It was the day-to-day actions of the two parties over the past seven years that sustained the polarization and provided both sides with all the justification they sought -- it takes two to tango - or fight.
You appear to have a fairly low threshold of indignation... sometimes a bit shrill and indicating more emotion than the matter merits (in my view at least). Perhaps that comes from too much exposure to soap opera-like recounting of daily events and 'he said; she said' (or tweeted) stuff of political reportage and blogs. A lot of that stuff is repetitive and ephemeral. I probably frequent it too little, as you suggested. However I think you do it too much.
I am not a "know nothing", as the historical allusion goes, and I think you know that.
