Category Archives: Politics

Accuracy In Media Attacks Gays, Reason Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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Today, Cliff Kincaid of “Accuracy In Media” penned a truly vile piece attacking gay conservatives and imploring CPAC to hold panels on how homosexuals were dangerous, dangerous people who were bad for American and all communists.

It’s absolutely idiotic. Here’s why.

Kincaid begins with:

The term “gay conservative” is being used by some news outlets in connection with the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and whether certain homosexual groups should be invited to appear. There is no such thing as a “gay conservative,” unless the term “conservative” has lost all meaning.

Really, Cliff? You mean the word “conservative” didn’t lose its meaning after eight straight years of budget deficits and ever increasing government spending under George W. Bush? You mean it didn’t lose all meaning when Republicans had a chance to cut spending this past year but complained about it? You mean it didn’t lose all meaning when they decided the holy grail of conservatism, the Constitution, was trampled upon in their mad dash to sign the PATRIOT Act and the NDAA? It took the acts of GOProud, a group formed for the express purpose of spreading the message of limited government and free markets throughout the LGBT community, to make the word “conservative” lose all meaning?

WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN THE PAST DECADE?

But there is a homosexual movement that has its roots in Marxism and is characterized by anti-Americanism and hatred of Christian values.

Yes, GOProud is Marxist. Except…if I ever heard Chris R Barron utter anything about Marxism, it was always deprecating. Cliff, you haven’t talked to any gay conservatives, have you?

Two of this movement’s members, Bradley Manning and Floyd Corkins, have recently been in the news. Manning betrayed his country in the WikiLeaks scandal, while Corkins has pleaded guilty to trying to kill conservative officials of the Christian Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.

Rather than debate whether “gay conservatives” exist or ought to have prominent speaking roles, CPAC should be sponsoring a panel on the dangers of the homosexual movement and why some of its members seem prone to violence, terror, and treason.

Let’s get some things straight. First, two people does not serve as a representative sample of gays across America. You darn well shouldn’t be using this argument, since AIM has complained loudly about the media smearing the Tea Party movement as “racist.” Glass house rules, and all. Second, they are not part of the “homosexual movement.” Manning was a soldier who disagreed with what his country and his army was doing, and took matters into his own hands. Corkins was a crazy guy with a gun. It would be indicative of the “movement” if there were armies of gay people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, shooting up the place while rainbow APCs disgorge bear troopers into the FRC’s headquarters. But…there aren’t. So your “argument” is without merit.

Gay people make up around 2-5% of the populace. If we’re going to talk about sexual orientations being “prone to violence, terror, and treason,” we could more easily talk about straights. Or are you going to invent the fiction that Benedict Arnold was gay, too?

But the fate of a political party is not only what is in jeopardy. Historian Paul Johnson knows something about why nations fail, and he says one reason is the acceptance of homosexuality.

Johnson’s book, The Quest for God, laments that Western society made a huge mistake by decriminalizing homosexuality and thinking that acceptance of the lifestyle on a basic level would satisfy its practitioners. He wrote, “Decriminalization made it possible for homosexuals to organize openly into a powerful lobby, and it thus became a mere platform from which further demands were launched.” It became, he says, a “monster in our midst, powerful and clamoring, flexing its muscles, threatening, vengeful and vindictive towards anyone who challenges its outrageous claims, and bent on making fundamental—and to most of us horrifying—changes to civilized patterns of sexual behavior.”

Today, this monster wants to impose itself on our children in the schools and even the Boy Scouts of America.

Right, gay people are a monster who want to…..get married.

OH NOES! THE SKY IS FALLING!

Newsflash: Gay marriage has never brought down a civilization. It was not the cause of the fall of either ancient Greece or Rome, nor Byzantium, nor the Mongol hordes, nor any civilization. Grow up and deal with the facts.

I know something about this as well, since I spent several years in Scouting, became an Eagle Scout, and received merit badges in various skills. My wife and I became Scout leaders. Now, the homosexual movement is determined to overturn the ban on homosexual Scoutmasters and wants to teach young men in the Boy Scouts that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle.

Such a campaign is objectionable on its face because the Boy Scout oath commits a young man to being “morally straight.” That “morally straight” can be considered compatible with homosexuality is a complete perversion of the English language.

