One Million Letters

The Teenage Life Club (of which I am not a member) is doing a campaign this month. The goal is 1,000,000 pro-life letters sent to the White House/Supreme Court during the month of March. My understanding is that you can write and send more than one letter per person, as the survey they ask you to take has an option for more than one letter. Here is the description on their website:

This year, The Teenage Life Club has decided to host a 2012 Pro-Life Letter Campaign. Our goal is to send 1 million letters to the White House and the Supreme Court, voicing the pro-life opinions of our nation. It is crucial to send the letters and make an impact at this time, especially as elections are not too far off.

The purpose of The 2012 Pro-Life Letter Campaign is to open up an opportunity for people who are pro-life to express their opinions on the matter of abortion and to make an impact in the constant fight for life.

We are asking people to send letters to the White House and to the Supreme Court during March 2012.

The addresses:

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20502

The Supreme Court

East Capitol Street, NE and 1st Street NE
Washington, DC 20002

People of any age can send letters. Adults and teens can write actual letters, while children are welcome to draw pictures and write a few phrases like “life,” “save the babies,” etc.

If you are not sure what to write in a letter, here are three general ideas that may help you start out:

1. Abortion violates the Fourteenth Amendment, of which the second half clearly states: “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
2. Abortion is murder, and it kills over 1 million babies every year in the United States alone.
3. I am speaking on behalf of those who have not had the chance to speak for themselves, and I will not stop until unborn babies have their equal share of rights.

After sending a letter to the White House or to the Supreme Court, please contact us so that we can know how many letters were sent. You can do so by taking this survey: Click here to take survey

We hope you will join us in our goal to reaching 1,000,000 letters sent to the White House and to the Supreme Court by people of all ages. In doing so, we hope to raise more awareness towards the issue of abortion and to help people see the injustice of the act.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at contacttheteenagelifeclub@gmail.com and if you are planning on participating in this project, please contact me as well.

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Angie
President of The Teenage Life Club

I will definitely be sending a letter, and probably more than one. This is a small, six-member club, and I greatly admire their effort.

Hitler Would Be Proud

It would have been hard to miss the storm over President Obama's birth control mandate. You know, the new law that will begin forcing employers to cover contraception costs in their employees' health insurance. So if you didn't miss it, and you don't want to hear my rantings, please just read the following paragraph.

The outrage over the mandate erupted because it ignored any conscience rights of religious institutions, such as Catholic hospitals, who don't want to be forced to provide contraception. After the pressure was put on the Obama administration, they "revised" the mandate, so that instead of the employers paying for the contraception, the insurance companies are forced to provide it for free. Except this doesn't fix anything. Because the employers are still paying for the insurance. They are still paying for their employees' access to contraception. THIS FIXES NOTHING. Don't be fooled by this false revision. Keep the pressure on Washington. You can sign a petition here. (If the petition gets 25,000 signatures by March 12, then Washington has to give an official response!)

The main problem with this mandate is that it violates the first amendment right to freedom of religion. You can't order people to give away carrots to anybody who wants them if carrots violate your religion. This doesn't just go for "religious institutions" either. This goes for all employers who don't like birth control.

Naturally, there is a limit to religious freedom. If, for example, your religion requires you to sacrifice virgins to your god every year, you have to be stopped. Or if your religion requires you to not perform a life-saving heart transplant...too bad. But contraception is not life-saving or necessary. It is not a right. There is no reason to force people to give contraception to others. There's no reason to prevent people from getting contraception either, as long as it isn't an abortifacient. I don't like contraception myself, but I don't mind if you use your privilege to access and use it, so long as it doesn't impede another's right not to provide it or another's right to live.

If, in a very rare (and perhaps bizarre) circumstance, some contraception or abortion is necessary to save someone's life, then their right to life is trumped by another's right to not provide these now life-saving services, as the normal intent for both contraception and abortion (preventing having babies and killing babies) have changed into "preventing dying".

Even if this didn't impede first amendment rights, this doesn't even make sense economically. Forcing insurance companies to provide "free" contraception just makes the price of the insurance in total go up. The employers still have to pay for the insurance, so the employers are spending more on their employees' insurance, which tightens financial strain on the workplace, which, eventually, coupled with other things, leads to laid-off employees. Government mandates forcing themselves into the free market system always have bad results.

