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.

Refuting Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion" (Part 8)

(I apologize for the missed posts. My school kind of took over last week. And I actually didn't realize I'd skipped two posts when I got on today - I had it in my head for some reason that I'd only missed one. In the future, if I don't post, you may assume it's because school is taking up all of my time.)

Judith Jarvis Thomson

Click here to read part 1.
Click here to read part 2.
Click here to read part 3.
Click here to read part 4.
Click here to read part 5.
Click here to read part 6.
Click here to read part 7.

This is the continuation of my dissection of the "ultimate pro-abortion argument". If we can prove this argument wrong, we can prove any pro-abortion argument wrong. This series will probably have roughly nine parts to it, because it is naturally divided up into sections. My comments are (in parentheses and underlined).

In this section, Mrs. Thomson is continuing to attempt to redefine morality so she can get rid of morality and justify abortion.This in itself is a great indicator that her overall argument of absolute bodily autonomy (covered in previous sections) is bogus, because if it were true, she would have no need to try to erase our morality. It would already, morally, make sense. This section, specifically, tries to dispose of personal responsibility.

Judith Jarvis Thomson: A Defense of Abortion

From Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971).

(Reprinted in "Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics," 5^th ed., ed. Ronald Munson (Belmont; Wadsworth 1996). pp 69-80
...

7.

Following the lead of the opponents of abortion, I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely as a person, and what I have been asking is whether or not the argument we began with, which proceeds only from the fetus's being a person, really does establish its conclusion. I have argued that it does not. (You haven’t proved anything because you’re assuming that people have an absolute right to bodily autonomy, which we do not, so the argument that abortion should be illegal because the fetus is a person still stands. But whatever.)

But of course there are arguments and arguments, and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the wrong one. It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. (This is true.) And it might be argued that all my analogies are therefore irrelevant--for you do not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist; Henry Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibility for me. (This is also true.) And our attention might be drawn to the fact that men and women both are compelled by law to provide support for their children. (Indeed they are.)

I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now may be in order. Surely we do not have any such "special responsibility" for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. (No, they took responsibility for the child when they risked bringing the child into existence.) But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it. (Yes they do.)They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to. (It doesn’t matter what they “wish” to do. You may “wish” to leave your infant in the woods so that she dies if you wanted an abortion but were not able to get one, but the law does not care what you “wish” to do. It never matters what you “wish” to do; we’re talking about right and wrong.) And I am suggesting that if assuming responsibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse--or anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so would a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist; so would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and assume responsibility for me. (You did not bring the violinist into existence, Henry Fonda did not bring you into existence, and you and Henry Fonda are not directly responsible for the intentional killing of your own offspring.

The hard truth, Mrs. Thomson, is that the world doesn't let us choose our own responsibilities. Some responsibilities are more or less optional, like taking the responsibility to turn in schoolwork assignments on time, but we can't pick and choose all of our responsibilities. It doesn't work like that. You can't say, "Well, I didn't ever take responsibility for this girl's well-being, so there's no reason I can't rape her." Similarly, you can't say, "Well, I never took responsibility for this baby (either 'because I was raped' or 'because I didn't mean to get pregnant' will do here), therefore there's no reason I can't kill her." Like it or not, the stability of the world depends on morals, including responsibility.)

I Remember Where I Was on 9/11

I am six. My mother sits me and my sister down on the rug in her room in front of the TV. She tells us to remember this day. I don’t remember her telling me that, but I must have done my best to obey, because I do remember.

I am confused. I don’t understand what is going on, why this is so important. In my six-year-old mind, I wonder why the news station keeps playing the same clip over and over, telling the same story over and over, instead of going from story to story like they usually do.

The clip they show is from a pedestrian’s viewpoint—one of those raw videos taken with a blurry camera and a shaky hand, instead of the fancy news ones. There’s a short stone wall to the left, running down the sidewalk, and trees growing on the other side of it. Coming up behind the trees, fairly close and easy to see, is the single burning tower, and its twin. There’s a man on a cell phone in the right-hand corner. He’s facing the stone wall, not the person taking the video, and not the towers. In slow motion he turns towards the towers, just as an airplane slowly soars into view from the left panel, crashing into the other tower. And explosions.

I get bored after a while, I remember that, but I’m also a little scared. Because I don’t understand what is going on. I don’t understand why my parents are upset. I’m scared enough to keep my restless six-year-old self sitting in the same place and not asking if I could leave now like I might normally do if my parents weren’t upset.

I also remember, fuzzily, the disbelieving horror my parents expressed when the towers collapsed.

I remember what seems like a few days later, though I suppose it could have been longer, and my dad has gotten out the modeling clay from the basement, and he sits at the kitchen table sculpting something. I ask why he’s doing that. And he (or perhaps mom) tells me it’s because God told him to.

It’s the towers, buckling in the middle. I watch for a while, because my dad doesn’t regularly sculpt things, and it’s interesting. But I’m still confused.

I’m missing something, I think.

Years later, sitting in the car with my mom, driving somewhere, we hear something on the radio about the war in Afghanistan and a bunch of other things I don’t understand and mom turns the radio off.

“When people complain,” she says, and she’s crying, “When people complain about the wars and the fighting, remember that they attacked us first.”

I remember.

Always.

~Dedicated to the 3,000 + American heroes who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

My memory may be faulty on some details, but they are real memories.

God bless America.

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

Moral Legislation

 

Hello world. I’m here to do yet another myth-busting post regarding government and abortion.

First, the Separation of Church and State. Put simply, that separation does not exist—at least not in those words. Those words in that order are nowhere in the Constitution. In fact, the words “separation” and “church” don’t appear at all. The word “religion” does though. Twice. In the same place, which is - you guessed it – the First Amendment.

“Amendment 1 - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”



"You placed a nativity scene
within 30 feet of a blinking reindeer
display...a violation of the separation
of Church and State...you're going
downtown."



That’s it. The “separation of church and state” doesn’t exist to keep the Church out of the State—but to keep the State out of the Church.

Related to the separation of Church and State is the popular lie that you can’t legislate morality. In reality, all legislation is somebody legislating somebody’s version of morality. All legislation. There isn’t one law that isn’t related to morality. I challenge you to try to find one that doesn’t lead back to somebody somewhere’s version of morality.

So to ask a Senator to keep his religious beliefs and his personal morality out of the Congress is unrealistic. The Senator was elected because of his personal morality (though not necessarily his religion)—otherwise known as his worldview. All politicians are elected because of their personal morality. They keep a list of their opinions on their campaign websites for the public to come and scrutinize.

Now, a line does have to be drawn between religious beliefs and liberty. Sexual immorality, for example. Do I believe premarital sex is a sin? Yes I do. Should the US have a law against that? Absolutely not. That’s Big Government in the extreme.

Pro-abortioners use both the “separation of Church and State” and the “you can’t legislate morality” arguments to use against pro-lifers.

“Keep your religious beliefs off of my body!” they proclaim, “It’s none of your business whether I kill this fetus or not.”

Remember the line that needs to be drawn? Abortion is not on the same side as premarital sex. Why?

Because some “personal morality”, some “religious beliefs” are too big to be ignored. Some things are too obviously bad, too obviously hurt someone, even if you don’t believe there’s a God.

Pro-abortioners don’t support rape.

They don’t support murder.

They don’t support genocide.

They don’t support racism.

They don’t support slavery.

They don’t support animal cruelty.

They don’t support child abuse.

They don’t support violence (against born people, anyway).

All of the things listed above are (with the exception of animal cruelty) violations of basic human rights.

Um.

Abortion.

They shouldn’t support that either.

All  images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

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!