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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NRLC, Infanticide & Words You Can't Believe In

NRLC takes Obama to task for lying about his vote against a bill that would have outlawed the most radical of positions, infanticide of children born alive after a botched abortion.



(H/T Hot Air)

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Palin In Comparison

This is Sarah Palin


. . . America’s hottest governor and the Republican nominee for Vice President.


She is the governor of Alaska


. . . the northernmost of our fifty some odd states.


She has an approval rating over 80%. That is . . .


. . . almost better than God's.

She likes fishing . . .


. . . for salmon


She likes hunting . . .


. . . for moose.


And Mooseburgers . . .


. . . are whats for dinner at the Alaska Governor's mansion.


What she doesn't eat . . .


. . . makes for comfortable office decor.


She started out her adult life as a working woman, a hockey mom, . . .


. . . and a runner up for Miss Alaska.


Obama started out as . . .


. . . a follower of the Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky.


Palin won her first election for executive office to become . . .


. . . the Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska in 1996.


She did so by beating a three term incumbent . . .


. . . in a hotly contested election.


Obama won his first election to the Illinois State Senate . . .


. . . by having his competition, Alice Palmer, a civil rights icon, decertified from the ballot by his attorneys. Likewise, none of his subsequent elections to office were models of democracy.


Palin is famous for blowing the whistle on massive corruption


. . . at the very top of Alaska's Republican Party.


Obama is famous for meeting corrupt people . . .


. . . befriending them and doing business deals.


Palin has a twenty year old son . . .


. . . in the U.S. Army Infantry, a job that requires he put his life on the line in order to serve our country.


Obama attended Trinity United Church for 20 years . . .


. . . exposing his children to the deeply racist, seperatist and anti-American Black Liberation Theology and a preacher who damns America.


Palin has run businesses, including. . . .


. . . a commercial fishing business with her husband


That gives her more business experience than . . .


. . . these two combined.


Palin has been a mayor and is now a governor. That gives her more executive experience than . . .



. . . these two combined.


Palin went to Germany. She gave no speeches while there, but . . .


. . . she did visit wounded soldiers in Landstuhl


Obama went to Germany. He gave a speech to Germans . . .


. . . then exercised near Landstuhl


Palin has fought against . . .


. . . tax increases and earmarks


Obama has . . .


. . . sought millions in earmarks for special interests.


Obama voted against a bill that would have killed the funding for the most infamous pork project of the last decade, the $200+ million earmark for the Bridge to Nowhere . . .




When she became Governor of Alaska . . .


. . . Palin killed the Bridge to Nowhere project.


Palin is a huge proponent of . . .



. . . drilling in ANWR and off the coast to bring down gas prices.


Obama is a huge proponent of


. . . inflating your tires.


And Obama is fine with . . .


. . . $4 a gallon for gas


Palin is a lifetime member . . .



. . . of the NRA


Obama voted . . .


. . . against a bill to allow people threatened with domestic violence to carry a firearm for self protection and against a bill to protect a man from prosecution who had used a hand gun unlawful in Chicago to defend his family inside his own home.


The McCains adopted . . .


. . . an infant with heart ailments from an orphanage in Bangladesh and raised her to health and as one of their own children.


Obama adopted . . .


. . . the symbols of the presidency.


Palin is a working mom with five children . . .




Her fifth child was born four months ago. His name is Trig and they knew five months before he was born that he had Down's Syndrome . . .


They chose not to abort the child because she is pro-life.


That puts her at odds with Obama . . .


. . . who voted against an Illinois bill designed to stop infanticide of children born alive from botched abortions.


The Left says that Gov. Palin . . .


. . . is inexperienced and not ready to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.


Who would have guessed . . .


. . . that lack of experience is now a disqualifier - for the position Vice President.

Indeed, putting aside foreign policy, Gov. Palin has more and varied experience than


. . . these two combined


Some on the left are questioning her intelligence and trying to label her the second coming of . . .

. . . Mr. "potato-e," former Vice President Dan Quayle.


The MSM of the day magnified Qualye's gaffes, while it seems that the MSM of today is ignoring . . .



. . . the serial gaffes of at least one of the candidates who makes Dan Quayle seem erudite by comparison.


McCain wants the Left and the MSM to speak up about this stuff so that he and . . .


. . . his new BFF's can hear also.

Of one thing there is no question. Of all the four candidates for President and Vice President from the two parties . . .


. . . Gov. Palin is the only one I would want to see both in the White House and on the cover of Vogue showing a bit of cleavage.
(Update 2: I included the above photo in the belief that it was the actual cover of the edition of Vogue for which Gov. Palin posed in February, 2008. Yes, she posed for Vogue, no, the above is not one of the photos. It is a photoshop. I thank one of the commentors, Mare, for pointing this out.)

