Showing posts with label abortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abortion. Show all posts

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Gender, Abortion & Rand Paul's Handling of the MSM



Rand Paul is now officially in the race for President. The attacks from the left have commenced. One, Paul is mean to women. Two, let's try to get Paul in a corner on the abortion issue.

The left seems to have their knickers in a bunch over the latest salvo in the war on women. The headline from Salon: “No no no no no no no no: Listen!” He-man Rand Paul lectures a lady — again. From Washington Post, it's Rand Paul's problem with female interviewers just cropped up again. Really? The left's going to play the victim card now when a Republican gets testy with a reporter in an interview if the reporter happens to be female? This would be the same left that spends their days and nights bemoaning a supposed lack of gender equality and looks upon the slightest hint of chivalry as yet another example of white male patriarchy?

Here's the video clip:



The interviewer, Savannah Guthrie, is, in fact, editorializing as part of a question, and the editorial is not favorable to Rand Paul. Paul's not having it, so he stops her in mid-question. In all fairness to both parties, Guthrie is doing what reporters should be doing, and Paul is perfectly within his rights to contest it. Frankly, Paul should be the example for how everyone on the right should be treating the MSM these days.

But apparently the left wants now to complain because Rand was mean to a lady. The hypocrisy is mindnumbing. If a woman is going into professions such as the law, politics, or journalism, their arguments are owed no deference because of their gender. This is the left trying to create a mountain out of a molehill, and I suspect this complaining has less to do with Rand Paul's lack of deference to a female member of the MSM than it does with battlespace prep for Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Update: This from Ann Althouse's post, The Rand Paul Has Problems With Women Meme:

But even for those of us who don't want special sensitivity to women and who think it will hurt women's opportunities — in journalism, in politics, and elsewhere — we observe how well women are treated with an understanding of what has gone on in the past when women were subordinated and diminished and dissuaded from entering the fray. . . . With that background understanding, what is objectively equal treatment may feel unequal.

Of course, it's also true that Rand Paul has his opponents who will use whatever works, and I fully expect them to accuse him of sexism whenever they can now. Once it's a meme, that's how it goes. If he remains "short tempered and testy," whatever hits women will be highlighted as Rand Paul's problem with women. If he manages to take the edge off, because he's trying "to get better," what niceness is aimed at women will be characterized as patronizing and even exclusionary. His opponents will want to box him in. Whatever he does will be wrong.

Update: Fox News ladie Dana Perino think this will play poorly for Rand Paul, while Megyn Kelly feels otherwise and indeed, takes offense at this effort from the left to "protect" the ladies, finding that in and of itself sexist.

But that is not all Rand Paul is in the news for today. A reporter in the interview below (at the 8:00 mark) asked Rand Paul to state his specific position on exemptions for abortion. Paul's response is probably the perfect one:



Allahpundit at Hot Air notes:

And this is no idle tu quoque. The great majority of Americans oppose late-term abortion; the vast majority, maybe a unanimous majority at this point, of Democratic leaders support it without restriction. They are, without exaggeration, absolute fanatics on this subject. And proudly so. . . .

Obama feels no differently. Neither does Nancy Pelosi, who’s gone as far as to use the word “sacred” when discussing her feelings on this topic. Paul’s response should be a stock answer for any GOP candidate who gets a question on a third-rail social issue going forward: We’ll weigh in just as soon as Hillary Clinton does. Want to know what Marco Rubio thinks about abortion exceptions? No problem — just as soon as Hillary tells us when life begins. Want to hear Ted Cruz’s take on gay marriage? He’d be happy to provide it — just as soon as Hillary answers a simple question about how many genders she thinks there are. The wedge question should cut both ways this campaign, whether the media likes it or not.

Well done, Rand Paul.

For the record, abortion is not and should not be a Constitutional issue. The decision to adopt it as such in Roe v. Wade was pure judicial activism and, by imposing their own personal morality under the guise of a "penumbra" of a Constitutional right, the Courts created a horrendous political divide in this country. It was an issue of social policy falling outside the text of the Constitution, and by the 10th Amendment, was a decision to be left to the individual state's to decide. Personally, if asked to weigh in on the issue at state level, I would allow abortion through the first two trimesters. That is a moral, ethical and pragmatic question for the mother. It becomes a societal issue, however, once the baby would be viable outside of the womb. Late term abortions are nothing more than murder.





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Saturday, March 28, 2015

Un-Reason-able Science



Reason magazine has published the first anti-Republican science based hit piece of the 2016 campaign season, taking the Republicans to task for being "anti-science." Let's take a look at the seven areas Reason examines and their criteria for grading Republicans in those areas.

Three of the areas Reason uses and their criteria for grading are unobjectionable: whether a candidate has shown support for storage of nuclear waste at Yucca mountain, whether he has shown support for vaccinations, and whether he has shown support for GMO crops. I take no issue with looking at those areas or the criteria Reason applies.

The next four issues are problematic indeed.

1. Did the Republican support either quarantine for people, especially medical practitioners, returning from Ebola stricken countries or a temporary ban on travel with those countries. If so, than Reasons gives a failing grade.

Reasons Explanation: [An article predicted that there would only be a small outbreak of Ebola in the U.S., and that is what happened. Regardless,] panicked politicians began ordering quarantines of U.S. health care workers who returned from treating Ebola cases in West Africa. Some pols demanded a ban on commercial air travel from the region. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opposed such a travel ban, cogently arguing that it would be counterproductive to efforts to stamp out the epidemic.

Comment: Nothing has been more devastating to humanity than epidemics. The most recent major pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918, took the lives of upwards of an estimated one hundred million people. Ebola, for which there is no cure, has in some strains a mortality rate several times that of the Spanish Flu and double that of the Black Plague that carried off half the population of Europe in the 14th century. Ebola was and still is raging out of control in several African nations, according to a Feb. 11, 2015 WHO Report. According to a December, 2014 NBC Report, healthcare workers in the country seeing the greatest outbreak of Ebola are at a 100% increased risk of contacting the disease as compared to the general population. Ebola has on average a 21 day gestation period and tests are negative until several days after a person becomes symptomatic and contagious. And, despite initial claims that Ebola could not be transmitted through the air, those claims subsequently were proven false.

Those are the science facts. Whether to quarantine under those conditions and the efficacy of restricting travel were and are political questions. Reason is conflating political decisions of the left with science.

2. Does the Republican contest climate change? If so, than Reasons gives a failing grade.

Reason's Explanation: "On the issue of climate change, all temperature data sets agree that the last decade has been the warmest one in the instrumental temperature record. All the records agree that the planet has warmed since 1979 at a rate of somewhere between +0.16 and +0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) reports temperature trends derived from satellite measurements and concludes that "climate models cannot explain this warming if human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are not included as input to the model simulation."

Comment: According to the temperature records, and indeed, according to the single best record that we have, satellite data, our planet has not experienced any statistically significant warming in the past 18 years. Given that the theory of man made global warming is predicated on the simple belief, written into computer models, that our temperatures will go up in direct proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide we pump into the air, and given that there has been a lot of carbon dioxide released in the past eighteen years, that ought to lead everyone to at least question the validity of the theory of global warming.

