Josh Marshall, big time blogger of the Left, seems to think so. In his short summary of yesterday’s SOCTUS proceedings, he complains thusly.

But what struck me more was how the the critical questions from the conservative bloc on the Court grappled so little with the actual economic role of health care provisions in society and the systemic market failure. These would seem to be precisely the issues the Commerce Clause is meant to address. Simply because the problem is serious doesn’t mean every possible solution is constitutional. But again, no real grappling with the practical issues the law was meant to address but rather a hyper-focus on academic and ideological points.

Does the Left really think that constitutionality can be overlooked if we really, really want the law? If so, then we have no Constitution. These concerns he calls "academic and ideological". When did keeping with the law, and the foundation of our laws, become merely academic and ideological?

If celibacy is to blame for the sexual abuse in the Catholic church, how does that explain the continuing abuses in the public schools? (Hint: it doesn’t.)

Here are 4 hard truths of health care reform. (Hint: if they promised something, it’s generally not going to happen.)

"[I]f you come down hard on Limbaugh because he has crossed a line, you must come down hard on Schultz and Maher because they have crossed the same line…." (Hint: Schultz and Maher supporters haven’t.)

New York City Mayor Bloomberg, not content with nannying the well-off on what they can and can’t eat at restaurants, now is denying food to the homeless because it might be too salty. (Hint: That’s not compassion.)

If they had been Republicans, this would have been racist. (Hint: They’re Democrats.)

Is Zionism humanitarianism? (Hint: Yes.)

Even with Warren Buffett’s new tax policy idea, wherein he’d pay a higher tax rate, the continuing deficit dwarfs it.

Once again, the issue is not that we’re taking in too little in taxes. We can’t take in enough to cover the deficits. We must start cutting spending in a serious way.

In ruling on same-sex marriage, the European Court of Human Rights warns that churches could lose some of their religious freedom.

First, the ruling.

Same-sex marriages are not a human right, European judges have ruled.

Their decision shreds the claim by ministers that gay marriage is a universal human right and that same-sex couples have a right to marry because their mutual commitment is just as strong as that of husbands and wives.

But it goes on.

The ruling also says that if gay couples are allowed to marry, any church that offers weddings will be guilty of discrimination if it declines to marry same-sex couples.

It means that if MPs legislate for same-sex marriage, the Coalition’s promise that churches will not be compelled to conduct the weddings will be worthless.

It always has been worthless, possibly naïve, if not disingenuous. If, today (actually 4 years ago), a photographer can be sued for turning down business from a same-sex wedding and lose, it’s no small step for government to compel churches to do what goes against the church’s beliefs. And the EU court has let us all know this in advance.

Keep that in mind when you hear promises to the contrary.

I’ve heard these statistics elsewhere, but not all in one place. So here’s an article doing just that. It tackles the myths about health care in the United States that ObamaCare was so necessary to fix.

• The U.S. spends too much compared to other countries.
• Other countries are doing better at controlling health spending growth.
• The U.S. has abysmal infant mortality rates.
• The U.S. has abysmal average life expectancy.
• The U.S. has worse health outcomes.

The stats have been manipulated to make the US sound far worse than it really it. In most cases its standing is better rather than worse, and in the rest it on par, if slightly lower, than other countries when comparing apples to apples. And in one case — life expectancy — the numbers used include issues that don’t relate to health care at all.

Read the whole thing. (It’s short.)

That’s the title of a post by Michael Stokes Paulsen at the Public Discourse website. He starts out with a statement of the facts.

Vanderbilt University has decided that Christian student groups that hold traditional Christian religious views are not welcome on campus. They will no longer be recognized as valid student organizations. Vanderbilt’s reason is that such groups require that their leaders be Christian—that is, that their leaders embrace certain core principles of Christianity and try to live according to these principles. In Vanderbilt’s view, religious beliefs and standards “discriminate” against those students who do not subscribe to them. Therefore, student religious groups with religious beliefs and standards are banned.

This from an institute that (allegedly) encourages debate and the free exchange of ideas. All ideas are welcome, except those that aren’t. Behavioral standards will not be tolerated in student organizations. You cannot hold to a belief system and, at the same time, expect that belief system to be held to by the members.