Then, President Obama had the gall to say that the birth control was "free" because it costs less than the babies that would result, therefore saving us money. WHAT?!? Since when were human lives worth only as much as the money they require?! Is abortion next, then? What about disabled people? I mean, hey, if it saves us money, why not go around killing people that cost more than they provide? That's called eugenics, and sounds quite a bit like Hitler's euthanasia program. And if it contradicts your religion to provide euthenasia for expensive less-than-worthy people, too bad, because we have a right to kill people over whom we have control.

Yay Government

Birth Control

Perhaps some of you have heard the news the government is now forcing insurance companies to cover, among other things, birth control. Because we “deserve” it. And if you haven’t heard, well…you just did.

Planned Parenthood, no huge surprise here, is celebrating this “victory for women”. Now you can prevent pregnancies (or terminate very early ones with the “morning after” pill) all for free! Yay!

Except for, you know, all the problems with this new rule.

Moral convictions aside, regulations like this are the enemy of Capitalism and small government. Short Economics-In-The-Free-Market lesson: if free birth control was really widely wanted and demanded by The People, eventually one of the insurance companies would latch onto this profit-making idea. “Come to us!” their advertisements would say, “and get free birth control!” Then all the people who wanted free birth control would flock to them. The company would make money, and the people would get free birth control. And (here’s the key) everybody who didn’t want birth control wouldn’t go to that company, wouldn’t be morally compromised by being forced to pay for the others’ free birth control.

Because the insurance companies are greedy, right?

This is why the government made them cover birth control in the first place. Insurance companies want to make money. So if they want to make money, they would add free birth control as one of their benefits and make money.

But they didn’t do this on their own. So obviously free birth control isn’t in terribly high demand. Or they would do it without the government forcing them to.

But the government is also forcing The American People to pay for the free birth control. Because the birth control isn’t free. The insurance companies pay for the birth control. And The People pay the insurance companies. See the connection? The government is forcing The People to pay for something they do not want.

Sounds like the opposite of freedom to me. They're the government. We're The People. We tell them what to do, not the other way around.

Besides that, the federal government shouldn’t be messing around in health care at all. It’s not Constitutional. I thought we wanted our “right to privacy”? Simply put:

Dear Government,

Get out of our lives.

Love (or lack thereof),  

PS: American People, I'd appreciate it if you could vote in my polls over there to the right. Thanks!

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

The Right to Health and Privacy

I recently watched a short video on why Planned Parenthood’s summer interns “stand with Planned Parenthood”. One of the recurring statements went along the lines of (and sometimes directly on the line of) “I stand with Planned Parenthood because reproductive health is a right, not a privilege.”

…it is?

 I wonder how all of the millions of people who have read the US Constitution could have missed that bit. Or perhaps one of us has a misunderstanding of the difference between a “right” and a “privilege”.

(First, may I say, that if you don’t believe in God, rights don’t exist, because no right and wrong exists. Sorry.)

“Right” is defined as something you have a claim on. And, if you have been deprived of that something, somebody or something should give it to you. A privilege is something that is graciously given to you that you don’t have a claim on.

(There is a difference between a God-given right and a government-granted right. I believe that the rights we have in the US are mostly one and the same. So for the sake of simplicity and conciseness, I will be assuming that they are so.)

The US constitution defines what we have a right to. To name a few: the right to life. The right to own arms. The right to peacefully protest. The right to freedom of religion. The right to freedom of speech.

But the “right” to reproductive health? Or to any kind of health, for that matter? While all the rights I just listed above are confirmed in the US Constitution, the word “health” is never mentioned. Nor is the word “privacy”.

The US Constitution does not provide rights for “health”…or “privacy”. (See my blog post on babysitting government.)