This is where I blew a gasket. Cliff, I served with Eagle Scouts. I am an Eagle Scout. Eagle Scouts were my friends. You, Cliff, are no Eagle Scout. And that you bizarrely conflate “morally straight” with heterosexuality just shows that you have learned nothing from either your English classes in school. “Morally straight” means the “straight and narrow,” not “morally heterosexual.” How can one be “morally heterosexual”? It’s absurd on it’s face.

You are not only a disgrace to the Eagle Scouts, by preaching hate and intolerance for others*, but you are also a colossal disgrace to the English language and English writers everywhere. You sir, should not be blogging, period.

The rest of the column is a long and confusing rant about how homosexuals are all Marxist communists in disguise. It’s really pathetic, seeking to pin everything on Harry Hay as the “founder” of the modern homosexual movement, as if someone just stepped up and said, “Hey, let’s be gay today.” Heck, Hay even had to resign from one of the original LGBT organizations because he was a communist. But Cliff won’t tell you about that, will he? No.

Cliff, just stop. You realize the reason why nobody votes for Republicans or free market conservatives anymore? Because of people like you. You don’t have an “argument,” you just have unveiled bigotry and hatred. And 21st century Americans are not fans of hatred or bigotry. They’re not going to vote for a party that embraces the free market if it simultaneously embraces bigotry, even bigotry against a small slice of the population.

Just come out and say it, Cliff. Just come out and say that you find gays “icky.” Fine. You find them icky. At least that’s valid, as it’s merely personal preference. Well, you know what, Cliff? Not a single gay person is going to come up and get gay with you. They’re not even going to want to be in the same room with you. So they can be gay, you can be lilly-white straight, and just not cross paths, and everyone will be happy.

Homosexuality is not an “unacceptable lifestyle.” It’s a sexual orientation. That’s it. I know libertarians and conservatives must work together to limit government, rebuild a free market economy, and promote individual liberty, but I am supremely frustrated with “conservatives” like Cliff who turn to us at every step and the liberty movement in the foot with a twelve-gauge shotgun. We don’t need this. What we need is to be expanding the movement and reaching out to people from all walks of life, to show them that free markets and limited government is the best thing they could possibly want. But people like Cliff cling to their old traditions, and abjectly refuse to build any bridges to new islands. At the same time, people are leaving the island he’s on in rafts made from whatever they can find.

You’re why we can’t have nice things, Cliff. You’re why Obama is president, the Democrats control the Senate, the government is spending at record levels, and we can’t even reduce the rate of increase in spending by 2% without everyone going ballistic. Just stop.

*I realize that the official position of the BSA is still no to gays, but since that is not courteous nor kind, it really goes against the Scout Law. Eagle Scouts should be speaking out against this, even though, as a private organization, the BSA does have the right to exclude gays. But just because it has the right to do so, doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

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3 Big Thoughts on Libertarianism

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stereotypical libertarian and conservative (and libertarian conservative, and conservative libertarian) approach to various topics in modern American politics. It’s pretty weird, and this will be somewhat longish, but I have to get it out of my head. [WARNING: Words ahead. Lots and lots and lots of words.]

First off, there is a huge focus on taxes, mostly accentuated by the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, their leader, Grover Norquist, and his little “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” (whereby signatories refuse to vote for any tax increases. Ever. Or something.) The end result is we pontificate endlessly about marginal tax rates and the Laffer Curve, and how we should cut taxes to boost the economy and employment, and yadda yadda yadda.

The problem with this approach, though, is that it’s misplacing the blame. The real problem with the government is not taxation. While I agree that taxation is an issue, and there can and should be significant tax reform (flat tax, anybody?), government spending and command and control regulation are way more important and far more serious. Government spending creates huge distortions in the market by moving money around in the private sector that wouldn’t have been if we left decisions up to private citizens, thus negating their power of choice in the market as producers scramble to lap up the government money that is spread around. Meanwhile, government regulation prohibits Americans from doing sensible things every day, not just by changing incentives as taxation does, but by literally saying “No, you can’t do that.”