I wonder if a women’s rights organization could be run by a woman, or a man, who thinks women are second-class citizens. She or he doesn’t agree with the group’s beliefs, but if they don’t allow for someone like that to lead the group, should they, too, be banned? But see that’s a belief system that Vandy doesn’t have a problem with. No matter how they paint it, it’s a case of discrimination based on beliefs.

And thus, in a huge bit of irony, Vandy wishes to exercise a right that they themselves deny to the student groups!

As Paulsen notes, Vandy is well within its rights to do this.

As weird as it may sound—and as ridiculous as Vanderbilt’s actions may be—this is entirely within Vanderbilt’s constitutional rights: Vanderbilt has the right to be as hostile to orthodox Christianity and to suppress its faithful exercise on its campus as it wishes. Vanderbilt’s status as a private university gives it the First Amendment right to take whatever position it wants on the exercise of religion within its university community. Vanderbilt University has the right to despise Christianity (and other faiths, too) if it so chooses.

Of course, having a right to do something does not make it the right thing to do. And Vanderbilt’s policy is, undeniably, an embarrassing example of political correctness run horribly amok, of intellectually incompetent administrators, and of institutional hypocrisy. But in Vanderbilt’s bad example lies a parable rich in irony about constitutional freedom under the First Amendment.

Worth reading the whole thing. This isn’t about rights; it’s about hypocrisy, and how it and religious intolerance is being taught to the next generation.

Medical technology is reducing the need for stem cells.

In the laboratory skin cells were treated with a virus, which was modified to ‘infect’ them with agents that function to convert the skin cells into precursors to brain cells. These cells can specialise into the three types of brain cell: neurons, oligodendrocytes and astrocytes. After laboratory research was carried out, the converted cells were injected into the brains of mice. These mice were bred to lack the protein myelin, which is important in aiding the transmission of messages in the brain. 10 weeks later, the precursor cells had specialised into oligodendrocytes, which made the myelin that the mice lacked.

Skin cells directly to brain cells, do not pass Go, do not create ethical issues. (And creating myelin, which is something that someone like me with MS raises their antennae over.)

[Please click here for part 1, as this just picks up where that left off. Also, another blogger found the article again at a new URL on the same site. I’d searched using their advance search form with no success, but glad that it’s back so people can read the whole thing.]

The newborn and the fetus are morally equivalent

The authors, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva,  start this section with their definition of personhood.

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’. We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.

Thus, to be a person, you have to know you’re a person and be able to value it. The state of not knowing, however, lasts quite a bit beyond newborn status. The authors, again, fail to address this. More than fail to, actually, they refuse to address it, as we shall see.

Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life: spare embryos where research on embryo stem cells is permitted, fetuses where abortion is permitted, criminals where capital punishment is legal.

The equivalence here is somewhat flawed, not the least because they start to blur the moral right to life with the legal right to life. Further, they equate giving up your legal right to life (by, for example, murdering someone else) with a fetus or embryo being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Depending on your morals, all three examples have a moral right to life, it’s just in the last case it was actively forfeited.

Read the rest of this entry

[FYI, Part 2 of my "after-birth abortion" article will appear Monday, for both of you waiting for it. ]

Obama: ‘Drill Drill Drill won’t work. And you can thank Me that it did.’

America’s per capita debt is worse than Greece. And Greece’s credit rating is in the basement.

BBC: We’ll Mock Jesus But Never Mohammed. (Because Christians won’t cut off their head or burn things.)

For all the talk about crude names called at Sandra Fluke, the war on conservative women goes merrily unreported. Meryl Yourish refers to this as the new Exception Clause.

No wonder liberals think their unconstitutional ideas are constitutional. They don’t understand the document’s intent.

Like all generalizations, it’s not true of every single case, but James Q. Wilson asks an interesting question: Why Don’t Jews Like the Christians Who Like Them?

Just as Jews were once expelled from Arab lands, Christians are now being forced from countries they have long inhabited.

And finally, the return of the political cartoon to Friday Link Wrap-ups.

Last Friday, I noted in my Friday Link Wrap-up "Medical "ethicists" are seriously arguing that post-birth newborns are ‘not persons’ and can ethically be "aborted". I also posted this article on Facebook, and one of my friends took me to task on it. He said that "sloppy agenda laden journalism" has misinterpreted their intent, and that "the researchers are attempting to provoke debate on the ethics of abortion, not the desirability to kill newborns."