Think about it. If somebody really did have a right to health, then it would logically follow that if you are not healthy, others, or the government are required to make you healthy. It gives you a free ticket to make yourself as unhealthy as you want, and then the government is required to give you all the care you need—or, more horrifically, the government is required to make sure you don’t become unhealthy in the first place. Not only is this unrealistic, if it was going on, that would be downright scary. Talk about unlimited government control! Here in the US, I am proud to say, we are free to be stupid if we want to.

The myth of the “Right to Privacy” originated from the third and fourth amendments in the US Constition. The third amendment states that soldiers cannot “quarter” (live) in a civilian’s house without the civilian’s consent. The fourth amendment states that the government can’t give “unreasonable search and seizures” and that “[search] Warrants shall not issue, but upon probable cause”.

But there is no “right to privacy”.

And this is a good thing. The keywords in the fourth amendment are “unreasonable” and “probable”. Think about it: if there really were a right to privacy, then the government wouldn’t be able to do anything at all to punish criminals, so long as they stayed on private property. The government would be unable to investigate the homes of suspected child abusers or wife-beaters or spouse-murderers or ANYTHING that took place on private property. This isn’t limited to just houses. This encompasses anything that is not owned by the government.

Talk about scary.

Normally, I’m all for less government intervention. But there are two times I will make an exception: protection of the citizens from outside forces (“outside forces” meaning anything other than the citizen themselves), and protection of the citizens’ property.

Abortion counts in with the child abusers wife-beaters and spouse-murderers.

Of course, I'm not saying I want the government to be able to search our houses whenever they want, and it certainly would be nice if everyone was absolutely healthy. But these are not rights.

Besides…being murdered while snuggled up in your own mother’s womb. That’s the ultimate violation of the right to privacy and health. If anything gives the government a ticket to intervene, abortion does.

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

Happy Independence Day!

This holiday has been steadily rising in my mental “Favorite Holidays” list as my love for my country has grown. Sometimes I wish I didn’t love the USA as much as I do. It’s frustrating to love something flawed, especially when you feel like if only the world would listen to you, you could fix it all up to perfection.

Of course, I know I couldn’t fix it perfectly, even if everybody would do what I said, because I’m not perfect. What’s more, if the world listened to me, that would mean I was the absolute dictator of the world and that completely contradicts what I would be trying to do in the first place: fix the USA’s problems. Her problems break my heart. Abortion, specifically.

The USA is flawed. Every country in the world is flawed. What makes the USA special is the idea it is founded on.

Humans are basically evil. Not basically good. Evil. The US government is set up to protect us from ourselves by letting us be free. To let us be free. We are supposed to be free to be prosperous, but I’d like to point something out that gets overlooked: originally, we were also free to be idiots and fail, but more and more we’re trying to stop that freedom to fail. The remedy is, supposedly, big government. I humbly point out that this isn’t working.

The US government is here for two things: to protect us, the people, and to protect our property. That’s it. Nothing more.

We are not a democracy. We are a Constitutional Republic. Yes, there is a difference. A democracy is where everything is jointly decided by the people themselves. A republic is where We the People elect representatives to decide things for us. A Constitutional Republic is where the representatives are bound to obey the Constitution that the Republic is founded on.

The Constitution that we are supposed to be obeying has a tenth amendment that states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”. If the Constitution doesn’t say you can do it, Federal Government, then you can’t. That's why our military is constitutional and universal health care isn't.

It’s these basic principles that are being ignored, and ignoring these basic principles is what is messing our country up.

It would be nice if government could take care of us. Government can take care of us. But there is something you have to give up in return.

When you are a toddler, your parents take care of you. They make sure you were safe and regulate how many cookies you can have and how much sleep you get. When you become an adult, you make your own decisions. You can make great decisions by looking both ways when you cross the street and regulating your own cookie intake and sleeping hours...or you can make poor decisions and pay for it with declining health. You're free to do whichever you choose.

Even if you make poor decisions occasionally, you don’t want to safeguard against poor decisions by having your parents always make your decisions for you. For one thing, that would take away all your freedom. For another, your parents are flawed too.

This is what big government is: flawed parents who aren’t always looking out for your best interests. Do you want to be a toddler and have the government babysit you, or do you want to take responsibility for your own life and sometimes fail along the way?

Happy Independence Day! Let's celebrate Freedom!