From Dawn Eden, regarding Sonia Sotomayor’s thinking on stare decisis which, apparently, varies depending on whether or not the ruling has to do with abortion. Eden states,

As I wrote when liveblogging this exchange, apparently, when the subject is antitrust law, Sotomayor is perfectly comfortable with admitting that new information must be taken into account. But when the subject is abortion law, she doesn’t want to even discuss whether a change in “factual findings” is relevant.

Funny how Sonia Sotomayor, the “wise Latina”, doesn’t know if one has a right to self defense, doesn’t seem to think that owning a gun is an individual right, yet believes the Constitution magically guarantees women the right to kill their unborn child…

At least according to this article in The American Spectator, the answer is yes:

Stated or unstated, a driving force behind modern liberalism takes root in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, in which abortion was legalized. The Court found a “right to privacy” guaranteed by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, saying that a woman had a constitutional right to abort her child up until the “point at which the fetus becomes viable.” The Court quite specifically defined viability as the point at which a fetus is “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.”

Quite aside from the political acrimony the Roe decision has generated from the day it was issued, the hot debate over President Obama’s health care proposal alters the abortion debate in a fashion quite unintended. If passed, ObamaCare could instantly set up a legal confrontation between the principle behind President’s health care system — and the principle undergirding Roe v. Wade. Which in turn would launch a political battle royal between proponents of government health care and abortion rights.

Why?

A reading of the Roe decision leaves no doubt whatsoever of what abortion advocates have claimed ever since the opinion was handed down. To quote the Supreme Court decision directly:

We repeat, however, that the State does have an important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health of the pregnant woman, whether she be a resident of the State or a nonresident who seeks medical consultation and treatment there, and that it has still another important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life.

If, as Roe clearly states, “the State does have an important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health [emphasis mine] of the pregnant woman” — why doesn’t it have “an important and legitimate interest” in protecting the health of the rest us?

The article goes on to point out that the fundamental premise behind universal health care is that the government could be deciding who gets what medical care thus taking the decision-making process out of the hands of the patient and putting into the hands of bureaucrats. If that’s so, you can be sure that abortion advocates will be at odds with those who want a single-payor health system.

If anti-abortion protesters threw stink bombs into abortion clinics, and threatened to demolish the building, what would happen to those protesters?  Well, they’d probably get thrown in jail and decried in the media.  (Perhaps get called a "Christianist" by Andrew Sullivan.)

But, change the cause, and those tactics become, as the LA Times says, "compelling" television.  Yes, terrorize for the right cause, and you get your own TV show.

Jill Stanek has the details on "Whale Wars", a Discovery channel show documenting the life and times of an crew of anti-whalers.  I saw an episode where they made it appear that they were going to ram the offending ship.  If people trying to save babies tried this, they’d be pilloried (by, no doubt, the LA Times). 

But do this in the name of animals, and the Left and the media put you on a pedestal.  Priorities, folks.

Jump over to La Shawn Barber’s Corner and watch the latest in a long line of videos catching Planned Parenthood in the cover-up of statutory rape. 

Again I ask, how long before these places get investigated on a nationwide level? 

I haven’t posted as much recently.  I thought summer would slow things down, but apparently not so much around our house.  I’ve been collecting things to write on, but they’re starting to get stale, so before they’re completely irrelevant, here are a few quick hits to start the week.

Economy: Never mind whether or not you got TARP funds, the Obama administration may be looking to cap your executive’s pay.

Gene Sperling, a top counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, conceded to a congressional committee that imposing compensation caps on companies could lead to a flight of talent.

“I can say with certainty that nobody in the Obama administration is proposing such a thing,” he said.

Yet, at the same time, he and officials with the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission laid out a case for how payment structures rewarded short-term gains at the expense of long-term performance and contributed to the nation’s financial crisis.

The administration plans to seek legislation that would try to rein in compensation at publicly traded companies through nonbinding shareholder votes and by decreasing management influence on pay decisions.

No mention of how incentivizing the giving loans to people who couldn’t afford them contributed to the nation’s financial crisis, nor any talk of reining that in.

Abortion: Warner Todd Hudson asks and answers, “Why is Killing Abortionists Wrong? Because it is Un-Christian, That’s Why!” He uses logic and scripture to back up his position.  The key paragraphs:

The final word here is that a Christian ethic posits that men are subject to man’s laws and willfully violating them is not a Christian thing to do — but for extreme cases, and then in a more passive manner than not. Additionally man’s duly constituted law is the sword of punishment and punishment should not be carried out by the individual going off on his own hook. Christians do not take the law into their own hands.