There is little about the global warming theory that should give one any confidence, including the repeated tampering with the land based temperature records. The "instrumental temperature record" only exists since 1880. Whether our planet is warming in an unusual fashion requires observations going back several millennia before 1880. And indeed, by all accounts, the Medieval Warm Period was warmer planet wide than our current warming -- and that was clearly not due to increases in carbon dioxide output by man. Nor is the fact that we have been warming in any way surprising, since the planet is recovering from a Little Ice Age. And lastly, it is interesting, is it not, that Reason would pick the year 1979, 36 years ago, from which to calculate a ten year average until today for increases in ten year average temperatures. They couldn't possibly be gaming the system by cherry picking a particular year with an unusually low temperature as a start point, could they. What disingenuous people.

Reason has it backwards. To embrace man-made global warming theory at this point is an act of blind faith. It is a rejection of science, which requires the constant reevaluation of assumptions in light of new data.

3. Does the Republican support further restrictions on abortion? If so, than Reasons gives a failing grade.

Reason's Explanation: "Pro-life activist groups like the Family Research Council claim that fetuses feel pain after 20 weeks of gestation. This claim has been used by such anti-abortion proponents as a justification for declaring that states have a "compelling interest" in limiting abortions after that period. The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, for example, was introduced in Congress most recently in January, 2015; it would impose such a limit nationally. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reviewed the scientific evidence and determined that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester (24 weeks). Ultimately, the controversy over fetal pain isn't about the scientific debate as much as it's about how people feel about the morality of abortion."

Comment: Reason doesn't even try to hide the ball here. They take the fact that it is groups who are opposed to abortion who have highlighted the science showing fetal pain at and after 20 weeks, then dismissed the findings by concentrating solely on the moral stand of the anti-abortion groups. Leaving aside that the methods used to conduct late term abortions are so horrendous that they could not possibly, in any way, survive an 8th Amendment challenge if used as methods to execute adults, and even accepting that the science suggesting fetal pain is contested, to dismiss the science and claim that anyone who believes that fetal pain is felt after 20 weeks is anti-science, that's just a disingenuous non-sequitur.

4. And then the old leftie favorite, has the Republican embraced creationism? If so, than Reasons gives a failing grade

Reason's Explanation: "Many object that candidates' views about evolution are irrelevant, since they will not be making public policy about it. Nevertheless, how a candidate thinks about evolution provides an indication of their overall level of respect for scientific reasoning and evidence. Or else it shows that they are willing to set aside what they believe to be true in order to pander to voter ignorance and prejudice. That tells you something about a candidate too."

Comment: Is there evidence in any of the 'tested' candidates individual backgrounds to make such an extrapolation valid? This is indeed irrelevant, but since it allows the left to assume an air of intellectual superiority, it is inevitably going to make it into every science based hit piece on Republican candidates from now until . . .

So the seven Republicans tested under Reason's suspect criteria were the potential presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush. How did they fare? According to Reason:

Ted Cruz - 3 Cruz failed their tests on Ebola, climate change, abortion and creationism. Actual score: 6 of 6

Rand Paul - 3 Paul failed their tests on Ebola, vaccinations and abortion. He passed their test on climate change. Actual score: 5 of 6

Marco Rubio - 3 Rubio failed their tests on Ebola, climate change, abortion and creationism. Actual score: 6 of 6

Jeb Bush - 2 Bush failed their tests on Ebola, climate change, Yucca Mtn., abortion and creationism. Actual score: 5 of 6

Scott Walker - 2 Walker failed their tests on Ebola, climate change and abortion. No answer on Yucca or creationism. Actual score: 4 of 4

Chris Christie - 2 Christie failed their tests on Ebola and creationism. He passed on climate change and has not stated a position on the other. Actual score: 2 of 4

So, other than Chris Christie's and Rand Paul's stances on climate change, Republican presidential hopefuls look quite strong in respect to their standing on science . . . actual science, at least, not Reason's unreasonable tests.





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Thursday, August 8, 2013

Kirsten Powers On Abortion, Wendy Davis & Crazy Nancy

Kirsten Powers is that rare left of center journalist with intellectual honesty. Her latest topic, the ignorance of Democratic women generally in their defense of abortion laws. And in particular, Ms. Powers focuses on two of the most ignorant, Wendy Davis and Crazy Nancy. This from Ms. Powers in the Daily Beast:

The Democratic star du jour was asked this week to explain the difference between the late-term abortions she fought to keep legal in Texas and the illegal killings by Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” she told the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who cornered her after her National Press Club speech on Monday.

This is incredible. After all, Davis is the state senator who held an 11-hour filibuster to fight legislation drafted in response to the abuses at Gosnell’s clinic. A passing knowledge of the case seems like basic due diligence.

She went on: “But I do know that [Gosnell] happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.” It takes real skill to pack so many falsehoods into so few words. . . .

At one point in his interview, McCormack asked Davis what she made of the fact a majority of women support late-term abortion bans. Davis told him, “I…think that a lot of people don’t really understand the landscape of what’s happening in that arena today and what an incredibly small percentage of procedures take place there.”

Actually, the people who “don’t really understand” the issue are the Democratic ladies crusading against laws the majority of the country supports.

Despite frequently mocking anti-abortion activists as anti-science know-nothings, abortion rights absolutists are the ones who play fast and loose with the facts of abortion. Because they are so rarely asked to defend their positions, Davis and her ilk apparently don’t feel the need to be informed. Follow-up questions to their strange and often empirically false statements are almost nonexistent, while offensive or misinformed comments from GOP back benchers are greeted with full-scale media hysteria.

John McCormack has been the dogged fly in the ointment here. On a noble quest to get a response to an eminently reasonable question, he has yet to get a straight answer. In June, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a press conference to condemn a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. McCormack asked her essentially the same question he asked Davis: “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth? Pelosi answered, “You’re probably enjoying that question a lot, I can see you savoring it.” This insulting nonsense inexplicably elicited laughter from some of the assembled reporters.

Pelosi then told an outright lie: “[The 20-week ban] would make it a federal law that there would be no abortion in our country.” No reporter questioned this absurdity, even though they’ve heard pro-abortion rights leaders assert a thousand times that “only” 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks. (For those who care, that’s “only” 18,000 late-term abortions each year.)

Pelosi then expressed outrage at the line of questioning, raised the fact she had five children in six years, and snapped, “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.” When you are pulling the Catholic card to defend your support of unrestricted late-term abortion, you’ve officially gone off the rails. . . .

Well, in all fairness, Pelosi has been certifiably insane for years. She is, I am convinced, incapable of intellectual honesty. There are many on the far left who seem likewise, with Debbie Wasserman Schultz being the most odious.

At any rate, my hats off to Ms. Powers for her intellectual honesty and holding both Democrats and the media to account on the abortion issue.

For the record, here are my positions on abortion.

Abortion is immoral at any point. However, if asked to vote on the issue, I would vote to allow that women still have safe access to abortions during the time frame when there is no question that a fetus is not viable outside the womb.