What is really stopping American business from hiring more workers and reigniting the nation’s economic engine? It is corporate income taxes, or is it a bewildering and byzantine system of government regulations at the federal, state, and local level, that make it a nightmare to hire anyone or even to do business itself? You can get around taxation through creative accounting, and indeed, many major companies have done it so effectively they never paid corporate income taxes for years. So clearly, taxation is not the biggest problem. Government spending and regulation, which breeds cronyism, lobbying, and corruption (talk about being redundant), and prevents people from pulling themselves up on the social ladder (what eggheads call “income mobility”), is–or, at least, is bigger.

There are three more considerations to think of when it comes to taxation. The first is the debt and deficit, which are massive problems today. Would cutting taxes do anything to fix them? Au contraire–they would only exacerbate the problem! Cutting revenue would only make the debt grow larger, because you can guarantee there would be no corresponding cut in spending. So that’s a big no-no. Second, by and large the American populace accepts taxes as the cost of living in America. Sure, they want that cost to be lower, but they’ve accepted it as just the way things are. It’s like grocery shopping; you’re going to shop around the lowest price, or maybe even try to haggle for a lower one, but at the end of the day, you’re still going to buy your food. At the end of the day, Americans are going to pay their taxes because they like America, with all of its flaws and blemishes, and they want it. Running a messaging campaign that myopically focuses on taxes may gin up some support on the passionate right, but it doesn’t quite reach out to middle America and makes you look like a fool in debate with leftists, who can rightly point out that the tax rate was much higher back in the day, but millionaires and billionaires still stayed in America and made things.

The third issue is much more severe. There are many other issues out there which are far more serious and injurious to your liberty than taxes. I happen to think that being thrown in jail for unlocking your smartphone, shot and imprisoned for smoking a joint, spied on by domestic intelligence agencies through drones and wiretapping, living under the cloud of indefinite detention by the military, or potentially even being assassinated by your government, are much bigger problems than having to pay a 25% marginal tax rate. In comparison, the tax problem seems fairly mundane and just simply pales compared to the decimations of civil liberties going on today.

These thoughts started percolating in my head after reading this comment to a really long Popehat post on right-libertarianism vs left-libertarianism. As I kept thinking about it, it made more and more sense. I’m not the only one, though. Reading this page at Libertarianism.com, I’m struck by how many libertarians say “Ignore taxes; spending is the real problem.” Jeffrey Miron, who I admire for a multitude of reasons, says “Slash expenditures; then lower taxes will follow.” Congressman Ron Paul, who has his issues, notes that the real discussion is the proper role of government, not taxation; on that I completely agree. And finally, Lawrence Reed of FEE states that the “real problem is spending. We tax because we spend and if government spends too much, no resulting tax system could be called remotely ‘fair.’” Right on, Mr. Reed, right on.

In summary, we libertarians (and conservatives) focus far too intensively on taxation. We’re missing the forests for the trees, in some sense. That’s not good.

This indirectly also leads into my second topic I’ve been thinking about, which is a basic income and libertarian justifications for it. Basically, a basic income (see what I did there?) is a minimum income, or floor, provided by the state to keep people from becoming too poor. Naturally, libertarians are against this, because it consists of the state taking money from some people to give to others. Normally, I would agree…except for a few things.

One, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the greatest libertarians of the 20th century, were both in favor of a universal basic income. (Hayek especially. Milton Friedman a bit less so.) So is Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, though he supports it only as a “second-best” system to no welfare at all, and a far superior model to the bloated mess we have today. Matt Zwolinski, of BHL fame, also makes a strong argument for a small basic income. That’s fair, and definitely one reason why I’m becoming attracted to it.

The second thing is that, while libertarians emphasis “negative liberty” and “negative rights,” if you can’t feed and clothe yourself, they don’t mean much. As one libertarian philosopher puts it:

Most, if not nearly all, libertarians emphasize negative liberties. These rights, for the most part, mean the ability to pursue an activity that does not cause harm to other parties. Thus, the right to vote, to earn a living, to read, to pursue an education, to speak freely, to enter a contract with another agent, and other similar rights are rights that may be pursued without the enslavement of others by means of force and or coercion.