So, in answer to Jacob Sullum’s tough question, killing abortionists IS wrong. It is also quite in keeping with Christian practice to suffer under pro-abortion laws without taking the law into one’s own hands to end the life of a doctor committing abortions. The law says that abortion is legal, only the law may impose the sentence of death, and the individual is bound by those facts under a Christian worldview.

Definitely worth a read.

Health Care: So will all those saving we’re supposed to come from health care reform going to come after the trillion dollar cost is recouped?

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

And, as we all know, government estimates of the cost of a government program are a low end guess.  Somehow, I think that net tax decrease that Obama promised was never going to materialize anyway.

…(and his post has the quotes to show that many Lefty bloggers do), then Collin Brendemuehl wants to know if the Left is going to blame itself for what one of its "peace activists" did; killing a military recruiter. 

The question is simple: Where is the contrition? Where is the self-deprecating admission that maybe, just maybe, the mainstream Left might be entirely wrong? They vandalize our nation and kill people and pretend that they have nothing to do with any of it. They protect the radicals and act like nothing is wrong.

(Ok, this is what I anticipate some them to say about this crime: The murderer was a convert to Islam and did this because he hated what Bush started. Bush made him do it. Right. And Nixon made Armstrong blow up the math building at UW.)

May they pretend to set an example by acknowledging that they might actually be doing what they contrive for us.

As of right now, big blogs from the left — Think Progress, TalkLeft, Talking Points Memo (can’t link to a search result) and Daily Kos — have absolutely nothing mentioning "William Long", the man who died in this killing. 

And yet blogs on the Right are all over themselves denouncing the violence done, ironically, in the name of the pro-life movement.  I’ll state for the record here that I find the killing of Dr. George Tiller absolutely wrong, just as wrong as the millions of abortions done each year, and just as wrong as killing a military recruiter who is posing no threat to you. 

Will the big voices of Left do the same?  Or is their outrage so very selective?

Following similar action in the House, the Senate voted (rather overwhelmingly; 90-6) to reject the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay detention center.  The Left has made this a drumbeat for years, but now that they’re in a position to actually do something about it, they suddenly get all NIMBY on the issue.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that none of Guantánamo’s detainees should be transferred to the US to stand trial or serve time in prison. “We don’t want them around,” he said. “I can’t make it any more clear … We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

“Terrorists”?  I thought they were a bunch of wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time, dragnet detainees that the ACLU is just waiting to spring.  But now Harry Reid is calling them “terrorists”.  Well yeah, that does rather change the calculus on the whole situation, doesn’t it?  If we’d only known then what we know now, right?

And it seems most of the countries where Obama thought he could pawn off these “victims cum terrorists” are closing their doors, after saying that they would be open lo these many years.  Apparently, they were “just words”.  So now, Congressional Democrats find themselves between Barack and a hard place, a situation of their own making as their candidate campaigned on, apparently, “just words”, but no real exit strategy from Gitmo.

But Scott Ott, news satirist at his own site and now columnist at the Washington Examiner, “reports” that Obama has announced a new tactic; simply declare the detainees as “fetuses”.

While accused terrorists have access to attorneys, and nearly-limitless legal appeals, a fetus has no legal standing, cannot speak for itself, and is subject to the death penalty without regard to guilt or innocence.

Civil rights advocates have pressured Obama to follow through on campaign promises to shutter Gitmo, but even Democrats in Congress have resisted bringing the inmates to U.S. soil for trials and incarceration.

“We can debate whether enemy combatants have access to protections under the U.S. Constitution,” said Obama. “However, no serious person would grant such protection to an embryo or fetus. The loss of 240 fetuses wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a nation where more than 3,000 of them hit the Dumpster daily.”

The president noted that America’s global reputation has been devastated by U.S. treatment of terror suspects, but that “our treatment of a million fetuses each year earns us nothing but admiration, and requests for clinic-funding from those who aspire to be like us.”

Sources acknowledged continuing White House debate about whether a terrorist who escapes from Gitmo alive can still be treated as a fetus.

Nobody, save for some right-wing extremists, could possibly object to that, eh?

For the first time since the Gallup organization has been polling this issue (1995), more Americans consider themselves pro-life than pro-choice, and the percentage of pro-life designations is the highest ever.

