politics – Page 19

Pandering

Elizabeth Scalia is pandering to the Politically Correct crowd, and she’s doing it at Pajamas Media, which is not the best place to do that sort of thing. She criticizes both “the gays” and “the Christians” for behaving “badly” during the Castro district altrication – you know, the one I blogged about the other day in which a crowd of angry anti-Prop 8 thugs surrounded a Bible study and prayer group and poured coffee on them, urinated on them, grabbed a girl’s Bible and attacked her with it, and then tried to molest the members of the group as they were escorted away by the police. Okay, I think we can see where “the gays” behaved badly.

But what are the sins of the Christians? According to Ms. Scalia, it was “singing hymns and praying for them, which might have seemed both separatist and condescending.” She says this “as a Catholic,” who says she’d feel judged by the fact she was being prayed for by strangers.

So on one hand we have a group engaged in physical assault, verbal abuse, and public sexual misconduct… and on the other hand we have a group who was praying.

Yeah. Those eeeevil Christians sure need a good talking to.

Praying is something we are commanded to do without ceasing, and singing hymns like “Amazing Grace” and “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus” are hardly extreme measures. These people were holding a prayer meeting – the same one they held “almost every Friday night” according to the locals – where they prayed for the community and tried to share the Gospel. This is commendable behavior, not something to be looked down on. I have yet to see a report from anywhere on this issue that says the prayer group did anything wrong, or did anything to provoke the attack other than praying and singing.

Yet Ms. Scalia says that what they did was very un-Christlike. Jesus would never have been so intolerant. I wonder, has she read Christ’s sermons? This was a guy who did not have concerns over coming across as extreme or controversial. Remember, he ransacked the temple and screamed at the Pharisees in public, decrying them as a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, hypocrites in every sense – can you imagine someone running up the stairs of the Vatican calling out such a thing? No, Christ was truthful. He was direct. He was loving. But he was not afraid of confrontation, and he was not afraid of what the truth would bring. In the same vein, we should speak truth in love, but be careful that we do not worry so much about appearing loving that it is no longer the truth being spoken.

Homeland “Security?”

So via Daily Pundit, according to a “top Obama advisor,” AZ Governor Janet Napolitano is currently the frontrunner for Secretary of Homeland Security.

My first response was to start humming “ding, dong, the witch is dead,” because her vacating her spot gives us a chance to have someone with an ounce of competence occupy the Governor’s office for the first time since 2002. But then it occurred to me that this woman – you know, the one that’s bankrupted the state and all but openly begged illegal workers to come to the state in droves – might not be the best choice for the position. I mean, she’s outright fought Joe Arpaio (America’s Toughest Media Whore) over the one thing he actually gets right, which is illegal immigration – opposing him at every turn. That the governor who’s arguably failed the most miserably to protect her state’s borders is being considered by our President-elect to protect the nation’s borders is only a further indication of the man’s utter incompetence.

The Remnant

Mrs du Toit has a brilliant post up regarding the unnamed men in history, the “Remnant” as she labels them, and how they play into the flow of history. Along the way she brings up some brilliant insights not only into our nations history but also into our perception of it, and how it is reflected in many of the current political ideas and proposed solutions being offered today.

It is the Remnant that carries the baton, differentiated from everyone else (as Nock describes) by quality, rather than numbers or circumstance. And as Nock further detailed in his essay, we have no idea how many there were, how they accomplished what they did with any certainty, but those of us who spend time looking at the great Gantt Chart of man’s existence know that they had to be there.

They’re the ones who taught their children to say please and thank you. They’re the ones who made up the fairy tales to soothe a child’s nightmare to help a child transition from awake to sleep. They’re the ones who showed up for the barn raisings, carried fire buckets to a neighbor’s barn fire, blew the horn or beat the drum when the Barbarians were at the gates, and didn’t think twice about leading other men in a charge up a hill, into a stream, or over a barricade to keep the Barbarians at bay. They muddled along, not as individuals, but as members of a kind of collective or secret society, bonded, and well aware of their duties and responsibilities to others, fully recognizing that they were not important as individual, autonomous persons, but only as a member of a greater community of humane-kind.

