Tag Archives: abortion

Commentary

Bloody Hands

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I have heard just about enough of this. Joe Biden (and others) have been accusing Donald Trump of being personally responsible for every single Covid-19 death in America–despite the following facts:

  • Original “expert” projections were closer to two million deaths. 200k was the “minimum” projection, “if we do everything right.”
  • Donald Trump’s actions at the beginning, such as banning travel from China and later Europe, were quick, bold, and almost universally condemned by those who are now criticizing him.
  • The president’s efforts to galvanize American industry to manufacture and distribute PPE, new medications and vaccines were groundbreaking and effective, bypassing years of ponderous, bureaucratic red tape.
  • The Covid-19 death rate in the US is 2.7%, well behind many other industrialized nations such as Australia (3.3%) France (3.8%) Ireland (4.1%) Canada (5.1%) the UK (6%) and Italy (8.8%).
  • When Joe Biden describes his plan for dealing with the pandemic, everything he says he will do is something that the Trump administration has already done or is doing.
  • Finally, almost half of America’s Covid-19 deaths are nursing-home related and most of those are in five blue states where governors ordered nursing homes to accept Covid-19 positive patients. These are the same Democratic governors who applauded President Trump’s quick response when he was showering them with newly manufactured ventilators and PPE and building them Covid-19 hospitals (that remained virtually unused) but who are now joining the partisan chorus condemning the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.

There’s simply too much to say about this to try to get it into a single post (even one my ridiculously long rants) but there are three things I do want to say. I’ll try to be brief.

If we’re going to talk about bloody hands, let’s first talk about the unknown thousands of elderly Americans who died alone because of the criminally stupid decision of their Democratic governor to send other infected patients back to their facilities. I say “unknown” because these numbers have been deliberately obscured and the full scope of this tragedy hidden. In New York, for instance, elderly patients who contracted the Wuhan virus in their nursing home but then later died in a hospital have specifically been excluded from “nursing home” deaths. New York Governor Mario Cuomo, while taking victory laps and publishing self-congratulatory books about how well he handled the crisis (the highest number of reported deaths, 34,399, almost twice that of the nearest competitor, New Jersey) has had plenty of time to stonewall, silence critics and short-circuit any investigation into his contribution to the deaths of thousands of his elderly citizens.

Let’s also talk about the people who have died or will die because they have been denied a simply, safe, inexpensive and effective prophylaxis/treatment for the Wuhan Virus that preexisted the pandemic by about 84 years: hydroxychloroquine. Since it was mentioned as a “game changer” by Donald Trump early on, the Deep State, Medical Establishment and Mainstream Media immediately attacked his recommendation as ignorant and dangerous quackery. They asserted that there was “no evidence” that it was at all effective (there was plenty of evidence) suggested that it could be very dangerous (it has been used safety for almost 100 years and is considered safer than Tylenol) and began cooking up distorted and deeply flawed “studies” to “prove” both assertions. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has suggested we should never shake hands again but considers anonymous sex a matter in which you can “weigh the risk,” and who declared masks ineffective at one time and argues in favor of a nationwide mask “mandate” now, quickly declared that hydroxychloroquine should not be used until we had the results of long-term, double-blind studies to demonstrate that it was “safe” even though it has been safely used to treat malaria all around the world for almost a century–and even though studies all over the world had already (and still do) prove its efficacy in preventing and treating Covid-19. In a way, this is actually Donald Trump’s fault. He should have know that the Deep State, Medical Establishment and Mainstream Media would attack the drug just to try to make him look bad. He also could have easily predicted that Big Pharma would attack. Hydroxychloroquine is cheap and no longer protected by patent. Nobody is going to make millions off of it. But only God knows how many people have died and will die that could have been saved by this safe and inexpensive medication. Just so that they could try to make Donald Trump look bad.