Making abortion a Constitutional right was one of the biggest mistakes the Supreme Court has ever made. It has utterly poisoned our national politics for decades. There was no basis whatsoever in the Constitution for the decision. I fully agree with the conservatives on the Supreme Court and its most liberal justice, Justice Ginsburg, that abortion is a question outside the Constitution and, thus, should have been left to states and localities.

Lastly, there is no question that once a fetus has any chance at being viable outside the womb, killing that fetus inside the womb or out is murder. It is murder both by the mother and physician involved, and should be treated as such at law.





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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

A Real Scandal

Today, the Obama administration dropped its right to appeal a judge's decision mandating that the Abortion Plan B pill be made available over the counter to underage girls without limitation - no prescription necessary, no need for parental consent. I've written on this before (see here and here). It is the left's war on the family and on religion. It is replacing parental discretion with the left wing government's judgement on how children should be raised, and it is furthering the left's goal of sexualizing our children. Of all the scandals coming out of Washington today, this one is the least noticed, yet the one with the greatest potential long term ramifications.

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Sunday, February 10, 2013

The Left's War On Religion & Family

The left has two goals - one, to imbue children with socialist morality and ethics (to the extent such can be said to exist) irrespective of how parents want to raise their children. The second is to drive its biggest competitor in the arena of ethics and morality, Christianity, from the public square (see A Historical Perspective On Religion & Obama's HHS Mandate). One area where these two goals converge for the left is in regards to sex.

In NYC, Mayor Bloomberg started a stealth program three years ago to freely dispense birth control drugs and the morning after "Plan B" abortion pill to NYC high school students. This was done without the knowledge or permission of the children's parents. After the program came to light, a FOIA request showed:

About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10, according to the newly released data. About 22,400 students sought reproductive care from January 2009 through last school year, records show.

This is a left wing government standing "in loco parentis," assuming the role of parents in deciding about how to address sex and abortion with their children. Parents are pushed wholly out of the loop on these critical issues. Moreover, in the way this is being handled, the state is promoting the sexualization of our children. Just as a practical matter, this a huge issue for the health of our children. If the Plan B pill was doled out 12,721 times last year, that shows a high number of teens having unprotected sex. The implications of that are frightening. According to the CDC:

An estimated 8,300 young people aged 13–24 years in the 40 states reporting to CDC had HIV infection in 2009. Nearly half of the 19 million new STDs each year are among young people aged 15–24 years.

On top of AIDS, we now have STD's that are becoming resistant to antibiotics. Anyone who has unprotected casual sex is playing Russian roulette. The Bloomberg solution is to pass out the Plan B abortion pill like candy and with no notice to the parents. Leave aside for the moment the moral and ethical issues associated with abortion that parents should have the absolute right to discuss with their children upon notice that they are sexually active. The fact is that while parents can't completely stop their children from having sex, notice would at least allow parents to drive home the point that having unprotected sex is very dangerous.

As to the moral and ethical issues associated with sex and, in particular, abortion, the left likes to pretend that they simply don't exist. One can trace a direct line from socialists of yore to Bloomberg's policies of today. In the U.S., Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, as a committed socialist, was a staunch proponent of consequence free sex and an implacable enemy of Christianity (all in addition to being a eugenicist). These things were not unique to Sanger, but rather an established part of the socialist blueprint in their war on religion and family. For instance, in a fascinating article on "cultural marxism" at the American Thinker, author Linda Kimball writes:

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.

And of course, it is not just teen sex. There has been no greater challenge to religion in our country than Obama's HHS mandate that requires employers to offer health plans that include free contraceptives and Plan B abortion pills. This would require not merely Church and affiliated employers to fund something to which their religion has been opposed since antiquity, but it would require private employers to violate their religious conscience (see Hobby Lobby). The failure to comply would result in massive penalties that would drive quasi religious institutions and businesses owned by Christians out of existence. It is hard to imagine any more of a direct attack on the ability of Americans to engage in the free exercise of religion, nor a plan more directly aimed at driving religious institutions and individuals out of our public and economic life.

If you have any doubt that this is a policy aimed directly at religion, understand that contraceptives are a nominal cost. Further, programs are already in place for women in the lower economic class to receive free contraception. This is not an HHS program aimed at solving a systemic problem for our nation's women as to either access to or affordability of contraceptives.

Obama's contraceptive / Plan B abortion pill mandate was recently made final in regulations issued by HHS. The regulations include the same accounting gimmick that Obama announced last year - that while all employers other than the Churches themselves would have to provide free contraceptives and abortion Plan B pills free to employees, in the case of quasi religious institutions, the employer would not have to pay for contraceptive/abortion aspects of the policy. Rather, their insurer would be required to provide the contraceptives and plan B pills "free of charge" to women. The response from the Catholic Church:

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Thursday rejected the latest White House proposal on health insurance coverage of contraceptives, saying it did not offer enough safeguards for religious hospitals, colleges and charities that objected to providing such coverage for their employees.

The bishops said they would continue fighting the federal mandate in court.

The late Andrew Breitbart's riason d' etre was that culture mattered - that it was in the culture wars that the left was working fundamental change to our nation. He was right. And there are no clearer examples of the left's war of cultural marxism on religion and family than the lefts push to sexualize our children, to drive parents from the decision making regarding their children as regards sex, and the left's push to drive religion and the religious out of our public and economic life. The stakes in this war are existential.





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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Planned Parenthood, Abortion & Feeding Off The Public Tit

Planned Parenthood is many things. First and foremost, it is our nation's largest abortion mill, performing 333,964 abortions last year.

Two, Planned Parenthood is a provider "sexual and reproductive health care." In addition to abortions, it engages in providing contraception, testing for STD's and for cervical cancer.

Three, Planned Parenthood is a far left advocacy organization, and indeed, it has been since its inception under Margaret Sanger, a deeply committed socialist with two goals. One, Sanger, a eugenicist, wanted to limit the number of children being born to blacks, and two, she wanted to remove from sex any hindrance of ethical and moral limits, as well as any physical consequence of pregnancy. She saw herself as a direct opponent of Christianity in our nation and actively sought to move religion from the public square.

Planned Parenthood was the recipient last year of "a record $542 million in taxpayer funding in the form of government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements," that accounting for 45% of their annual revenue. Like ACORN, the far left found a way to get one its primary advocacy organizations on the public dole in a huge way. As I've written before, the penchant of the Democrats for funneling hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to far left is one of the most corrupting aspects of our government and politics. No advocacy group, right or left, should be feeding off the public tit. That is doubly true for Planned Parenthood in consideration of the fact that Planned Parenthood is an abortion mill.

For years, it has been the law that federal funds cannot be used for abortion. That said, it is not hard to for Planned Parenthood to account for all federal funds as being used to fund everything but abortion - including overhead that allows it to do abortion in the first place.





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Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Abortion, Sonograms & The War On Women

Carolyn Jones has written a column in the Texas Observer about her experience under the new Texas law requiring a sonogram prior to having an abortion. She clearly considers the law a part of the "war on women."

Ms. Jones decided to abort a pregnancy after she found that the child had birth defects that would have, she tells us, required "life time medical care" and left the child "in pain." Curiously, precisely what the child's condition was, Ms. Jones seemingly takes pains not to specify. Irrespective, Ms. Jones does have my sympathy for finding that her unborn child had birth defects.