One of the most common criticisms of negative liberties is ‘so what?’ Indeed, it is easy to see the dismal of the negative right to free speech when one is hungry, poor and unemployed. Negative rights for agents in those derelict conditions mean not that much, if any bit at all.[9] For those in the said conditions the offer of positive rights, the right to be free from hunger, to an education, to a home, and to a job are understandable preferences. So of what relevance is the libertarian with his mantra of negative rights to the person in desperate need?[10]

Most right-libertarians take the standard of self-ownership, which most declare to be an axiom, as the sole foundational pillar of libertarian thought and political philosophy. As long as you own yourself and your property, that’s all that matters. But as Matt Zwolinski has been pointing out lately at Libertarianism.org (different site than the one cited above), that’s really far too simplistic and isn’t really adequate.

Also, I recently read John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness, examining a “middle way” between libertarians and classical liberals on one side, and Rawlsian “high liberals” on the other. Tomasi notes that a better basis for a libertarian polity, with free markets and a “thick” conception of economic liberties, is not the self-ownership principle. Rather, it is the ability of each citizen to be a “responsible self-author,” able to write his own story and lead his own life. (I don’t have my copy with me, unfortunately, having lent it to a friend, so I can’t give you a page number, but it’s there.)

The way I see it is this: you’re on the street, homeless, starving, and begging for food. Nobody will give any to you, though, and you won’t steal from anyone because you have principles. You end up starving to death. Now, the self-ownership principle was followed, but were you really free? Of course most libertarians would argue that yes, you were, and that is is a horribly over-simplified scenario–which they’re right about, it is over-simplified–and that “positive rights” serve only to enslave others because for that to work you must force someone to provide you with food…but if we have a society where people are starving like this, is that justifiable? Can libertarians really accept such a thing? And if your number one need is survival, if you’re living hand to mouth and living on a subsistence diet, are you really free?

I myself am torn on this, in terms of moral issues. I don’t know the answers to the above questions. I certainly don’t think, though, that targeted economic interventions and wealth redistribution as the left always promotes is the answer. We’ve seen what that has done over the past century, and it’s nothing good. Therefore, in terms of consequentialist issues, I’m totally onboard; it may be “second-best,” as Murray puts it, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we have today. I’m also in favor of it from a purely PR perspective; Americans do indeed care about the poor, and a movement and/or political party that seems to just want to let the poor starve on the streets is going to be ignored at best, and vilified at worst. A basic income would remove that weakness.

As for how to actually implement…hell if I know. The standard basic income system is simply not feasible, ever. Even if we replaced all other government spending, giving $15,000 to every American, at a population of 300 million, would cost $4,500,000,000,000–that’s $4.5 trillion a year. I don’t think that’s something we can afford, even with a rapidly growing economy (which, as it turns out, we don’t have right now.) Probably the only way we can do this is through a form of the negative income tax. Originally proposed by Milton Friedman, I think Jeffrey Miron has come up with a slightly better version. That one might actually be doable.

At the very least, though, this is something that libertarians and conservatives should be taking seriously. As Mike Munger notes in the abstract of his article on basic income, “A distinction is made between libertarian destinations and libertarian directions.” Basic income may not be–and probably isn’t–a libertarian destination. But to me it seems it sure as hell is a libertarian direction.

Finally, one last thing, again from the left-libertarian playbook, are some thoughts about our environment and natural resources. I’m not what Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear would call an “eco-mentalist.” I don’t think increased government regulation over the environment is going to solve anything. I don’t think global warming or climate change is a serious problem (and even if it were a problem, I don’t think government would be the answer.) I’m not a vegetarian or a vegan, and I don’t go into any of that crap. I like my big engines and my big burgers just like any other red-blooded American. But I am very sympathetic to an idea amongst left-libertarians that the world is common property.

The basic gist is that left-libertarians are totally free market libertarians, like everyone else, at least until we get to natural resources and the environment. This kind of left-libertarianism is known as “Steiner-Vallentyne libertarianism”–at least on Wikipedia–after it’s two major proponents, Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne. This turns into a strong defense of self-ownership, but holding an egalitarian view on natural resources. I remember reading about this a long time ago when I first researched Henry George and the “Georgist” school (which also has led to geolibertarianism.)

To break it down, wilderness and natural resources are, in their “initial state,” unowned. They become owned when, as John Locke and Robert Nozick put it, someone “mixes their labor” with it. Henry George disagreed with this analysis, pointing out that we own something when we make it, but nobody “makes” or “creates” land; it is just there. How then could we own it? Although he was writing in the late 19th century, before automation and global industrialization, his viewpoint is very appealing to me. It makes a lot of sense.
I should also note that I’ve always considered myself to be a “green-libertarian.” While I’m definitely a libertarian first and foremost, I also care a lot about the environment. That’s why I don’t want to entrust it to the government. That’s probably why I’m feeling sympathetic to this view of “common ownership” of the Earth.