I’ve read the whole piece by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, and I come to the conclusion that, while their stated intent may not be to suggest that it is desirable to kill newborns, the result will be the same. The main problem I see is that, while they have their personal moral stances regarding how often and in what circumstances what they call "after-birth abortions" would take place, their stances would not be what others use to make their determination. Would they accept a gun manufacturer’s statement that "I don’t intend my product to kill innocent people"? Perhaps not, but it can be used that way, and abortion kills millions upon millions because they are merely inconvenient. The authors’ morals will not be used to put into practice their suggestions. Keep that in mind.

(Note: While putting this blog post together, the article was removed from the Journal of Medical Ethics website. The link takes you to a "Not Found" page, and no amount of searching for title, text, or authors could find it. I’m not sure if it was taken down for some reason, or if, perhaps, only the most recent articles appear on the website. In any event, the article is no longer there. I’ll continue to look to see if it gets posted elsewhere.)

(Second note: This is why I haven’t posted anything this week so far. I’ve been spending my time working on this.)

Read the rest of this entry

In Canada, strip searches from possession of a deadly … crayon.

Also from the Great White North, government intrusion into homeschool, saying that Christian parents can’t teach a Biblical view of homosexuality. Freedom of religion is being chipped away slowly enough that most don’t see it.

If Obama is some post-racial president, why is he launching "African Americans for Obama"?

Medical "ethicists" are seriously arguing that post-birth newborns are "not persons" and can ethically be "aborted".

With all the religious implications of Obama’s policies, you’d think he’d have kept around his faith-based council for advice. Nope, they’ve just faded away.

Movie reviewers of the liberal persuasion are all for anti-war, anti-military or pro-environmental message movies, but that idea gets thrown out when they disapprove of the message. Suddenly, it’s "propaganda".

Scofflaw Democrats. "The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 further provides that if, for two years in a row, more than 45% of Medicare funding is coming from general revenues rather than Medicare taxes, the president must submit legislation to Congress to address the Medicare funding crisis. President Bush dutifully followed the law, but President Obama has ignored it for the last three years."

Obama claims that we can’t drill our way out of the energy problem, and then, in the same speech, notes that domestic oil production is at it’s highest level in 8 years. Because we drilled! Can’t have it both ways, Mr. President, but the press will try to let you have it.

I’m still not sure who I’ll vote for in the Republican primary, and with Super Tuesday less than a week away, I don’t have much time to make my decision. However, it’s been very instructive to see how scared of Santorum the Left and media are. How else to explain their gross distortion of what he has been saying? (Well, I’m trying not to insult their intelligence, but that’s always a possibility, too.)

Santorum has said that contraception has been harmful to women, and to society in general, because of the changes it made to our society. James Taranto cites the facts and figures, and scholarly support, for Santorum’s claims.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for contraceptive use in 1960. Over the next half-century, the marriage rate declined and the illegitimacy rate skyrocketed, Charles Murray notes in a recent Wall Street Journal essay adapted from his new book:

In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont [Murray’s metaphor for the upper middle class] and Fishtown [the working class] were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10. . . .

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education–were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

The same trends have been noted among blacks, although they started earlier and are more severe. Of course it would be a fallacy (post hoc ergo propter hoc, for those keeping score at home) to declare Santorum’s argument proven on the basis of these facts. But they do demonstrate that the argument is not inconsistent with the facts.

The usual criticism we’ve heard is that it is absurd to suggest a causal link between birth-control advances and illegitimacy because, after all, birth control prevents pregnancy, and giving birth out of wedlock entails pregnancy. By that logic, though, illegitimacy rates should have remained low, or even declined further, after the inception of the pill. The Santorum argument may be counterintuitive, but the counterargument flies in the face of the facts.

But Santorum’s argument is not really all that counterintuitive. It posits that the availability of birth control changed the culture in ways that encouraged illegitimacy. There is scholarly support for this hypothesis, in the form of a 1996 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, which served as the basis for a brief written by George Akerlof and Janet Yellen and published by the centrist-liberal Brookings Institution:

[snip]

Santorum has come under particular attack for saying that contraception is "harmful to women." It may reasonably be said that this is an overgeneralization: There are many women for whom birth control has not been harmful–those who don’t want children, who prioritize career over family, or who have been able to find husbands in the post-sexual-revolution mate market. Still, Akerlof and Yellin make a compelling case that birth control has been harmful to many other women, and it is not implausible to think, as Santorum does, that it has been harmful to women on balance.

