Check it out at:

http://huckamania2012.blogspot.com/2009/06/who-i-like-in-2010.html

To take a quote from Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” The debate about abortion is going nowhere.  The simple reason for that is because we are having the wrong debates.  Right now it is framed as pro-life versus pro-choice. What the debate boils down to now is either you can support life, or a woman’s right to choose. Each side will try to make it seem as if the other side does not have the capacity to support both. For example, you may hear that a pro-life person does not support woman’s rights in all situations, ergo, they are sexists, or for selective rights. It cuts the other way as well.  A pro-choice person doesn’t respect human life, and is uncaring and cold hearted.  That is when you start to hear terms like anti-choice, and pro-abortion.  When we put aside the rhetoric, I believe that we can all agree that those statements are not true.

I dare to get out of the fray and suggest that the debate is not about whether we prefer life or choice. In reality, we prefer both.  One of the main arguments from the pro-choice side is that the government should not be able to tell a woman what she can do with her body.  Or in other words, a woman has the right to choose how to take care of herself.  I believe everyone would agree with that statement.  This is a universal truth (or was) that the individual knows what is best for them, and not the government.

Now I would like to take the time to I reiterate that I believe that women have the exact same rights and freedoms that men have.  However, no one has the absolute right to do anything they please.  All laws are a prohibition on absolute freedom.  Absolute freedom is not a right.  If there was such a thing as absolute freedom, then I should have the right to punch you without fear of consequences or punishment.  In order to protect your unalienable rights, laws have been put into place to prevent me from hitting you.  I call to mind a popular saying: “my right to swing my fist at you ends at the beginning of your nose.”  Or in other words, I do not have the right to do something when it infringes upon your rights.

This helps to frame what the debate about abortion should focus on.  As you can see, the debate should no longer be about whether a woman has a right to choose to have an abortion or not, but instead should focus on determining when life begins.  Why should it focus on that? Because every person is guaranteed certain unalienable rights, among these: LIFE, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The second it is determined that a fetus has life, it is ensured these same inalienable rights that each one of us enjoys.

As of now, there is no consensus as to what the definition of “life” is. Some say that the definition of “life” should be based on a heartbeat, brain activity, “viability”, or conception.  Others may try to argue there is a difference between “human life” and “human being,” but I would agree to the contrary. Notice the word choice in the following sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [Emphasis added]  This famous piece of American history shows that we should not differentiate between “life” and “being.”  If we are only granted the right to “be”, then it would be allowable to end the lives of several groups of people including: the handicapped, the mentally disabled, the sick, the elderly, and so on.   Some people in these groups may not able to “live” in the sense that they may not be able to fully experience life, and thus could be viewed as disposable.   Would we then say that they are human lives, but not human beings?  I think we can all agree that trying to distinguish those two words would open up Pandora’s Box.

I do not consider the question as to when life begins to be a scientific one.  We cannot now, nor ever in my opinion, definitively say when the Divine spark is imparted on us.  That is why this will be a moral/philosophical debate.  No amount of scientific discoveries will be able to tell us when life begins. Scientific facts change from generation to generation, but moral absolutes do not.  The answer to the debate will not come easy, but once we figure out what the debate is that we are supposed to be having, then we have progress. Right now both sides are debating seemingly separate points, neither one really responding to the other.  When we agree on the scope of the debate, then we are on the right path. So, let the real debate begin!

By BMK

June 25, 2009

Dear Mr. Burns,

I listened with great interest to your show tonight between 9:00 and 10:00 pm on the topic of selective reduction. If only I had been able to call in and offer my two cents.

If you find that my opinion offered here merits consideration, then please share it with your audience at your next opportunity.

My wife and I brought children into this world with the assistance of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Before doing so, we looked deeply into the issues attached to IVF, established our boundaries, the proceeded deliberately. Today we have four beautiful children: three girls and one boy.

The cardinal principle from which we operated is a moral one: every embryo created should be given the best possible chance at continuing its natural life cycle, i.e. being implanted, brought to term, and delivered to realize its potential. Since we believe that one should not create persons with intention to destroy them (as in selective reduction), we precluded this concern by fertilizing eggs conservatively, and only two embryos at a time were implanted in their mother’s womb. None were “reduced,” thrown away, or otherwise destroyed. When one rolls the dice conservatively, one risks getting nothing for the $16,000 they paid for an IVF cycle. There is a cost to living within boundaries, but, more often than not, a higher cost to living without them.

I must interject here regarding the term “created.” Actually, neither we nor science created anything. Simplified, IVF is just a facilitation of the meeting of the natural ingredients after which the resulting new lives are placed in their natural environment until transition to the next stage of their life cycle. For science truly to create an embryo, scientists would construct the organelles and other sub-cellular structures from scratch, then assemble them into a complete respirating and functioning embryo. Perhaps it is more correct to say that science “facilitates” what usually happens naturally.