But while the view that we can’t own land–we can merely “rent” it from the rest of the community–because we don’t create it is appealing, it also has significant flaws. First, what’s to say that one must create something in order to own it? Why not mixing your labor with something that is unowned? If someone discards something in the trash and another person claims it, does anyone care? I don’t think so, and I think you would be hard-pressed to say that the latter person doesn’t “own” it because it took it and it had no owner.

But a more fatal argument is the tragedy of the commons argument: that without a clearly defined, individual (or a very small group) owner, the whole ecosystem will go to pot as people overexploit the area. You must have some incentive for people to take care of the land.

Of the three points presented here, this is the weakest and the faintest one. I’m just not sold on it like I’m sold on a pivot away from tax obsession and the idea of a basic income. It is merely an interest. We’re stuck in a rut right now between global warming eco-mentalists on one hand who think we should all go into “deep ecology” and hard-headed conservative types who can’t even dream that the environment may be having problems on the other. There has got to be another way to break out of this. I’m just not sure what at the moment.

I definitely think that we, as a liberty movement, can use some strategic adjustment. I think the vehement opposition to any sort of income redistribution is going to stop us in our tracks; sure, it works fine from a high philosophy standpoint, but nobody on the ground really cares, and anyways, you can make a case for libertarianism with a bit of that as the crowd over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians have shown. (Heck, even Adam Smith, godfather of capitalism, was not as market-dogmatic as modern libertarians.)

…

Well, those are my two cents, anyways.

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Dude, we live in space!

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And space is dangerous:

That’s the sound of a meteorite coming down from outer space and blowing up in the atmosphere just over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. Yeah.

I’m not entirely sure what’s happened, as I just heard about this when I came into work, but it appears that 500 people are injured and there has been a lot of damage.

The Soviet Russian fanblog “Russian Machine Never Breaks” has a roundup of videos and tweets on the meteorite. Obviously I am not going to compete with them, so I’ll just link to more roundups.

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has a good roundup of videos.

And Phill Plait, who is probably the best astronomer out there today, of course is watching it and has been blogging on it for Slate. (No, this is not part of the asteroid near-miss that’s expected to come later today.)

The moral of the story is…we live in space. We’re affected by it. And while events like these are astonishingly rare, we should still sorta prepare for them. And by the way, though I’m a libertarian, I absolutely believe in a publicly-funded global SPACEGUARD program. It’s a simple public good, which is actually within the realm of government (as Adam Smith, who is practically the godfather of capitalism and free markets, actually said.)

But…crikey. 500 1000 people injured in Russia from a meterorite. Good thing this didn’t happen 30 years ago during the height of the Cold War. There might not be any humans left.

UPDATE: The Guardian’s video is a good compilation, including what happened to folks inside buildings:


They also have a live update blog going on. It looks like injuries may have risen to 1000.

Finally, they also have a column up about the “meaning” of meteor strikes, including this gem:

Like all random events and misfortunes, we want these things to mean something. The Russian fringe politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, rushed to the microphones to claim that the shower of stones that broke windows with their sonic boom, injuring 400 people, was a dastardly test of a new American weapon. Advocates of a renewed space programme have instantly told us that the asteroid pass proves that we need to be in space so that anything that comes closer can be, somehow, shoved out of Earth’s way. More generally, all over Twitter, people are calling on passing rocks to land on, for example, the Sun offices (over publication of photographs of the late Reeva Steenkamp) as once they would have called for the thunderbolts of Zeus, the wrath of Jehovah or Betjeman’s friendly bombs.

The trouble with wanting random events to acquire significance by afflicting unpleasant, otherwise untouchable powerful figures is that everyone does it. The religious right, Christian and Islamic, are fond of regarding tsunamis and hurricanes as instruments of wrath – Pat Robertson came up with a particularly unpleasant version of this when he attributed Haiti’s problems to divine punishment for an alleged satanic pact made by that country’s successful slave revolution. Nor is this confined to the religious right; rightwing sci-fi writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in their 1977 novel of a comet’s impending collision with Earth, have a character who survives the impact say that the good thing about the calamity was that women’s lib was over. Heavenly vengeance is really an idea that has no place on the left.