(Click on the picture for the source article.)  Gallup calls this jump a "significant shift".  Increases were found among the individual demographics Republicans, conservatives, moderates, Protestants, Catholics, men and women. 

I’ve mentioned Lila Rose before. She’s the adult that poses as an underage girl at Planned Parenthood clinics and finds out how they deal with a statutory rape victim.  She’s got another video showing that PP just follows the money.

HotAir has the video.

Lila Rose has been doing a great service with the Mona Lisa Project, exposing Planned Parenthood as the abortion mill it is.  In video after video on their web site, they expose cases where PP clinics have a "hear no evil" approach to statutory rape. 

Ms. Rose and other pose as minors who say they’ve been made pregnant by their adult boyfriend, and their hidden camera videos show PP employees ignoring this law that is to protect these children.  But no investigation of this corrupt organization. 

Stop the ACLU notes that PP gets, in addition to their profits, $300 million of federal taxpayer dollars every year.  And yet, no national investigation of laws being broken in California, Arizona and Indiana.

Phone conversations included PP employees telling her how to cover up the rape, and how to give money for the abortion of just black babies.

Regardless of your political party or stand on Roe v Wade, this is simply outrageous.  Why this organization has not come under investigation, by any administration or Congress, is beyond me.

In an number of previous essays the notions of Bertrand de Jouvenel regarding political theory have been utilized. One of these ideas in particular is that government is rightly formed for a particular society and culture when its authority is freely granted by the people, that is it utilizes the authority granted to it by the people and does not have to resort to coercion. This idea of government does not stem from rights or freedoms and the “standard” contract terminology stemming from Hobbes/Lockean political philosophies. Limitations on government stems from both the withholding of authority and that what actions and freedoms state may grant to a person, does not by that granting make that action ethical or moral. For example, the Roman state (and in fact many states) granted the power of life and death to the state over individual citizens. For over 200 years, Christians were put to death for their faith under this power granted. That however, did not make it ethical or moral for a particular Roman to do put a Christian to death. Or more plainly, it was within the boundaries of Roman rule to put a Christian to death but it was unethical for individual Roman to do so. Nero as Emperor could execute Christians as such but it was unethical for Nero the man to do so.

Christians for just slightly under two thousand years have opposed abortion. A statement regarding abortion made today of and by those against abortion that fixes the idea that the act of abortion is a equivalent to murder and the actor be it the mother or the doctor, is equivalent to a murderer is not unheard of in pro-life circles. Some pro-life activists “go this far” and those criticizing the pro-life Christian position remark that this should be a logical consequence of ascribing personhood to the fetus. It is not necessary to ascribe full or even partial “personhood” to a fetus in order to oppose abortion. But even granting that, a view of government as expressed above combined with Christian ethics does not necessitate that step of equivicating abortion with murder. Read the rest of this entry

Melanie Phillips in the London Daily Mail observes:

The story of 13-year-old Alfie, who reportedly has become a father by 15-year-old Chantelle, is a fable for our tragically degraded times.

Most of the attention has focused upon Alfie, who looks about eight and doesn’t even understand the word ‘financial’. But while Alfie’s youth is exceptional, this situation is not.

Whether or not Alfie is the father of baby Maisie or whether that honour goes to one of Chantelle’s reputed other boyfriends, the fact is that the length and breadth of this country there are many Chantelles, having sex and often getting pregnant while under age.

Phillips points out what has long been a refrain in societies where liberal programs have taken hold; the unintended consequences of government intervention.

There has been a profound loss of the very notions of self-restraint and boundaries of behaviour, promoted from the top by narcissistic liberals and funded at the bottom by welfare benefits which cushion people from the consequences of their actions.

The liberal intelligentsia pushed the idea that the worst things in the world were stigma and shame. Illegitimacy was accordingly abolished, lone mothers provided with welfare benefits and any talk about the advantages to children from marriage and sexual continence was to be banned as ‘judgmental’.

With all constraints on behaviour vilified as ‘moralising’, sex became treated merely as a pleasurable pastime devoid of any spiritual dimension.

As parents careered through serial sexual partnerships, putting their own short-term desires first and effectively behaving like children, they no longer wanted to be bothered with taking responsibility for their own offspring and so started treating them as if they were grown-up.

This was massively reinforced by the approach to sex education and contraception by schools and public health professionals, who treated children as quasi-adults capable of making their own life choices.