What is utterly ludicrous and disgusting is Ms. Jones's melodramatic recounting of the "ordeal" of having to undergo a sonogram and see the life she held in her womb prior to having the abortion. This short, non-invasive procedure, designed to make apparent the moral implications of abortion, is, according to Ms. Jones, nothing less than "torment." Fortunately, her "ordeal" was somewhat ameliorated by the good people at Planned Parenthood, whom she describes with a varying list of positive adjectives, from 'compassionate' and 'warm' to 'sympathetic' and 'professional.'

When told by the Planned Parenthood staff that she would have to have the sonogram per Texas law prior to the abortion, Ms. Jones tells us that she replied:

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.”

How much of a narcissistic, amoral if not immoral individual do you have to be to near hysterically center on 'your pain' and not the life that you are about to extinguish. But the extremes of melodrama were not done.

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart...”

I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident. . . .

What it all boils down to is this - the far left, and most definitely Ms. Jones - do not want any moral considerations associated with abortion. This is part of the reason why the left is an implacable enemy of religion and any continuing role for Christian morality in the public square. They want an omnipotent government to be the sole moral arbiter, and abortion is one of the tools through which they are trying to accomplish that goal. And indeed, Ms. Jones goes so far as to cast her freedom from morality as a right. Ms. Jones does not believe that the state has any role in furthering the sanctity of life.

It is important to note that the Texas law, as currently interpreted, does not require a woman carrying a child with significant birth defects to undergo a sonogram prior to the decision to abort. The rule was so new at the time that Ms. Jones went for her abortion that Planned Parenthood went ahead with the sonogram out of an abundance of caution. But Ms. Jones makes absolutely clear that it is the sonogram for any woman seeking an abortion to which she objects. And as she says in conclusion to her screed:

[W]hat good is the view of someone who has never had to make your terrible choice? What good is a law that adds only pain and difficulty to perhaps the most painful and difficult decision a woman can make? Shouldn’t women have a right to protect themselves from strangers’ opinions on their most personal matters? Shouldn’t we have the right not to know?

What immoral arrogance. Countless people have been faced with pregnancies of children that they knew had birth defects. But Ms. Jones's point goes far beyond that, to every woman who is pregnant and considers abortion.

Abortion snuffs out a human life. Shouldn't the people of our nation, acting through the state, have the right to insure that the woman who makes the decision to abort at least understands the moral implications of that decision? Ms. Jones casts this as heinous. What is truly heinous is the belief of Ms. Jones and her ilk, who devalue human life and see in abortion no moral issue at all. A 10 minute sonogram under the Texas law is not part of a "war on women." It is Ms. Jones and her ilk who are in the midst of a war on religion and morality in the U.S. And that war goes beyond abortion. It is for the heart and soul of our nation. Pick your side.





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Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Gov. Granholm Goes Wild With Her Claims Of A War On Women

What an utterly disgusting and intellectually dishonest person Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is. She has taken to Politico to decry the "war on women" being carried out by evil Republicans. Granholm claims that Virginia's decision to require pre-abortion ultra-sounds, the defunding by some states of Planned Parenthood, and Rush's crass description of Sandra Fluke add up to an all out Republican War on "women's rights." Her arguments are disingenuous at best - and she omits any mention of the elephant in the room, Obama's HHS mandate that all employers fund free contraception and abortion plan B pills for all female employees.

Granholm first attacks Virginia's recent passage of a law requiring women to view an abdominal ultrasound before undergoing abortions. The sole purpose of the law is to insure that the women opting to undergo an abortion understand that they will be destroying a human life. For Granholm, this is exhibit one in the evil Republican "war on women." A 10 minute ultrasound hardly seems to be a "war on women," but to Granholm, who is apparently an advocate of abortion on demand without any moral considerations, any state action that would require nothing more than a woman face the morality of her actions is both "demeaning" and "unnecessary."

Granholm's next argument is that any state that acts to defund Planned Parenthood of our tax dollars is likewise conducting a war on "women's health." Granholm neglects to mention the fact that Planned Parenthood is a radical left wing organization pushing a far left social agenda of sex without physical consequence or moral considerations. Granholm likewise neglects to mention that Planned Parenthood, even though it receives vast tax dollars, is also our nation's largest provider of abortion services. They do so under the canard that the money used to provide abortions is separate and apart from taxpayer funding.

What is really going on is that the Obama administration shares the goals of Planned Parenthood and is intent on that organization receiving our tax dollars funneled through the states via Title X. Two recent examples paint this clearly. When New Hampshire voted to remove Planned Parenthood from the list of eligible recipients for Title X funds, the Obama Administration actually stepped in and gave a $1 million dollar no-bid contract with Planned Parenthood of New England. When Texas voted to provide Title X funds only to organizations that do not provide abortions, the Obama administration took the step of withholding all Title X funds for women's health from the state. What this dust up is about is not a war on women's health, it is a war being waged by the left to insure that one of their most sacred cows, one that fully pushes their social agenda, Planned Parenthood, continues to get fat on tax payer dollars. Yet Granholm, ignoring all of this, claims that this focus on Planned Parenthood amounts to "sexual McCarthyism." The reality is that this is Granholm and the Obama administration Komenizing the states that refuse to fund Planned Parenthood.

Lastly, Granholm claims:

Rush Limbaugh did more than insult a law student with his diatribe about Sandra Fluke; his words revealed a mind-set about women. Republicans have been chanting that they want to “take our country back.” Sure they do … back in time. Back to the good old days when women didn’t have the opportunities for personal and professional advancement that they do now.

What a disingenous ass this woman is. Not a single word has been mentioned by any Republican of reducing women's opportunities in any profession in any way. Not a single Republican has advanced the proposition that contraception should not be available to women under Title X. So how can Granholm make this outrageous charge?

Republicans are doing this by waging a war against contraceptive choice. Not just abortion, but birth control in general — the very thing that set women free to pursue equality in the first place. Studies have shown that since women have had access to the pill and family planning measures, they have made huge gains in both wages and in careers that were dominated by men. Which is why we’re seeing an outpouring of outrage from women. The legislation being advanced threatens those gains.

Granholm's last argument is cause and effect - that only access to the pill has made women able to succeed in the job market. That is ridiculous. The great societal change that began with "first wave feminism," then WWII with women working outside the home and finally the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, are what have allowed women to achieve parity with men in the workforce. Without those changes, every pill in the world would be meaningless. Granholm's argument is akin to saying that because dew forms on the grass at about the time the sun rises, that one causes the other.

As to her other argument, how can Granholm possibly portray anything that anyone on the right has done as an attack on "contraceptive choice." If her problem is with limiting funding of Planned Parenthood, which it implicitly is, the only way that argument could be valid is if there were no other organizations that could meet the requirements of Title X - and that is an absurdity.

Granholm, like virtually all on the left, is an intellectually dishonest person. The only war going on here is the HHS mandate, which is a war on the First Amendment religious rights of all Americans, not merely the Catholic Church. It is a deeply cynical, election year war being waged by Obama to reduce religion in the public square and to create the illusion that he is championing "women's rights" against evil Republicans. Yet the HHS mandate is the one issue Granholm manages to ignore. That alone tells you all you need to know about this piece of partisan excreta.