Naturally the Guardian is more left-wing, but you can’t help but nod your head and agree with the author. The only thing this meant was that a rock fell out of the sky.

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“Wayne Kerr” on Anarcho-Capitalism

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A very intelligent man, who wishes to go by the name “Wayne Kerr,” has this wonderful comment on anarcho-capitalism:

“Anarchism is the center-right equivalent to academic Marxism. A farcically impractical political agenda that would almost certainly lead to mass suffering, perpetuated by moralizing armchair philosophers and overzealous students. In the end it only detracts from those of us actually trying to advance human freedom.”

Indeed.

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OTB Comment: Really Only One Way to Save the #GOP

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Here’s a comment I wrote for James Joyner’s post on David Brooks’ proposal for a “Republican-lite” party. It’s so long I thought it might be worth it’s own little post:

Look, there’s really only one way to save the Republican Party, and that’s to become more libertarian. Dropkick the social conservatism out the door. You can’t have a party that says it will stay out of the boardroom invade the bedroom, and you can’t do that to foreign countries either.

Stop bailing out corporations and the banks. Stop the cronyism. Stop the subsidies to keep food prices high. Stop being pro-business and start being pro-market. Look for ways to break down the barriers holding people down and increase income mobility (forget about income inequality, it’s meaningless). Stop denigrating the poor and help them help themselves. Start getting serious about entitlement reform, because we’re already pass the point of no return, and now it’s just a question of how hard we’ll hit. Also, and this one is probably going to be very controversial, but it’s time to look at radical welfare reform. Whether that’s a negative income tax or a basic income, we need to replace the bloated mess we have today, but we do need to establish some sort of minimal safety net or floor so that people at least have a launchpad to get their lives started(and, for those Objectivists, don’t drag on the rest of us).

Stop being hypocritical on government spending: government spending is government spending. That means that you have to take cuts to defense spending too. Stop trying to take that stuff off the table. It’s stupid and makes you look like fourth-graders. If we’re going to cut government, we’re going to cut all of it, not just the parts you don’t like.

And for the love of jesus, stop being so virulently religious. Atheists and the nonreligious are one of the fastest growing demographics today. What’s interesting is that a lot of them are, if not the garden variety conservative, are more free market than people think. They’re not automatically godless Communists. I would say 50-60% are free market libertarians. Enough with the Christian rhetoric in your speeches. You don’t have to be a god-fearing Christian to believe in free markets and individual responsibility. That theoconservatism, combined with the social conservatism, is the #1 reason why the GOP brand sucks today. A lot of people don’t mind the free market and are cool with working for themselves and making some money to get ahead. But they can’t stand the religious crap, even if they are Christians. Nobody is that hardcore outside of Alabama and Georgia, and you can’t win elections with just two states.

Enough is enough is enough.

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How you know politics is beyond stupid

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From some random reading on Wikipedia:

2009 – Dale Swenson, Kansas State Representative from Wichita switched January 12, 2009 moments after being sworn into office as Republican for eighth term [48] In 2010, Swenson’s Democratic opponent in 2008, Leslie Osterman, switched to Republican and defeated Swenson.[49]

 

That’s right. Candidate A switches from Republican to Democrat. Candidate B, his opponent, then switches from Democrat to Republican.

And you think the two parties are actually different.

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Well, there goes the pro-life neighborhood….

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In an embarrassingly hypocritical legal suit, a Catholic nonprofit church has argued that “fetuses are not people” in order to get out of paying money for a wrongful death (emphasis here mine):

Lori Stodghill was 31-one years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins.

The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”

[...]

But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.

Now, what they’re saying is that state law defines fetuses as not people, not the Church itself. But, by using this argument, aren’t they throwing away standard Church doctrine on abortion and the right to life? With $15 billion, shouldn’t they just pay up?