(Update: Jim at Bright & Early has an additional comparison worth a view)

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O-bortions, Dishonesty & A Very Tangled Web

Obama is giving truth to the old saying, "what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decive." At issue is how deceptive Obama is being in attempting to hide and neutralize his prior radical stance on abortion. Obama is being caught in lie after lie about his prior adoption of a position that crosses the line from abortion to infanticide. The evidence that he is being dishonest is so clear and the position he took so radical that this could and should turn out to be a major issue in the campaign.
________________________________________________________

When a child is born alive from a botched abortion, should it be treated legally as a human entitled to care and life saving medical treatment? Or should it be be killed outside the womb, either by direct act of the physician or by the physician's inaction - i.e., simply abandoning the live child to perish with no care? That is infanticide and those who say yes to the latter occupy the very radical fringe of abortion rights activists.

The question is whether Obama supported that radical position. The answer is unarguably yes. Over the past days, we've been treated to an ever changing series of statements from Obama in an effort to disown his prior position or, at a minimimum, to neutralize it. But that just became impossible with the release of Obama's statements on tape and the publication of the minutes of the Illinois Senate in which Obama argued against a bill that would have required treating children born alive from botched abortions as human.

To appreciate both how radical Obama's position was on abortion and how unarguably deceptive and dishonest he has now become about his prior position, let me give a short history of what is occurring. On the eve of the Saddleback interview last week, Obama said that people who were claiming he had supported the radical position of infanticide were lying. Here is the interview:



The background to his started in about 2000 when Jill Stanek, a nurse at Christ Hospital in Chicago, discovered that some of the abortions being conducted there resulted in the birth of live infants. The doctors who performed the abortions were simply discarding the infants, allowing them to perish from neglect and exposure. She publicized her observations and turned this into a cause celebre.

Congress acted. With the full and bipartisan support of abortion opponents and staunch supporters of abortion alike, Congress passed a law directly aimed at this practice by providing that such children born alive from botched abortions were to be considered human. As such, these children were entitled to care and treatment. The law was crafted very narrowly to apply only to live children fully expelled from the mother's body and with "neutrality" language so as to not otherwise restrict abortions - even partial birth abortions where the live child is killed while partially outside the vagina.

States had to decide whether to also pass such a law to address infanticide in their states. The bill came before the Illinois Senate in all practical terms in the same form as the federal law. Doug Ross posts a copy of both the federal and state bill as well as the roll call for the vote on the bill in the Illinois Senate. Obama voted against the bill.

Subsequent to Obama's lie shown in the video above, when confronted with proof of his vote, the Obama campaign admitted that Obama had in fact voted against the bill. This came with a caveat. Initially that caveat was that he voted against the Illinois bill because it did not contain "neutrality" language that would otherwise leave the right to an abortion unaffected.

We learned the next day that Obama was lying again. Obama, as a state senator, was in charge of the committee that oversaw their state legislation on this issue and, in fact, voted to include the "neutrality" clause in the Illinois bill preserving all rights to an abortion other than in this narrow category of infanticide. It was after the neutrality clause was inserted that Obama had voted against the bill.

Obama's excuse then changed again. His newly articulated justification for his vote against this legislation was because the anti-infanticide bill was part of a package of legislation and that he did not agree with the entire package.

I do not know whether in fact this anti-infanticide legislation was part of a larger package. As the facts below show, it does not matter.

Obama's latest in a string of serial lies falls by the wayside today with transcripts and tapes of Obama arguing explicitly against this bill to halt infanticide. He does so on the merits, wholly without reference to any other legislation to which this bill was attached. Here is the audio, compliments of Gateway Pundit, of Obama arguing against the provisions of the bill on the grounds that it might effect a woman's decision (not her right) to have an abortion:



I was going to analyze this, but Hot Air does so with exceptional clarity, adding in the more detailed transcript of Obama's argument against this bill in the Illinois Senate:

. . . On pages 32-34 of the April 4, 2002 session, Obama debates the bill on the floor of the state Senate. He says essentially the exact same thing as he did in this audio passage above, but with a little more detail:

[T]he only plausible rationale, to my mind, for this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor, the attending physician, who has made the assessment that this is a nonviable fetus and that, let’s say for the purposes of the mother’s health, is being — that — that labor is being induced, that that physician (a) is going to make the wrong assessment and (b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error, and in fact this was not a nonviable fetus but, in fact, a live child, that the physician, of his own accord or her own accord, would not try to exercise the sort of medical procedures and practices that would be involved in saving that child.