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Thursday, March 8, 2012

Morality, Infanticide & The "Culture War"

What does morality look like when it has become unmoored from the Judeo Christian ethic? Here is one example:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life.’

This should not be shocking. Historically, infanticide was an accepted practice in many cultures and, indeed, was part of several pagan religions. most notably the cult of Moloch. It was only with the growth of Judaism and, ultimately, Christianity that the practice fell out of favor in the West.

But the socialist left has long been intent on destroying the Judeo Christian underpinnings of our society. When that happens, it is the few people in power who decide what is to be deemed moral and immoral, what is to be deemed acceptable and what is to be deemed punishable, Never in history has any wholly secular moral code claimed the sanctity of individual human life as its defining characteristic. As Lenin said in a speech in 1920, after declaring that socialists should have no "belief in God," and that they should reject morality based on Christian traditions, he opined that "morality is entirely subordinated" to the interests of the state.

It is the man-made morality of the socialist left that resulted in the slaughter of over 100 million people in the 20th century. In the far left's secular view of the life, there is no soul, nor is there any threat of punishment or reward after life on earth. Thus individual life has no intrinsic worth and its value is defined in purely pragmatic and relativistic terms. Maintaining the power of the state and attempting to meet utopian ideals takes precedence over individual life. Call it the culture wars or whatever you like, but the dominant theme of our lifetime is the struggle between those who would keep our nation based in the Judeo Christian tradition and those who would substitute government as our nation's moral arbiter. The left has been engaged in this war through the Courts for over the last half century, and now, with Obama in power, they are forcing it through our nation's regulations.

Make no mistake, this culture war is at the heart of the HHS mandate being foisted on America by Obama. It is a mandate that has nothing to do with the availability of contraception to women - its already available at minimal to, in some cases, no cost - and everything to do with, at once, harming religion and, simultaneously, furthering the secular left's amoral views of sex. The genesis of the HHS mandate is from the same leftist wellspring that gives us an argument for infanticide.

Because the left's war on religion in America has been so protracted and incremental, not many people realize the fundamental changes being wrought to the character of our nation, nor, unfortunately, do many people know where these changes logically lead. Far too many people yawn at the "culture war," having no idea just what is really at stake. It is a battle for the heart and, ironically enough, the "soul" of our nation.







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Sunday, February 12, 2012

A Historical Perspective On Religion & Obama's HHS Mandate



This is the third part of a three part essay. Part 1 examined the original intent of the Founders in passing the Free Exercise clause. Part 2 looked at the current state of the law surrounding that clause.

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The first thing to understand about the Department of Health and Human Services’ birth-control mandate, and the last, is that it is an assault on both faithful Christians and the Constitution by leftists who consider themselves at “war” — their word — with bourgeois America. It has nothing to do with guaranteeing access to contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients.

Andrew McCarthy, The Contraceptive Mandate’s Shaky Justification, NRO, 11 Feb. 2012

Virtually all laws, at least beyond those that are purely administrative or relating to health and safety, are moral choices of one sort or another. They set the outer bounds of what is morally acceptable or required in our society. So it is no surprise that when Obama speaks of his latest mandate to require all health care plans to provide free contraception, sterilization and plan-B abortion for women, he does so in the language of morality – to fail to force this mandate on religious employers will, he says, “discriminate against women.”

For most of the past two millenium, the moral source of our laws in Western civilization has been the Judeo-Christian ethic. It has provided a stable and immutable framework for morality at the heart of Western civilization - one that places the greatest importance on the sanctity of individual human life. And, as many have noted, it likewise provided the basis for our nation:

Nineteenth century historians wrote extensively on the United States of America having a distinctively Protestant character in its outlook and founding political philosophy. . . .

The notion of a distinctive religious basis for American democracy and culture was first described and popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1840s, in his influential book, Democracy in America. In the second chapter, de Tocqueville describes America's unique religious heritage from the Puritans. His analysis showed the Puritans as providing the foundational values of America, based on their strong Hebrew Bible view of the world, which included fighting for earthly political justice, an emphasis on laws and education, and the "chosenness" which the Puritans identified with, giving them a sense of moral mission in founding America. As de Tocqueville observed, the Puritan's biblical outlook gave America a moral dimension which the Old World lacked. De Tocqueville believed these biblical values led to America's unique institutions of religious tolerance, public education, egalitarianism, and democracy.

And to the end of protecting religion in our country, our Founders wrote into the Bill of Rights that Congress could pass no law prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. As Thomas Jefferson wrote at the time, that meant that Congress's legislative power did not extend to “rights of conscience,” only to affirmative acts taken under the color of religion that threatened the peace. And as I have noted here, the Catholic Church teachings on artificial birth control and abortion have been doctrinal matters of conscience that far predate the signing of our Bill of Rights and, indeed, extend back into antiquity.

Ironically, almost at the same time as Jefferson and Madison were crafting our First Amendment, half a world away, Christianity's mortal enemy, socialism, was being born in the crucible of the French Revolution. One of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy. As recounted at the American Spectator:

The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism's final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the "guts of the last king."

Socialism is a radical ideology that sprang up largely in response to the ills of the industrial revolution. The goal of socialism is to deconstruct traditional Western society and remake it under the auspices of an omnipotent government that would use its police powers to create a new order of ostensible social and economic equality. Socialists replace God with government as the source of morality. As one particularly observant commentor at Legal Insurrection recently opined:

In any left revolution, be it progressive, bolshevik, socialist, fascist, maoist, or bolivaran, it is necessary to knock down organized religion. The Catholic Church competes for the hearts and minds of people and does so effectively, as do the evangelical Protestant churches, etc. Further, the Church is organized and so can put out a message of opposition. So at some point the revolution has to take the Church on, or lose.

And yet another immutable truth of history is that, as socialist governments fully consolidate power, they invariably devalue individual human life. Much of the 20th century's history is written in the blood of over 100 million people slaughtered as part of socialist experiments.

Sixty years after the French Revolution, Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." Lenin, the father of the Soviet Union's bloody experiment in Communism, wrote in 1905, “The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth.” Lenin further noted that “every socialist is, as a rule” an “atheist.” And Hitler himself was of like mind - "“National Socialism and Christianity cannot co-exist together."

And lest there be any doubt, there was Dutch socialist philosopher, Anton Pannekoek, who wrote in a 1907 essay - interesting in part for its incredibly naive belief in an incipient socialist utopia:

The socialist teachings have inoculated the laboring class with an entirely new conception of the world. The realization, that society is in a process of continual transformation, and that misery, poverty, exploitation, and all the suffering of the present are only temporary and will soon yield to an order of society, to be inaugurated by his class, in which peace, abundance, and fraternity shall reign, this realization must revolutionize the whole world conception of the laborer from the ground up. The theory of socialism furnishes the scientific foundation for this world conception. Political economy teaches us to understand the internal laws, which move the capitalist process, while historical materialism lays bare the effects of the economic revolution upon the conceptions and actions of people. And this stands irreconcilably opposed, as a materialistic doctrine, to religion.