Make no bones about it–I’m a pro-choice kind of guy. I generally follow Ayn Rand’s ideas on abortion. However, I understand–and sympathize with–pro-life arguments that equate abortion to murder. It does make sense; if the fetus is a person, then wouldn’t abortion be murder? I myself am not entirely clear on if a fetus is a person or not, but I generally move against it because, come on, a fetus doesn’t notice anything and isn’t performing cognition in whatever passes for a noggin. It’s a potentiality, nothing more. But, I will accept that, if we discover fetuses performing cognition, that maybe that’s the point where abortion should be denied.

What the above paragraph shows is that this is a deeply complicated issue, complicated over the simple fact that we don’t know when personhood begins. What both sides should realize that this is precisely the worst place for a ham-handed government to get involved.

Unfortunately, it has become clearer and clearer to me over the past few years that the pro-life movement is really not about it’s trumpeted principles at all, but just another way to gin up more votes or more parishioners. A lot of it is just a hypocritical grab for power over women’s vaginas.

I’ve written before that I would gladly trade abortion for gay marriage: take the pro-life, pro-gay route, just to end the stupid culture wars in America and get back to what is really important, fixing our economy and our fiscal problems. But these days, I don’t know if I can. The transparent hypocrisy is showing just a tad too much.

Here’s a grand idea, folks: let’s leave government out of the bedrooms and our private parts. This is not an area for government action. Let’s leave it be.

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Dear Social Conservatives: Just stop the hate

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Sometimes, I read something, and I don’t really write about it for days or even weeks afterwards. In this case, I’m still not sure what to say about this piece from Stephen Crowder at FoxNews.com, but I’m going to try and say it anyway:

Can all of the real men in this country please stand up? You there, not so fast. Anyone who’s read my op-eds here on FoxNews.com knows just how much I hate the systematic destruction of man in modern America.  No, I’m not just talking about the hyper-metrosexualization of young men, I’m talking about the role of man in modern society as a whole. For real men everywhere, these are some dark times.

[...]

Now I get that Carlos is an extreme example of a screw-up being used by some high-up network executives as a desperate grab for ratings. The problem is that this kind of behavior is becoming increasingly indicative of men in the 21st century.

Today’s left-leaning, pseudo-feminist society has bred men to believe that they are not intrinsically different and/or valuable in comparison to their female counterparts (and vice versa).

I remember in kindergarten, my teacher (who will not remain nameless) told the entire class, “Kids, men can do anything that women can do and women can do anything that men can do!”

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Crowder.”

“But Mrs. Henderson, what about being a dad?”

“Many women do that everyday!”

Sadly, many of those on the left actually believe this. To the left, men and women are interchangeable. How else could you support same-sex marriage?

The only difference between someone like our friend Carlos Short and I, is that he’s bought into the lie. Why shouldn’t he have ten “baby-mammas”? Those women, sorry, persons, don’t need a man or a husband. Who needs a nuclear family with a strong male figurehead when you’ve got politically correct, warm fuzzies on which to fall back?

Also, suggesting that a mother needs a husband and that a child needs a father… well that’s getting dangerously close to the line of “judging.” To many on the left, that already has you walking on paper-thin ice.

Stop. Just stop.

I am absolutely sick to high heaven of people going around and lecturing one others on how they should live their lives. Most of the time, the ones doing the lecturing are not symbols that should be raised up. And even if they are, where do they get the idea that they can write screeds denouncing other people’s personal lives?

I’m not saying that the TV show Stephen is blasting is one that I would like, or that it’s some model to hold high to the rest of the world. It probably isn’t. But by the same token, neither is the same kind of backwards, barbaric, and utterly brain-dead misanthropy that leads him to turn this into an anti-gay marriage barb.

And for the record, Steve, support for gay marriage has nothing to do with “men and women are interchangeable” beliefs. It has everything to do with treating people as individuals, and protecting their individual rights–you know, what conservatives harp about constantly? Guess you don’t practice what you preach.

There are many families that follow the model that Stephen here would want them to–and yet they still turn out horribly dysfunctional. And there are many people who might not fit his views of gender roles–and they turn out to be just fine, wonderful people.

Just stop hating people. Just stop judging people. I am utterly sick and tired of conservative folk, especially the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, going around and doing nothing but judging others. Wasn’t there a major message in the Bible that said “don’t judge?”

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. “For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? “Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)

People need to stop moralizing about others and go back and fix their own lives. Stop criticizing other people because they follow a life that’s different from yours. One of the first colonies in America was Rhode Island, a refuge for Jews, atheists, homosexuals, and a whole bunch of other people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. If having different lifestyles like that isn’t American, then nothing is–and certainly not your Puritanistic moralizing nagging that nobody buys today.

