This is the Tangle Sunday Edition, a brief roundup of our independent politics coverage plus some extra features for your Sunday morning reading.
What the right is doodling.
What the left is doodling.
Reader essay.
Tyler Beal was brought up as a Miami Dolphins fan in rural Montana. Appreciation for football and following his father’s team was part of his upbringing, but he never really appreciated the heritage of the 1972 undefeated season that Dolphins fans like him inherited. That is until he read Marshall Jon Fisher’s Seventeen and Oh. From the reading the book he learned more that about just the Miami Dolphins, but about his father, the values he was raised with, the history of violence the sport is steeped in, and the backdrop of racial tension that the 1970s Dolphins existed against. Read the piece here!
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Reader review.
In our piece about the Alabama IVF ruling, we didn’t really get into the philosophical debate about when life begins, other than to say that prosecuting killed embryos resulting from the IVF process seemed consistent with the pro-life belief that life begins at conception. Commenter DAK gave his argument for why he disagrees:
The logic behind the ruling is frankly wacky and strongly damages the reputation of the pro-life movement by making it seem somewhat extreme or radical. When a sperm cell combines with an egg cell (putting it simply), the egg is given the second set of instructions to have the capacity to build a human. When it's within a human (or special lab settings) it will grow, and it can be argued that since it's in a trajectory to becoming a child it deserves human rights.
However, a frozen embryo outside the human body, by itself, cannot become a child by its own means. This is impossible. There is no trajectory of it becoming a child, because it is dormant. It can never, will never, be a child in this state. It must be intentionally grown.
If I hand you a seed and say "this is a flower" you'd look at me strangely because, no, it's not. But if I hand you a newly growing plant and say "this is a flower" you'd see it as fact because it's growing to become one. A seed isn't a flower just because it's capable of one day maybe being one if I place it in the right conditions, that's ludicrous.