Socialism arrived on U.S. shores in the mid 1870's. One of its early adherents was the father of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Ms. Sanger, in a 1915 speech to the Fabian Society in London, described her father as “one of the early pioneers of Socialist thought” and noted that she herself was “rocked in the cradle of socialism.”

Sanger ultimately established Planned Parenthood to promote both contraception and abortion. As to abortion, Sanger, a nurse by training who worked among New York City's poor at the turn of the 20th century, saw many poor women suffering from “dangerous and illegal abortions.” In part motivated to help these women, and in part because she was a eugenicist who wanted to limit the birth rate of blacks, she became the leading advocate for abortion.

Sanger's motivation in pushing contraception overlapped with her motives for advocating abortion, but also went far beyond. She wanted to remove from sex any hindrance of ethical and moral limits, and, in order to promote sex among women, make sex free of the physical consequence of pregnancy.

[Sanger judged] the necessity of breaking down the "codes that have surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the prohibitions of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society."

As a consequence, Sanger became a direct opponent of Christianity, especially the Catholic faith, for the Church was the greatest obstacle opposing the release of the "dynamic energy" of sexuality, and such obstruction for Sanger was "nothing less than foolhardy."

"Instead of laying down hard and fast laws of sexual conduct, instead of attempting to inculcate rules and regulations," as the Church had done, "the teacher of Birth Control seeks to meet the needs of the people," she wrote.

Neither Sanger nor socialism itself was part of the original feminist movement. That movement concerned itself with seeking equality before the law for women, as well as securing their right to vote. The feminist movement didn't become radicalized until American socialists adopted feminism in the 1950's and 1960's and, along with American socialism's than recent adoption of the civil rights movement, made radical feminism part of their raison d'etre. It was then that Sanger's goals and ideas became mainstream as part of the “second,” and now “third wave” of the radicalized feminist movement.

The black civil rights movement, though co-opted and bastardized by the socialists in the 1960's, was long supported by the right - indeed, far more so than by the left. Likewise, gender equality and the right of women to be free from discrimination saw bipartisan support. So to the extent that calls for greater protections in these areas were mainstreamed, our nation was able to affirmatively act on them in the 1960's.

(Just as an aside, let me add here that the Socialist left in the U.S. has, in the past two decades, added others to their stable of victim classes that seek to drive Christianity and Judaism from their place in America - the far left wing of the gay rights activists and the political Islamists who dream of a world without Christians or Jews - or for that matter, gays or godless socialists.)

At any rate, the radical aspects of the socialist movement – attacks on religion, as well as pushing for unrestricted abortion and contraception, saw limited success at the ballot box through the mid-20th century. Consequently, socialists turned to the Courts to achieve what they could not through legislation.

In the mid-20th century, the American socialist left used the ACLU - an organization specifically formed to further socialism and communism - to bring a series of Court cases designed to remove religion from the public square and elevate the ethos articulated by Margaret Sanger. The socialists sought judicial activism – and by and large, the Courts complied. Though the Constitution says nothing about abortion or contraception, thus leaving the matters to the states and majority rule by default, the left asked the Court to enshrine abortion and contraception as federal Constitutional rights. Between 1965 (Griswold) and 1972 (Einstadt), the Supreme Court found a “right to privacy” in the “penumbras” of the Constitution such that access to contraception was made a Constitutional right. And then in 1973 (Roe), the Supreme Court, found the same for abortion.

As to religion, it has been under sustained attack by the socialist left through our Courts since 1947 (Everson). wherein the Supreme Court read the 1st Amendment clause prohibiting the federal government from establishing a national church to mean “a wall of separation between Church and State.” Where for almost two centuries there had been fairly substantial involvement of a generic Christianity in the public square, the Supreme Court, in a series of subsequent cases, changed that completely. In 1963 (Engle), the Court ruled prayer in school unconstitutional. In 1989 (Allegheny County), the Court ruled that a creche, prominently displayed in a Courthouse at Christmas, was unconstitutional. In 2005 (McCreary County), the Court held unconstitutional displays of the Ten Commandments in several Kentucky courthouses. But perhaps the biggest victory the left gained through the Court's was the 2002 decision in Lawrence v. Summers, a case seeking to hold Texas's laws against sodomy unconstitutional. Implicit in the holding of that case was a finding that Christian morality, standing alone, is no longer a “rational basis” to uphold our laws. The potential ramifications of that decision have not yet begun to be plumbed.

The election of Barack Obama brought to the White House the first true child of America's socialist movement. And though he nominally claims to be a Christian – he claims conversion not to the words of the bible, but to the political polemics of Rev. Jeremiah Wright – he has also publicly proclaimed that we are no longer a Christian nation. That was an aspirational statement at the time. It is difficult to believe that Obama's Christianity is anything other than a bare patina on his political ambitions.

Regardless, it is no surprise now to see Obama attempting to bring to fruition the socialist goal of weakening religion as an important force in America. With Obama in power, the socialist left has won at the ballot box and need not rely on the Courts, at least for the moment. Obama would see the Margaret Sanger's radical socialism become the moral underpinning of our laws, not merely as an alternative to Christianity as they exist now in our law, but over top of it. That is what Obama is doing with his HHS mandate to force all Christians, including Catholic institutions, to fund healthcare that will provide contraceptives, sterilizations, and plan-B abortion pills free to all women covered by the plan. And for Obama to portray this as a moral good – saying that to do anything else would be to discriminate against women – is simply obscene.

To direct this healthcare mandate at Christians is a raw power play, nothing more and nothing less. If Obama succeeds in this, then indeed, we really will have made the final push into a brave new world. The Courts have raised socialist ethos above religion as the basis of our laws, and now Obama intends to use the socialitst ethos to to significantly drive religion even further from its historic and Constitutionally protected role in our society. Obama's aspirational statement will be made good. For the first time in our history, we really will not be a Christian nation. This is a critical moment in our nation's history.

As I wrote in Part I of this three-part essay, the original intent of our Founding Fathers in passing the Free Exercise of Religion clause should protect the Church from Obama's mandate. And as I wrote in Part II of this essay, the current law surrounding the Free Exercise clause, would also likely find Obama's mandate unconstitutional, though it is far messier given the current state of the law. Let's hope that I am right.

Update: Greg, a former Catholic seminarian and now a history teacher who blogs at Rhymes With Right, believes the time is right for Pope Benedict XVI to respond to this assault on religion with a four part encyclical. Part 1 would be a statement of the proper roles of Church and State. Part 2 would be by-name excommunication of those Catholics supporting Obama's policy, starting with HHS Supervisor Kathleen Sebelius. Greg's suggested third part "ought to be a reminder to American Catholics of the importance of bringing their faith into the public square and voting booth." And lastly, "lest the encyclical be seen as a rejection of the whole idea of health care accessibility, there should be a fourth section reminding the faithful of the Church's continuing devotion to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy, and that it is for this reason that the many schools, hospitals, and agencies subject to the Obama regulation operate." It sounds eminently reasonable to me. Do visit his site and read the entire post.

Update: Kindly linked at Bookwormroom, Larwyn's Linx and Seraphic Secret.

Update: And kindly linked at the Watcher's Council for this week's nominations.