The point I kept hearing you make more than any other during the hour on this topic was this: if we’re okay with employing science to “create” life, then shouldn’t we also be okay with employing science to extinguish that same life? (I hope I repeated your thought accurately enough.)

To test your assertion, let me then offer a scenario and a question. Suppose a woman brings sextuplets to term whose genesis had been facilitated by IVF. That is, without the intervention of science, those six children would not exist. Two years go by, and the woman realizes that she has not the means to care for all six of the children, to provide adequate nourishment and otherwise any foreseeable “quality of life” for all of them. Since science helped to bring these children into the world, would you then argue that the woman should be offered a legally-protected prerogative to employ science toward the termination of the lives of any of her toddlers? Why not? …because a toddler is a person, but the unborn is…..is what?

What is the unborn?

Is the unborn a person?

This then is the crux of the controversial life issues, of the debate over selective reduction, of the debate over abortion.

Given any scenario, given any quandary, if you wouldn’t advocate taking the life of a toddler, then why would you advocate taking the life of the unborn?

It always comes down to this one question: Is the unborn a person?

We agree that at some point along the life cycle of a human, that human becomes a person. Is it at the very beginning? Is it at the end of the first trimester? Is it at birth? Is it, as Peter Singer asserts, when a human becomes aware of her desire to survive (between two and three years old)?

It seems to me that the onus is on the advocate of selective reduction (or abortion) to discover honestly when a human becomes person, and then not to breach a zone of moral safety within which that threshold exists. Otherwise, he becomes guilty of, or at least complicit in, the taking of lives of innocent persons.

Regarding selective reduction, discussion of whether personhood is achieved at conception isn’t really necessary because that’s not when selective reduction is performed. No, selective reduction is often performed at twelve weeks gestation, and is almost always performed between ten and twelve weeks gestation. At this stage, the little person has fingers and toes, and its heart has been pumping since the seventeenth day after conception. Take a look at any human embryology text; what I’m saying is true.

Yes, I said “person.”

Neither size, level of development, environment, nor degree of dependency eliminates or precludes personhood.

My daughters are not non-persons because they are smaller than me.

My son is not a non-person by virtue of being less developed than me.

There is nowhere I can go where I become a non-person by virtue of being in that place.

Dependency upon an insulin pump does not cause one to be a non-person. My young children are dependent upon me or another adult for their survival (remove their caretaker, and see whether they last more than a week), but I doubt you would argue that they are non-persons.

Therefore, I hold that the unborn is a person and that every embryo created should be given the best possible chance at continuing its natural life cycle. Certainly, no human life should be created if the intention from the outset is to destroy it.

Sincerely,

Brian S.
Sacramento

PS – I hope that you, an agnostic, will appreciate that I had no need to invoke religion to make the case for the personhood of the unborn. As our Declaration says: These truths are self-evident…

Friends,

It is time for me to get back up on my soap box. Not a day goes by that this administration and its stooges in Congress don’t make my blood boil. Whether it is the “stimulus package” or the federal government taking over our health care or Attorney General Holder giving consideration to prosecuting the former administration for their decisions, it all boils down to one issue. Where is the constitutional justification for any of their actions?

The more I look at this administration as well as administrations for the past 80 years (and I am being generous) I realize that most, if not all of our economic problems have come as a direct result of the federal government violating its constitutional authority. In this series of Discourses let’s concentrate on just the establishment and operation of what I call extraconstitutional cabinet-level departments. First, I suppose that we should determine which departments are authorized, expressly or by implication, by the Constitution.

I would submit that Treasury, State, Justice, War (now Defense), and Commerce are authorized or implied by the Constitution; there might also be a case for the Department of Interior. I have linked Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution here. This article details the powers of the Congress. You may want to open it in order to refer to it while I go through this discussion.

The first extraconstitutional department I will discuss is the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which came into being during the FDR administration with the enactment of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. HUD was elevated to cabinet-level by the Department of Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 during the Johnson administration. The stated mission for HUD “is to increase homeownership, support community development and increase access to affordable housing free from discrimination.” I discussed Our Uncontrollable Debt in December of last year.