Aannnnddd….I’m out. I don’t know if I have any more to say on this topic. Just that I find this crap very aggravating and I wish it would stop.

UPDATE: My friend linked to this on Facebook, and a commentator there had a really good point:

[I]t is not social conservatives, but prescriptive social conservatives. People can be socially conservative all day, if it primarily involves their own behavior. Under these terms, I would consider myself a social conservative.

The problem is when people decide that they know what’s best for others and they will force you at the point of a gun, if need be, to shape your behavior in a way they approve.

Yes, this is the real problem. Those who are personally “socially conservative” but don’t bother other people are harmless and perfectly okay. I do think, though, that a lot of unnecessary crap in this country comes from moralizing, and people of all stripes–liberals, conservatives, even libertarians–need to just stop. Just shut up. Nobody wants to be lectured on how to live their lives, period. So knock it off.

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COPS: Disgusting

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I’m reading Kelley Vlahos’ article in The American Conservative on the 25-year old reality TV show COPS, and one thing really disgusted me:

And though the COPS team is emphatic that it works within the law, the show has been the target of civil rights complaints and other grievances from the start. Its producers were accused in 2011 of coercing an 18-year-old African American boy into signing a waiver that would allow them to show his face on television after he was detained (in dramatic COPS fashion — “three knees in my back and my neck”) for loitering in a Tampa county park after dark. He complained later that while handcuffed in the squad car, he was told by a COPS producer that if he didn’t sign the waiver, he would go to jail.

He signed “out of fear,” he told news reporters, and was soon released on a misdemeanor.  Meanwhile, he’s afraid his image will be out there forever, his face on the ground. “I might not be able to get a job,” he said. “They show reruns and reruns.”

That’s beyond disgusting. First, if it’s not illegal already, it should be. Second, it is downright immoral. That this TV show is run by self-centered, immoral jackasses who defraud young, uneducated kids just to score some more ratings makes me furious. Does anyone here respect people? Does anyone here understand the meaning of “standards?” I guess not. Nothing matters any more.

I hope COPS goes off the air, and then real life cops around the country start getting re-educated on what their jobs really are.

I encourage you to read Kelley’s piece from top to bottom. It’s a great read, and I assure you, it’s not what you would think is “normal conservative” material.

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Comment on BHL Blog: Science, Religion, and the Great Stagnation

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Seems to be the comment system over at BHL is eating up my comments. Ah well. Here is what I’ve been trying to say on this post:

Original comment got eaten. Aaargghhh….

1 – I’m not sure if science and theistic religion are really all that compatible. Theism, in all its myriad ways, purports that there is an omniscient deity that not only created the universe, but gets involved in humanity on a daily basis (or some other time interval.) As the intelligent design argument has shown, science has effectively ruled this out completely. You can’t really talk about physics and biology and then say there is some deity pulling all the strings so we look exactly how we are now.

2 – *Deism*, on the other hand, may be a different matter, because all deism is about is that there is a god, who created the natural laws that lead to the universe, and then was never seen again. Although there are problems with this view too (Austin Cline notes that the universe appears much more dynamic and chaotic than one would suppose it would be if it were designed) I think deism and science are fairly compatible, and indeed, deism could easily become the new religion of the US as trends continue.

3 – As for the social status of scientists, I don’t really think that’s the basis for the problems we face today. Leaving aside the matter of if we have a great stagnation or not, it seems clear to me that the problems really stem from cronyism, fiat monetary systems, and special interests gaming the market to the point where it is more like participatory fascism, as Randall Holscomb puts it. While there are certainly problems with science today–namely how it has been politicized over climate change and environmentalism, to the point where it has sustained serious damage to its credibility–I don’t think the lack of “Likes” on scientists’ Facebook fan pages is the reason for the problems and difficulties we’re facing today. I mean, we’re churning out new products and technologies all the time. Hell, in 20 years, we might even have an outpost on Mars, for all we know.

EDIT: Aha! And now the comment system is back, meaning my original comment is up there, but this one, which retrospectively feels superior, is not. Blast it, Zwolinski, are you trying to confound me?

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