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Saturday, February 11, 2012

Obama Offers Catholics A Pure Smoke & Mirrors Accomodation

On Friday morning, the Obama administration responded to the furor raised by the mandate that all Catholic related institutions will have to fund healthcare plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and plan-B abortion pills. This from the USA Today:

President Obama announced a plan today that attempts to accommodate certain religious employers opposed to a rule that would require them to provide access to birth control for women free of charge.

Obama announced that the rule would be tweaked so that in cases where non-profit religious organizations have objections, insurance companies would be required to reach out to employees and offer the coverage directly. . . .

"Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive service no matter where they work," Obama said. "That core principle remains. . . .

The change, loosely based on a regulation in effect in Hawaii, still leaves some unanswered questions. How will women be referred to insurers if they don't think of it themselves? Will the cost of contraceptives get added to premiums? And will other employers -- say, a strict Catholic who owns a restaurant -- be allowed the same exemption as hospitals, schools and charities? . . .

Contrary to the belief of apparently every leftie in the world, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Just because contraception is free to women does not mean that it is free to the insurance companies. The insurers have to collect the money to pay for the free benefit from somewhere, and that somewhere is from all the people in the risk pool covered by the particular insurance policy. So in other words, what Obama is offering as a resolution of this issue is nothing more than pure smoke and mirrors - an accounting gimmick. If Catholic institutions have to purchase insurance and that insurance has to cover free contraception, steralization and Plan B abortion pills, than the Catholic Church will be funding it in reality, if not in the Obama directed accounting columns.

So why would Obama and the left possibly think that this smoke and mirrors will work to soothe the Catholic beast? Well, the left uses these kind of accounting tricks all of the time. Planned Parenthood is the premier example. Planned Parenthood receives tens of millions of our tax dollars annually with the proviso that none of those funds can be used to fund abortions. And yet, in 2009 alone, Planned Parenthood executed 332,278 abortions. How does the left get away with this? Through accounting of course. On paper, our tax dollars go to fund PP's overhead and all the other activities, while PP accounts show only other funds being used to fund the abortions. In reality, our tax funds are what allow PP to fund all of its activities, including abortion. It is intellectually dishonest to its core. Update: It would seem that our nation's Catholic Bishops share the same reservations noted above and more with Obama's latest proposal.

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Krauthammer On The Gospel According To Obama

Pinhead does his best Obama imitation:

 

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In his column this week, Charles Krauthammer disects Obama's forays into the pontifical:

At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified “as a Christian,” “coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ ”

Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.

The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity as represented, for example, by the biblical injunction against retrieving any sheaf left behind while harvesting one’s own field. That is for the gleaners — “the poor and the alien” (Leviticus 19:10). Like Ruth in the field of Boaz. As far as I can tell, that charitable transaction involved no mediation by the IRS.

. . . But this Gospel according to Obama has a rival — the newly revealed Gospel according to Sebelius, over which has erupted quite a contretemps. By some peculiar logic, it falls to the health and human services secretary to promulgate the definition of “religious” — for the purposes, for example, of exempting religious institutions from certain regulatory dictates.

Such exemptions are granted in grudging recognition that, whereas the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state’s regulators, our quaint Constitution grants special autonomy to religious institutions.

Accordingly, it would be a mockery of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment if, for example, the Catholic Church were required by law to freely provide such “health care services” (in secularist parlance) as contraception, sterilization and pharmacological abortion — to which Catholicism is doctrinally opposed as a grave contravention of its teachings about the sanctity of life.

Ah. But there would be no such Free Exercise violation if the institutions so mandated are deemed, by regulatory fiat, not religious.

And thus, the word came forth from Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.

Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.

Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.

Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.

. . . To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.

The contradiction is glaring, the hypocrisy breathtaking. But that’s not why Obama offered a hasty compromise on Friday. It’s because the firestorm of protest was becoming a threat to his reelection. Sure, health care, good works and religion are important. But reelection is divine.

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21st Century Radical Secularism Meets Jefferson Meets Scalia (Part II)

This is Part II of a three part post.

Part I identifies the intent of the drafters in writing the First Amendment's Free Exercise of Religion clause and explains why the Obama HHS mandate is unconstitutional in consideration thereof.

This Part II deals with how the Supreme Court, and particularly Justice Scalia, have strayed from the original intent of the Free Exercise clause, but would still find the HHS Mandate unconstitutional.

Part III will deal with how the founders did not forsee or account for the rise of radical secularism, which is a religion unto itself, and how that impacts the Free Exercise clause.

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Part II Summary

Under current federal law (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act - RFRA), the federal government would stand next to no chance of winning in a suit brought over the Obama HHS mandate as applied to Catholic institutions.  But RFRA - a Congressional power grab on the issue of Constitutional interpretation - is likely itself to be found unconstitutional as applied to the federal government.

If RFRA doesn't apply, then Justice Scalia's 1990 interpretation of the Free Exercise clause, one that severely circumscribes the scope of the clause, would mean that the Obama HHS mandate is lawful.  But Scalia admits in his opinion that he wrote his bright line rule to cut off litigation from minor religions that have sprung up after the signing of our Constitution.  Scalia, like Jefferson before him, implicitly assumes that the government would not encroach on core, mainstream religious beliefs extant at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights.  Thus, a case brought today under the HHS mandate would most likely result in a complete reexamination of the original intent of the drafters in passing the Free Exercise of Religion clause.  And if that happens, then the Court would likely find that the HHS mandate is unconstitutional.      

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Part II Discussion:

The First Amendment to the Constitution provides, in relevant part, that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. As explained in Part I, the original intent of the drafters of this provision, as identified in the 1878 case of Reynolds v. United States, was to keep government from legislating in the area of then extant mainstream religious beliefs, but to allow the government to legislate against acts done under the color of religion that threaten societal order and duties.

As the scope of government has grown over the past near two and a half centuries, and as both minor religious offshoots, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, have proliferated and as people have become inventive in trying to make use of the Free Exercise clause, the Supreme Court has done a significant number of Free Exercise cases.  The Free Exercise clause was used to challenge everything from payment of income taxes, payment of SSI taxes, minimum wage laws, and the draft to name but a very few.  Prior to 1990, the Court had developed "Sherbert" test for Free Exercise cases that it applied on an ad hoc basis.  "Under the Sherbert test, governmental actions that substantially burden a religious practice must be justified by a compelling governmental interest."

That changed in 1990, when Justice Scalia authored the opinion in Employment Division, Dept. of H.R., Oregon v. Smith, a case involving native Americans who claimed the right to use peyote as part of their religious services.  The plaintiff's argued that Sherbert should be applied to their case. Scalia, whose love of originalism exists in conflict with his love of bright line rules, held that the Sherbert test would henceforth be limited to employment compensation matters.  His concern was that the Sherbert test, if generally applied, would produce "a private right to ignore generally applicable laws:"  He as much as admits at the conclusion of his opinion that his goal was to cut off litigation arising out of claims outside the mainstream of religious beliefs, in essence assuming, as did Jefferson two centuries previously, that the Free Exercise clause would protect mainstream religious beliefs because government would never encroach upon them:

It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.