Instead of discussing whether or not Santorum’s conclusion follows from the advent of the pill, mostly what we get is feminist sloganeering about government wanting to take away womens’ right to their bodies or similar tirades that just don’t address what he said and miss the point entirely. They scream about their rights but won’t address the other issues that Santorum is trying to focus on; illegitimacy, children having babies, and the explosion of the welfare state because of it. Even the huge increase in abortions, which, you would have thought, would have gone down with the pill. This hurts, not just women, but society in general.

No, instead, his detractors try to make it all about themselves. The narcissism of the Left is truly breathtaking.

So says two high-ranking government officials who would know.

In a stark warning ahead of next month’s Budget, the Chancellor said there was little the Coalition could do to stimulate the economy.

Mr Osborne made it clear that due to the parlous state of the public finances the best hope for economic growth was to encourage businesses to flourish and hire more workers.

“The British Government has run out of money because all the money was spent in the good years,” the Chancellor said. “The money and the investment and the jobs need to come from the private sector.”

What should George Osborne do to provide a tax cut?

Tax the rich more to allow the income tax rate to be lifted to £10,000Borrow more and worry about reducing national debt in future yearsWe can’t afford any tax cuts

Mr Osborne’s bleak assessment echoes that of Liam Byrne, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, who bluntly joked that Labour had left Britain broke when he exited the Government in 2010.

He left David Laws, his successor, a one-line note saying: “Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left”.

Mr Osborne is under severe pressure to boost growth, amid signs the economy is slipping back into a recession.

Conservatives have been saying this for a generation. Government spending bankrupts us all. The private sector is where economic growth comes from. Government spending may give us something of a jolt (if any), but the cost associated with it is far more than if the government would just get out of the way and let the engine run.

If Samuel L. Jackson voted for Obama because he’s black –  using as his reasoning, "’Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them … That’s American politics, pure and simple." — then is it OK for white folks to vote for white guys just because they’re white? Could those white folks expect the non-reaction to their reasoning as Jackson got for his?

Albert Mohler takes Nicholas Kristof to civics class.  The Constitution protect freedom of religion as a basic right, not only when it’s convenient.

"Actor Sean Penn criticized Republican presidential candidates during a visit to Venezuela on Thursday, saying that right-wing policies in the United States aim to benefit the wealthy." No, we want to make as many people as possible wealthy, as opposed to Venezuela’s socialism, which is making as many people as possible poor.

Stoning Christians on the Temple Mount. No, not Jews. One more guess.

Germans are discovering that, when they need their solar energy most, during December and January, it doesn’t help that they don’t get much sunshine then.

Sign of the Times: "For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage" Perhaps Rick Santorum isn’t as kooky as some are making him out to be.

Revenge is not a proper motivation for proposed legislation. It makes you do foolish things like this.

A state lawmaker says turnabout is fair play when it comes to restricting abortion:  she wants to ban vasectomies for men.

Democrat Yasmin Neal of Jonesboro is protesting a bill that would restrict most abortions in Georgia to the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.

She says it’s only right, if Republicans are truly serious about "thousands of children" being "deprived of birth."

She tells Channel 2 Action News, "The Georgia General Assembly at this point is trying to legislate and dictate what women can do with their bodies. We’re just trying to do the same thing in reference to the men."

Is Ms. Neal really that unaware of the issues that concern the pro-life movement? Worse, is she that blissfully ignorant of the biology of it all? Have her parents had that "birds and bees" discussion with her yet?

Let me make this plain, if you, too, think the two procedures are equivalent.

A vasectomy prevents a sperm from leaving the man. This is equivalent to a tubal ligation for a woman, which prevents eggs from getting to the uterus. A sperm, or an egg, if cared for properly in a proper environment, will never, ever be anything other than a sperm or an egg. Pro-lifers do not consider a sperm or an egg human life, and the movement is not trying to pass laws prohibiting either procedure.

An abortion, on the other hand, occurs after the sperm has fertilized the egg. For pro-life people, this is, indeed human life. (The question of whether or not it is life is really the only question that matters, and if it is, it should be treated as such.) And if it is life, then we as human beings have limited rights when it comes to killing it.

Because here’s the thing; a fertilized egg, if cared for properly in a proper environment, can become President of the United States, a great doctor, a wise counselor, or even a revenge-filled lawmaker from the state of Georgia.