Being the simple-minded soul that I am, I have to ask, “Why?” What happened to working toward homeownership? Before you get all riled, I know that in years-gone-by discriminatory lending and home sales practices existed and may still today; but there are free market forces that can and should deal with that. Much of the current financial folly we are enjoying now is a direct result of “making” people eligible for homeownership when they just hadn’t gotten there on their own. What happened to good old American work ethic? What happened to the concept of setting your goals and working toward them? Why is the federal government in the business of business anyway? As a friend of mine is want to query, if you are not a homeowner, what are you? You are a renter. Is that bad? I don’t think so. Someone owns that house or apartment and is living the American dream. If you think it is easy being the owner of a rental unit, just ask those who do. If you don’t want to be a renter why do you have to have a department of the federal government behind you pushing you into a mortgage you can’t afford? If you want homeownership badly enough you go out there and work for it.

This great county has grown because individuals worked. At first it was just to subsist. Then as they worked harder they began to realize that their efforts could pay off and make their lives even better than just subsistence. Is this an easy path? No, but nothing worth the pride of ownership is easy. That is what makes one stick his chest out and say, “I worked for that and I earned it.” Where is the pride in saying “HUD got me this house”?

Looking at the Constitution and the enumerated powers, I do not see any place that allows the federal government to manipulate the marketplace for any group or for any reason. This interference in the marketplace is a very sharp overreach of constitutional authority.

The current budget for HUD is $41.5B. That is money that comes from people who have worked for that dream of homeownership. I can think of a lot more productive ways to spend that money, such as paying down our enormous debt. I can think of a lot more productive ways for people to earn their way into homeownership than working the federal bureaucracy to get a home. Working toward homeownership puts productivity in the community. Achieving that goal and purchasing that home means that someone earned a wage when the home was built, or the prior owner is going into another home that someone had to build. That is the way of economics.

By my way of thinking, if people have achieved the dream of homeownership or they are working toward it, that is good for the state and community in which they live. Doesn’t that make it a state issue? The states and municipalities should be more in tune with the individual citizens than the federal government. Why, then, is the federal government trying, and succeeding, to assume the duties of the states and local communities? While they are doing this, it is a continual degradation of states’ rights and responsibilities; a place the federal government has no business visiting.

This Discourse is very high-level and not in depth. That would take much more time and space to cover. These highlights should be enough to start you thinking.

This is the first in a series of Discourses discussing the gross assumption of power by the federal government. Hopefully, it will encourage a renewed interest in taking our communities and states back which, in turn, will give us our country back.

As always, your comments and discussions are welcome.

Cross-posted at: http://carpentersmate.blogspot.com/2009/06/constitutional-authority-2.html

Part 1: http://carpentersmate.blogspot.com/2009/06/constitutional-authority-1.html

The last week has given us video of spectacularly brave protests and utterly gruesome killings.  Watching these videos brings out many different emotions, with the two most predominant being anger and pride. The anger goes toward the authoritarian regime, and pride to fellow freedom lovers.

Nothing will bring fire to my heart faster than people using their power to brutally oppress people they disagree with.   There is no more of a cowardly act than to send goon squads into student’s dorms, citizen’s homes, and hospitals to silence critics and protesters. How poor of a philosophy must you have if you need to arrest (i.e. kidnap) top political figures of the opposition? If it comes to the point where the regime needs to silence opponents and cannot defeat them in the arena of ideas/philosophy, then public trust is lost and there is no going back. The only way forward is either a stricter authoritarian rule, or revolution.

The videos of student protesters, like “Neda,” being shot and dying before your eyes does not only pull at the heartstrings, it completely rips them out. It brings the world to tears.  I cannot help but to put myself in their shoes. Would I be courageous enough to stand against a brutal regime? Would I be out in the streets knowing that my life could end with the pull of a trigger or a baton to the head? These are questions that I pray I will never have to answer, but these are the realities of millions of Iranians today. To see so many of them answer those questions in the affirmative and on the side of freedom, it fills my heart with hope.  Hope for Iran, hope for the region, and hope for the world.

The sense of pride comes from the feeling that we are all brothers and sisters, because essentially we are all the same. We have the same inalienable rights. We all yearn for peace and happiness. We all have the same emotions and feelings. The human body is essentially the same, with some slight variances of color and features. We may speak different languages, but we are saying the same words. That is why when we see people who have limited freedoms fighting for true freedom, we get behind them. We don’t back them because it is politically advantageous, but because we genuinely care about the plight of others.  Those of us whose freedoms are guaranteed know how great it is to be free, and wish that everyone could share in it. The freedom of the people of the world is directly proportional to its greatness.

The majority of the world has had its freedoms challenged in some way.  It comes in the form of cruel dictators and terrorists among others. Today, the Iranians have seen their freedoms and rights snatched away and are now willing to fight for them. On 9/11 America had its freedoms challenged, and we went to protect them. The people of Iran responded by holding a candlelight vigil for the Americans that were killed in the attacks.  And just as Iranians and the whole world considered themselves Americans on 9/11, today we are all Iranian.

By: BMK (HucksArmy Members)