But if we’re going to talk about blood on hands, we have to talk about this:

Commentary

National sins and civil war

The United States of America was born with a birth defect: slavery. Contrary to what Tim Kaine (D-VA) asserted in the well of the senate, we did not invent slavery. It’s been around just about as long as humans have, and we did inherit it from our father, the British Empire. Slavery was America’s original national sin, and our founding fathers knew that it was an affront to the fundamental principle upon which our nation was built: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It took about eighty years, but eventually a majority of Americans mustered the will to confront this sin and act to eradicate it, even though they knew that doing so would be costly.

A great many Americans were determined to safeguard the institution of slavery because their wealth was built upon it and they could not see any way to maintain their position without it. Despite being fundamentally religious people, because it was valuable to them they managed to convince themselves that it was right, and mankind has always been adept at justifying what we really want to do. As those who opposed slavery came closer to the power to legally ban that abomination, the slave states saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to leave the Union before abolition was imposed on them. The end result, of course, was a “great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] could long endure.”*

We are hearing a lot today about the evils of racism and slavery, and some are even demanding reparations for the crimes committed by some of our progenitors more than a hundred years ago–deliberately forgetting that other progenitors fought and died to end that evil. Slavery was a great evil, but if it is wrong to put a man in chains, what is it to rip a living child to pieces inside the womb, suck them out and sell them to laboratories? If it is wrong to make merchandise of a living human being, how can it be permissible to kill an innocent child and then make merchandise of them?

Legalized abortion on demand is not a birth defect, but neither did all Americans choose it. It was imposed upon the nation by a cadre of unelected judges who substituted a perverse and arcane legal calculus for the will of the majority of America’s citizens, inventing a “right” to end the life of an unborn child and creating a multi-billion dollar industry that funnels millions into the pockets of politicians who promise to keep abortion safe, legal and profitable. And just as the antebellum slave owners refused to even consider relinquishing their property, those who have been enriched by legalized abortion will fight to keep the abortion mills in operation.

The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has ignited a firestorm of rancor and ratcheted up the stakes of this election to eye-bulging intensity. Why? Because as the liberal majority on the Supreme Court to which liberals/progressives/Democrats feel entitled slips away, they have realized that the handwriting is on the wall for abortion. It was never constitutional, it was always bad law and it was always pure evil to declare millions of unborn children non-human so that their lives could be extinguished. America has awakened to this horror, it is trying to right the wrong, and the abomination of abortion on demand must be purged from our national conscience. I sincerely hope and pray that it does not take another “great civil war” to atone for the taking of so many innocent lives. After slavery, our second great national sin was forgetting God and the best chance we have of ending the slaughter of the unborn without a great slaughter of those already here is to remember God, turn from our sin and plead for His mercy.

I’m afraid that ultimately the choice will be up to those who have profited by saturating the earth with the innocent blood of more than sixty million unborn Americans.

I am not optimistic.

*Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Liberty and the RKBA

Dred Scott was Settled Law Too.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, is certain to be questioned at length (and ultimately opposed no matter her answers) over the issue of abortion. Just as slavery was America’s defining issue of the 1800’s, abortion will be our defining issue of the 20th and 21st centuries. Just as slavery was America’s original national sin that cost us a bloody civil war to extirpate, legalized abortion on demand is the terrible sin that may cost us even more dearly. If it is a terrible crime to put a man in chains, what can we say of the slaughter of more than sixty million unborn, innocent children?

“Roe v. Wade is settled law,” the Democrats like to say, and they will demand that any nominee for the Supreme Court assure them that it will remain settled law.

Precedent and the law. It is interesting how important the principle of stare decisis becomes once the Democrats have achieved their desired outcome. Prayer banned in public schools, gay marriage, abortion: the courts are the least democratic of our branches of government, but it is there that the Democrats have accomplished their most dramatic and corrosive transformations of American society. Transformations that they could not pass through the legislative process. Transformations that they do not intend to be reversed.