What they actually needed, as all children do, was firm and consistent boundaries which taught them that sex was properly an adult activity.

Instead, they were taught to treat sex a bit like bungee-jumping or paragliding – to have fun doing it, but to take precautions to avoid getting hurt.

And, she notes, the only definition of "hurt" was "getting pregnant".  Never mind the emotional or psychological harm that might be involved.

Read the whole thing.  Seems the more sex education we have and the earlier it starts, the more stories like this that we get.  Phillips’ article is a strong argument for the teaching of responsibility and its consequences rather than covering the world in bubble wrap. 

The legal defense of abortion rests on a claim of a right to privacy. Alas, following the argument below, it seems this right is used as a legal proxy and is not consistently applied. By legal proxy, I mean that it is the legal argument/excuse used to justify the legalization of abortion (for other reasons unstated) and is not a right which is given in other comparable or parallel circumstances. Consider the following three somewhat related cases involving immunization. Immunization is fundamentally a private thing involving the manipulation of your immune system, which is clearly a private part of your person. If the state feels it can adjust and order your immune system programming for its purposes, logically it can also do so in the case of pregnancy.

1. Pubic schools demand immunization of children attending. While it might be said that public education is not a right, education is a requirement placed by the state on parents. You cannot legally raise your child and deny him or her an education. However that is not relevant to the question. The point is, immunization being private should not be a question asked or required to be answered by the state regarding education or any other purpose.
2. When you travel abroad certain immunizations and proof of the same are required for exit and re-entry into the country. One cannot claim a right to privacy to waive this requirement. Again, if this is private how can the state justify this in the face of their stated alliance to a right of privacy. Should one not logically be able, akin to “claiming a fourth Amendment right” be able to stake a claim to one’s right to privacy and refuse to provide information regarding your immunization status?
3. Consider the case of a modern carrier, a Typhoid Mary, if you will. That is to say, ,she/he is a person, symptom free, who is an active vector for a disease. I claim that this person if identified, would be given treatment and by court order if she refused. When this was suggested earlier in a comment, Boonton suggested she might be exiled. However this suggestion clearly fails under examination as the public/foreign relations problem of knowingly sending an active disease vector to another state is, well, just a little problematic. Perhaps we might also, in those states where there is no capital punishment, exile serial killers as well. The only realistic solution, once discovered, is that this person would be treated, willingly or not.

How is that from a legal standpoint are immunizations required? The logical reason is of course the health and safety of the people. Yet over a million are killed per year by abortion. That is clearly a health and safety issue for quite a number of human lives, in fact a quite terminal question for those. And, if you argue the non-personhood of a early term fetus, one still faces the 45 late term abortions performed per day … and after that a small number of executions of infants for whom that late term abortion was intended but botched (botched in that the infant was failed to be murdered at the appropriate moment in the delivery process). It is in this latter case that our current President (in)famously argued that those failed executions should be carried out at any rate.

So there is a logical inconsistency here. Abortion is claimed as a privacy right. Yet analogous privacy rights are waived every day in circumstance not related to abortion and the reason that right is waived is exactly the same claim made by the abortion opponents why abortion should be regulated if not prevented. So perhaps dropping the rights talk regarding privacy in the legal and ethical discussions might be helpful, for that’s really just a smoke screen for something else.

Preaching through the Ten Commandments, our pastor came to the 6th.  One of things I found fascinating is that there are quite a number of words for "kill" in Hebrew, and the King James translation doesn’t do much to get across this particular word.

Lo ratzach; don’t murder.

There is a word in Hebrew for killing an animal.  This is not that word.  You can be a vegetarian or vegan if you like, but you can’t use this verse as Biblical backup for your position.  (Actually, the Bible has a number of references showing that God’s OK with meat-eating.)

There is a word in Hebrew for killing in battle.  This is not that word.  You can be a pacifist if you like, but you can’t use this verse as Biblical backup for your position.  (Actually, the Bible has a number of references where God commands his people to make war on those God wishes to punish.)

There is a word in Hebrew for killing in self-defense or defense of another.  This is not that word.  You can be a police officer and kill someone in the line of duty while protecting yourself or others and you will not have broken this commandment.  You can protect an intruder with deadly force, and not be guilty of breaking this commandment. 

There is a word in Hebrew for the purposeful taking of an innocent life.  This is that word. 

Read the rest of this entry