Wolf whistles offend some but killing the unborn does not.  One such person is Princeton philosophy professor Elizabeth Harman who was offended by this billboard.  She posted it on Facebook, someone blogged about it, which then prompted Holly Kearl, founder of the Washington-based organization “Stop Street Harassment” to start a petition drive to have it removed.  And, sure enough, the mall management agreed to remove it.

According to Miss Kearl’s website, street harassment is “catcalls, sexually explicit comments, sexist remarks, groping, leering, stalking, public masturbation, and assault. Most women (more than 80% worldwide) and LGBQT [by the way, I have no idea what the “Q” stands for] folks will face gender-based street harassment at some point in their life. Street harassment limits people’s mobility and access to public spaces. It is a form of gender violence and it’s a human rights violation. It needs to stop.”

And these women somehow equate public masturbation (something I encountered on more than one occasion when I lived in NY) and assault with this dopey billboard?  It’s absolutely ridiculous.

But, I want to get back to Prof. Harman who started the brouhaha about the “offensive” billboard.

This is the same Prof. Harman’s who wrote a paper on “Creation Ethics:  The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion” in which she espouses the “Actual Future Principle,” which says, “an early fetus that will become a person has some moral status.  An early fetus that will die while it is still an early fetus has no moral status.”  In that paper she says, “I believe that nothing morally significant happens in an early abortion” and concludes, “while there is nothing wrong with having an abortion on a whim, there is something gravely wrong with allowing a pregnancy to continue without moral deliberation.”

Then in 2008, at a symposium, “Is It Wrong to End Early Human Life” at Princeton, she compared unborn babies with plants, “Look, when we think about ending an early human life, this is something that is really bad for the embryo or early fetus that dies, it’s losing out tremendously—I agree with that as I already said. And then you said that it’s one of the things that we should care about. And, um, I think that I should have said before that I think it’s really dangerous to slide from noticing that something is bad for something, to thinking that that gives us a moral reason. And just to prove that that doesn’t follow, think about plants. So lots of things are bad for trees, and plants, and flowers, and often that gives us no reasons whatsoever, certainly no moral reasons. In my view, fetuses that die before they’re ever conscious really are a lot like plants: They’re living things, but there’s nothing about them that would make us think that they count morally in the way that people do.”

So, Prof. Harman (thank God I’m not in school anymore), on the one hand, is offended by a billboard about wolf whistles which she claims is an affront to her dignity, but, on the other hand, won’t recognize the dignity which should be afforded to an unborn child who she equates to a plant.

I wonder if proponents of abortion ever feel lucky that their parents didn’t believe in abortion.

Prof. Harman’s stupidity is offensive to me and her status as a professor lecturing young people is shocking.  To whom do I complain?

I don’t get it, but if you do, God bless you.