Roe v. Wade is bad law. It was literally made up, an exercise in creative thinking from the mind of liberal justices with no basis in the Constitution. But now it is settled law, the Democrats say, and may not be touched. So if the Supreme Court rules on something, that mean it is absolute, immutable, forever set in stone and no legislative or judicial process can ever change it.

Really? The people have no recourse whatsoever if SCOTUS speaks? That is absurd on its face. We are no more bound in slavery to a tyranny of nine unelected judges than we are to any branch of our government. What recourse do the people have through the democratic process?

First, legislative. Everyone seems to have forgotten, but we have three co-equal branches of government, and any two of them may overrule the third. Congress and the president have the power to remove an issue from the purview of the Supreme Court, and if that effort reaches an impasse (a runaway court tries to declare such an action by the other two branches”unconstitutional”) Congress may impeach if necessary. But a resort to such drastic measures would be one of those “constitutional crises” we’re always hearing about. The usual (supposedly) non-confrontational method of overturning a decision of the Supreme Court is as follows:

  • The people elect a president that will appoint justices who see things differently.
  • The people elect a senate that will confirm the justices that their president nominates.
  • The people wait for vacancies on the court to provide their president the chance to act.

This process can take decades, and when the lives of sixty million or so unborn children are the price of the patience it demands, it is especially unfortunate that the people, the president and the congress were unable to muster the courage or conviction necessary to restrain and overturn the corrupt decision immediately. But the fact that it took decades for the will of the people to move does not somehow render the original flawed decision immutable. If the people cannot in any way reverse a bad decision of the court through the legal processes of government, then we truly do live under a tyranny, and the only remedy is the one prescribed by the Declaration of Independence:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…

Is this what the Democrats are suggesting? That the only way the American people can overcome stare decisis is to overthrow their government and start over?

No, Roe v. Wade is “settled law” just like the Dred Scott decision was settled law. It is settled until it is reversed.

Commentary

There Could Have Been People…

My youngest son, Stephen, drives a tractor-trailer and a little more than one year ago, in the early hours of the morning, he became a hero and nearly lost his life. He was driving in rainy conditions on I285 east when he came upon an accident that had just happened. Two cars were involved blocking three lanes of the interstate. He did not know if there were any people in those cars, but he knew that if there were and he hit them with his rig, they were going to die. With only that thought in mind, he reacted immediately and, risking his own life, drove his 18-wheeler into the ditch. His truck was totaled but miraculously he sustained only minor injuries. It turned out that there were no people in the cars, but even so I consider Stephen a hero because he risked his own life to safeguard the lives of others.

The anniversary of that same day was also the National March for Life, and the conjunction of those two events struck me. Leaving aside for a moment all of the logical and emotional arguments for and against the supposed right of a woman to choose to abort her unborn child, I reflect on the fact that the real and all-important question about this issue is never discussed by the pro-abortion lobby: when does human life begin? I would argue that by definition, human life begins at conception, since that single fertilized cell is unquestionably alive and unquestionably human, but I do recognize that there are arguments against this position that could be valid. But we do need to ask and try to answer this question: when does that life become a human life, worthy of all the protections that a civilized society can and should provide to the most innocent among us? Is it when the fetus can feel pain? Is it at viability? Thirty seconds after the child clears the birth canal? An hour later, when the woman and the doctor decide to let the infant live? When the child begins to walk?

Science has vastly increased our knowledge about the development of a human within the mother’s womb, and this, in turn, has increased the difficulty of the questions we must answer. But has it really? The most important question, when does human life begin, simply cannot be answered by science. This is a moral and philosophical question that has monumental consequences for us and our society.

But in a contest between one person’s right to choose and another person’s right to live, shouldn’t we err on the side of human life? If there is just a chance that the embryo or fetus inside a woman’s body is another living human being, shouldn’t that be given due consideration before sweeping it away?

By some estimates, about fifty million abortions have taken place in America since Roe v. Wade. It is long past time that we asked these questions.