Now, if — if you think that there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill makes sense, but I — I suspect and my impression is, is that the Medical Society suspects that doctors feel that they would already be under that obligation, that they would already be making these determinations, and that essentially adding a — an additional doctor who the has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.

Now, if that’s the case –and — and I know some of us feel very strongly one way or the other on that issue — that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if these children are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure they’re looked after.

This passage is really remarkable for the willfully obtuse nature of Obama’s arguments. By the time this debate took place, Jill Stanek had already revealed that doctors weren’t providing medical care to infants born alive during abortions, at Christ Hospital, and a subsequent investigation proved that other abortion providers also abandoned such infants to die. That was the entire reason for the debate. Obama acts as if this is some curious academic hypothesis.

Instead of addressing the actual issue of infanticide, Obama twists it into a protection for abortion. He frames his own hypothetical as an abortion “for the health of the mother”, but the circumstances of the mother’s health has no bearing at all on whether a live infant should receive medical care. How would treating a live infant threaten the health of the mother?

And finally, as the original audio notes, the remainder of Obama’s opposition rests on the “burden” of calling in a second physician to make an independent determination of the birth. The bill created that “burden”, a procedure which would take very little time at all, precisely because the doctors at Christ Hospital and elsewhere threw live infants away with no oversight at all.

Nowhere in this argument does Obama say, “I oppose this bill because of its companion bill,” the lame argument that has surfaced over the last 48 hours from Team Obama. He doesn’t talk about the bill’s supposed unconstitutionality. Moreover, during the presidential campaign, he said he would have supported the federal bill even though it had all of the same supposed flaws Obama argued against in this passage.

Obama protected infanticide in order to protect abortion on demand. There simply is no other explanation except abject stupidity, and this passage proves it.

This is one lie that has caught up with Obama. This is simply too well documented for him to disown. Whether this will be publicized and be reflected in voter's assessments of his character and judgment is an open question. That it should is, I believe, beyond doubt.

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O-bortion

Obama's vote against a bill to protect children born alive during a botched abortion is indefensible. Abortion is one thing. Infanticide is another thing entirely. Alan Keyes spoke on this some time ago with great eloquence:

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Truer Words Never Spoken

Obama said yesterday in a speech to the VFW that "McCain doesn't know what he is up against." That is the most accurate statement Obama has made to date. And therein lies his problem. No one knows what McCain is up against. Obama has yet to articulate a doctrine, policy or principal that he has not revoked, revised or tossed out - all the while claiming that his latest articulation represents no change whatsoever from the views he has always held. Obama, whose poll numbers are dropping just slightly slower than lead dropped into the ocean, is vowing to fight back - aided and abetted by the MSM, of course. But his problems are all self-inflicted. Thus, it seems his only options are to delegitimize criticism and to dishonestly paint John McCain.

Obama is losing ground in the polls, with at least one poll, the Zogby poll, now showing a McCain with a 5 point lead. McCain has led a steady drumbbeat against Obama for lacking substance. In response to the Russian invasion of Georgia, McCain looked decisive, Obama weak. And all of that was topped off with a commanding performance by John McCain and a weak performance by Obama at the Saddleback pseudo debate.

A big part of Obama's problem is his dishonesty and blaring hypocrisy. He has raised flip flopping to an art form heretofore not seen in American presidential politics and added on top of it a layer of dishonesty and hypocrisy that is breathtaking. The abortion issue is but the latest shining example. On the day of the Saddleback interview, Obama claimed that he was being maligned with suggestions that he supported infanticide:

The presumptive Democratic nominee responded sharply in an interview Saturday night with the Christian Broadcast Network, saying anti-abortion groups were "lying" about his record.

"They have not been telling the truth," Mr. Obama said. "And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying."

He added that it was "ridiculous" to suggest he had ever supported withholding lifesaving treatment for an infant. "It defies common sense and it defies imagination, and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive," he said in the CBN interview.

At issue is the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill in the Illinois state Senate that sought to protect against bungled abortions by requiring that a fetus that survived an abortion be defined as a person. . . .

It turns out that Obama was lying about his position. He voted against the above referenced bill in the Illinois Senate. Big Lizards has the whole story and Doug Ross also has an excellent post complete with copies of the documentation. And then when that lie was caught, Obama added another layer of dishonest nuance, as Hot Air explains. All of this was on top of his craven refusal to answer the question put to him at Saddleback of when does life begin.

