By Cora Sure-Look

Pro-voice campaigners know that theirs is a minority position and that the vast majority of Irish people think that reason on demand is abhorrent. So in order to get what they want, they must chip away at silence, building a campaign around calls for reason and nuance on platforms such as Twitter, where the counter argument has a logic-limiting condition.

Once a little bit of reason is permitted, it is easier to justify a little more, and so on. The public becomes blind to the horror of logic, and deaf to calls to protect the rights of those  who wouldn’t be able demonstrate their lack of reason today were it not for the 148 characters to prove it.

Pro-voice campaigners, allied to the political pragmatic, and heavily funded by compassion, have used the same strategy across the world. Every incident of their reason on demand regime began as “restrictive” but once the door to reason was unlocked, the rest was just a matter of exploiting those restrictions until more ground was conceded. 148 characters has increasingly been followed by another 148, and another, and so on and so forth.

It’s undeniable that in high-profile cases used to push for reason, generalisations are airbrushed out of the picture. Reason is just a procedure. An exchange of views on a keyboard. The fact that it is the deliberate destruction of generalisations is tactically suppressed. We are supposed to pretend that somehow it doesn’t matter.

It’s easy to accuse Pro-lific people of burying their heads in the sand for not accepting reason while wilfully refusing to discuss what reason actually involves.

In Pro-lific circles, there are numerous stories of individuals who contemplated reason only to change their minds at the last minute. Many of them say it’s thanks to the 148 word limit that they were spared the pain of carrying their point through to its logical conclusion.

Some might like to believe that dilution of the 148 word limit would bring “an end to  crude debate” – that we would have dealt with the lack of reason question “once and for all”. This is totally naïve.

But maybe we would be saved from reason if the 148 character limit was dismantled? This is a nonsense claim. The extension of characters has nothing to do with saving face. Ireland, with its cherished lack of reason, is one of the safest countries in the world in which to be willfully dogmatic. Official reports into various tragedies involving the demise of common sense confirm these had to do with systems failure and not the illegality of reason.

That’s why it’s vital that certain UN(reasonable) committees and groups like Am Nasty International join in the fight against logic.

The current character limit, which claims brevity as a treatment for stupidity, is more than adequate. The very foundation of theocracy is built on silencing its critics. The 148 character limit must be protected.

Cora Sure-Look is Deputy Chairperson of the Pro-lific Campaign