Ultimately, Scalia adopted the brightest line of all -  that a case could not succeed solely on Free Exercise grounds unless the government act at issue was directed explicitly at religion.  The problem with Scalia's solution is that it went too far - and his assumption was wrong.  His reshaping of the law now allows the government, as Obama has done, to encroach on what Jefferson called "the rights of conscience" of mainstream religion that the Free Exercise clause was designed to protect.  It disadvantages all ancient religious practices, not merely those that "are not widely engaged in."

Congress reacted, passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb et seq.  Under RFRA,  laws interfering with free exercise of religion under would have to be supported by a compelling state interest and be the least restrictive of religious freedom as possible.  The Supreme Court would later, in City of Boerne v. Flores, declare RFRA to be unconstitutional as applied to the states because it exceeded the bounds of Congressional authority.  The decision was based on whether the Supreme Court or Congress has ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution.  Yet because the Boerne Court did not address whether RFRA still stands as to federal law, it remains today as the law limiting federal government action.  As NRO points out, the practical effect of the RFRA two prong test would be to make it next to impossible for the U.S. government to succeed in a case over the Obama HHS mandate

So here's what all of this boils down to.  In a case over whether the Obama HHS mandate can be lawfully applied to force Catholic institutions to fund contraception and the morning after abortion pill, the Court would have two major questions to answer.  One, whether RFRA is unconstitutional as applied to the federal government.  I think that likely.  Which would then raise the second question, whether the bright line test in Smith applies in a situation where it is not minor religious practices that "are not widely engaged in" at issue, but the ancient, mainstream and core issue of Catholic beliefs as to contraception and sanctity of life.  I cannot seeing the Court doing that, as it would mean truly gutting the Free Exercise clause.  

And that last will cause some amazing linguistic contortions in the Court.  For our nation, at its inception, was a Christian nation that made room for all within its ambit, subject only to restrictions that define the outer edges of what was acceptable to such a Christian nation.  Indeed, that was the whole basis for the decision in the first Free Exercise case heard by the Supreme Court, Reynolds, which I addressed in Part I here.  That is decidedly not politically correct to admit after six decades of radical left wing efforts to remove Christianity wholly from our laws and the public square.  How the Court might modify Smith without admitting to all the rest would be interesting to see indeed.

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Friday, February 10, 2012

21st Century Radical Secularism Meets Jefferson Meets Scalia (Part I)

This is Part I of a three part post. This part deals with the intent of the drafters in writing the First Amendment's Free Exercise of Religion clause and why the Obama HHS mandate is unconstitutional in consideration thereof.

Part II, here, deals with how the Supreme Court, and particularly Justice Scalia, have strayed from the original intent of the Free Exercise clause, but would still find the HHS Mandate unconstitutional.

Part III will deal with how the founders did not forsee or account for the rise of radical secularism, which is a religion unto itself, and how that impacts the Free Exercise clause.

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Part I Summary

The Obama HHS mandate would force Catholic institutions to fund healthcare plans that directly violate the most sacred and core belief of the Catholic faith, sanctity of life. The mandate would force Catholic institutions to provide for contraception, sterilization, and Plan-B abortion, or in the alternative, be penalized or voluntarily dissolve. Such an act violates the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment as it was intended to be interpreted by our Founders.

The original intent of the drafters, as explained by Thomas Jefferson, was to draw a big circle around then extant mainstream religious beliefs and put those beyond the scope of government legislation. Under the Free Exercise Clause, the government could only legislate to stop an affirmative action done under the color of religion that threatened the social order. Catholic opposition to abortion and contraception was an openly held belief at the time, and thus fall within the ambit of the Free Exercise clause's protections.

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Part I Discussion:

The First Amendment to the Constitution provides, in relevant part, that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. It was over a hundred years from the signing of the Constitution that the Supreme Court was first called on to interpret the Free Exercise Clause in the 1878 case of Reynolds v. United States. In that case, a Mormon criminally charged with polygamy argued that he was only acting in accord with the precepts of his religion. The Court looked back to the drafters to find how they interpreted the "Free Exercise" clause:

[In a bill] 'for establishing religious freedom,' drafted by [Thomas} Jefferson, . . . religious freedom is defined; and after a recital 'that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of [religious beliefs and principles], and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty,' it is declared 'that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.' In these two sentences is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church and what to the State.

. . . Mr. Jefferson afterwards, in reply to an address to him by a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, took occasion to say: 'Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions,-I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.'

Coming as this does from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the amendment thus secured. Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere [religious beliefs], but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.

(emphasis added, citations omitted)

The Reynolds Court found that at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, all sects of the Christian faith in Europe and America had, since ancient times, practiced monogamy and had outlawed polygamy. It wan't until the Mormon faith was created in 1830 and preached polygamy as one of its tenets that polygamy in the U.S. became an issue. The Court further found that polygamy was universally held to be criminal in the 13 states at the time that the Constitution was signed.

Thus the Court found that the Constitutional prohibition against free exercise of religion did not contemplate polygamy as within its ambit. The Court, describing polygamy as "odious" to the religious traditions protected by the Constitution, and further finding it to be an "act" that threatened the social order, the Court held that polygamy could be prohibited by the state.

Also implicit in the Court's decision was that the Free Exercise clause protected mainstream Christian and Judaism and their religious doctrines extant in the U.S. at the time the Constitution was signed. Other religious beliefs and or religious beliefs claimed thereafter, to the extent that they conflicted with "peace and good order" and "societal duties," could not claim the protections of the Free Exercise clause. To this point, the Court said:

Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?

So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.

Today's Christian and Catholic Church doctrines on abortion and contraception are the same as they were at the time of the signing of the Constitution. As to contraception, "the Catholic Church has been opposed to contraception for as far back as one can historically trace." Likewise, there is no question that issues of sanctity of life and the view of abortion as a sin were part of Christianity virtually from its founding.:

There was universal condemnation of abortion in the early Church. The practice was roundly condemned in early Christian writings including the Didache and the writings of Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose, Jerome, John Chrysostom, and Augustine.

David Braine in his study concludes that:

For the whole of Christian history until appreciably after 1900 . . . there was virtually complete unanimity amongst Christians, evangelical, catholic, orthodox, that, unless, at the direct command of God, it was in all cases wrong directly to take innocent human life.

So looking at this from the standpoint of an originalist, there appears little doubt that the decision of the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to fund contraceptives and Plan B abortion, or in the alternative to be penalized or choose to dissolve, violates the 1st Amendment's clause on the Free Exercise of Religion. The Catholic Church beliefs on contraception and abortion were core beliefs at the time of the signing of the Constitution. The Church has taken no affirmative "act," and as Jefferson points out, the limitation of the government to prohibit the free exercise of religion was meant to vindicate "the rights of conscience." It is hard to see how attacking a core value of the Church could be categorized as anything other than an attack on the conscience. Moreover, as Jefferson made clear, he saw the Free Exercise clause as being in perfect balance with the then extant religions at the time the Constitution was signed, commenting that he saw "no natural right in opposition to his social duties." Today, the natural rights remain unchanged, it is only government imposition of new "societal duties" that unconstitutionally encroach on Jefferson's - and the Catholic Church's - natural rights.

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