Another Obama problem is his inabiity to back up his promises with anything substantive. He has been asked several times now, in light of his promise to heal the partisan divide, to show an instance where he reached across the aisle on a contentious issue. His answers have been inane, weak and deceptive. When first asked that question a few weeks ago by during a Fox News interview, Obama responded that, while he voted against the appointments of Judge Alito and Roberts, he nonetheless defended Democrats who voted for them. When asked the question at Saddleback, he responded that he had worked with John McCain on bi-partisan ethics legislation. That of course was true - for one week in 2006. That was until Obama backtracked and refused to participate any further, garnering this response from McCain:

Republican Sen. John McCain on Monday accused his Democratic colleague Barack Obama of “partisan posturing” on the issue of lobbying ethics reform . . . “I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable,” McCain, R.-Ariz., wrote in a letter to Obama, D-Ill., Monday. “Thank you for disabusing me of such notions.”

Thus, Obama's problems are self inflicted. He is a fundamentally weak candidate with a few superficial strengths. He has tried to ride the wave of his utopian and meaningless rhetoric - but that only went so far before McCain started pointing out the obvious, that the emporer had no clothes. On specific issues, Obama pretty much has no identifiable positions or the positions he does hold, once identified, are disclaimed as the need arises. Again here, McCain has done little more than point out the obvious, often with a bit of humor.

Obama's response has been to "fight back" against the McCain onslaught. We seem to be getting a taste of that in Obama's speech to the VFW and his latest deeply dishonest ad on the economy now playing in the swing states.

Obama's fighting back against McCain at the VFW was to simply demand that McCain stop being critical of Obama. In essence, it was Obama's attempt to paint any criticism of himself as being an attack on his patriotism. I suspect this will work as well as Obama's attempts to paint any criticism of him as being racially motivated. This from the WSJ:

Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars this morning, Barack Obama delivered an amazing show of chutzpah. John McCain had addressed the VFW yesterday, and as the Associated Press reports, he was predictably critical of Obama:

McCain . . . said Obama "tried to legislate failure" in the Iraq war and had put his ambition to be president above the interests of the United States. He said the Illinois senator did this by pushing for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and by voting in the Senate against a major appropriations bill to help fund the troop increase.

Here is Obama's reply:

"One of the things that we have to change in this country is the idea that people can't disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism. I have never suggested that Sen. McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America's national interest. Now, it's time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same. . . ."

Of course, if Obama were to accuse McCain of picking his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition, everyone would laugh, because it obviously is not true. By contrast, there is quite a bit of evidence that Obama has placed political expediency above national security . . .

In politics one often hears the charge of hypocrisy: My opponent criticizes me for X, but he has done Y, which is just as bad or worse. Obama's argument here, though, is roughly opposite in form. He concedes that McCain is above reproach on this particular subject and therefore demands that McCain treat him as if he were beyond reproach. Obama's acknowledgment of a McCain virtue is well and good, but it does not mitigate or excuse his own shortcoming.

Powerline also does an exceptional deconstruction of Obama's VFW speech and his attempt to cloak himself from criticism under the rubric of patriotism. It is not Obama's patriotism that is suspect, its his judgment and his willingness to put his ambition over the best interests of the country.

In the swing states, Obama is running ads that amount to cutting and splicing, taking quotes out of context and taking statements McCain made assessing the economy from a time before the economy went into its current rough patch. This from the NYT:

In Philadelphia; East Lansing, Mich.; Green Bay, Wis.; and at least five other major cities, Mr. Obama is heavily showing an advertisement contrasting a statement by Mr. McCain that “we have had a pretty good, prosperous time with low unemployment,” with appearances by people making statements like, “The prices of gas are up; the prices of milk are up.” . . .

Here is Factcheck.org's take on the ad:

"An Obama ad uses dated and out of context quotes to portray McCain as clueless on the economy.

Summary

Obama's campaign is running a TV ad in Indiana that asks the question: "How can John McCain fix the economy, when he doesn't think it's broken?" But the ad uses quotes from McCain that are old and taken out of context:

The ad shows McCain saying, "I don't believe we're headed into a recession." But McCain said that in January, and he also acknowledged at the time that the American economy was in "a rough patch."

The ad then shows McCain saying in April, "[T]here's been great progress economically." But the quote is lifted from a much longer response; McCain went on to say that the "progress" made during Bush's tenure still wouldn't console American families who are facing "tremendous economic challenges."

The third quote from McCain, "[W]e have had a pretty good prosperous time, with low unemployment," also comes from January. In his full response, McCain went on to say "things are tough right now."

So, at any rate, to return to the initial quote from Obama, no, we, like John McCain, really do not have any idea what we are up against in Obama. We do not know what he stands for. But we do know that he is trying every card in the book to deflect all criticism by delegitimizing it as impermissibly motivated. We do know that he is governed first and foremost by ambition. We do know he has a history of close association with radicals. We do know that he is fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical. We do know that he is ducking and running from any real debates with McCain. Is there anything else we really need to know to round out the picture before November?

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