Her stuff is always good, but this one left me gasping for breath.

On Abortion

Digging this topic back up from a couple of posts ago, because it seems to be coming up all over the place lately. As a result, it’s been on my mind, and now is getting its own blog post.

Abortion, to my eyes, is one of the most incredible problems we face as a nation, from a moral standpoint. It’s extremely divisive, morally ambiguous, and has great social power weighing in on both sides of the argument. More importantly: it involves the mass murder of over a million Americans every year.

Did that get your attention at all? Let me say it again: this is the mass murder of over a million Americans every year. Condoned, and sometimes paid for, by your government. If you’re not pissed off about this yet, then you probably won’t like the rest of my blog.

The debate surrounding the topic of abortion is a fascinating one to me: the undisputed facts are that currently about 1.2 million abortions are performed in America every year, and that each of those abortions ended the life of a human baby in utero. No one argues that. The argument is over whether or not that’s an acceptable occurance. If you think about that for a while, that the argument has nothing to do with medical procedure, but whether or not those babies are in fact people with natural human rights – well, its enough to drive a person mad. And people can argue back and forth about that all day, and it certainly will not be solved on the pages of this blog, but in my mind I’ve never understood how someone can so easily rationalize away a human life – be it an unborn child or an eldery grandfather or a woman in a coma.

But even bringing up the topic of abortion will quickly expose the presuppositions of those involved in the discussion – those who feel it’s simply a social/religious policy issue versus those who feel it is a moral life and death issue. And while I suppose you may find many of the “social policy” crowd in the pro-life camp, I doubt you’ll find many who think that abortion is muder participating at pro-abortion rallies. What I am saying is that those who suggest abortion is only a social issue are dismissing abortion as being the ending of human life, because if it was truly about human life then we’d be talking about whether it should have the full weight of first-degree murder behind it, or if it should just constitute something like negligent homicide.

Instead, these people have for the most part either try to remain ignorant of the facts, or else grasp at straws to suggest that somehow the baby has not yet been given its right to live because it lacks specific body parts, or is too dependent on its mother, or has not yet fully developed conciousness… But these are trifles, and cannot form a solid platform to stand on. So instead you hear, far more often than any other argument, that abortion is necessary in cases of rape, incest, or instances in which the life of the mother is risked.

A couple of years ago, while arguing the so-called merits of abortion in an online community, I dug up an interesting fact: less than 1% of abortions are because of rape or incest, and somewhere between 75% and 85% of rape victims opt against abortion. Even fewer are listed as due to the mother having life-endangering health problems. We’re talking roughly 0.7% of all abortions being done for these reasons. Even if we add in other health reasons, the total rises to only roughly 2%. The vast majority of abortions are done out of mere convenience, not because of this percieved “necessity.”

Now, with President-elect Obama promising to pass FOCA if it gets to his desk, and the Catholic church facing widespread withdrawl from the healthcare field as a result, we face the possibility of government-assisted abortion making massive leaps forward on a national scale and overriding every countermeasure placed in the last 35 years. It’s a scary thought and proves that the pro-abortion movement is not interested in merely making abortions available where it could be considered “necessity,” but instead making it available upon request to every girl and woman in America, without such restrictions as waiting periods, parental consent or even notification, and funding it with your tax dollars. This wants you to pay for the systematic genocide of an entire generation of as yet unborn children, and that’s simply the fact of the matter.

This is not a country that should embrace genocide as a national heritage.

I feel like I’m on Mars or something.

“The entire Obama campaign seemed to be conducted at a much higher ethical level than that of the GOP.”

What?

Seriously?

The guy who accepted millions of dollars in fraudulent campaign donations, the guy who disabled basic security checks on internet donations in order to facilitate that fraud, the guy who refuses to release basic documents about his birthplace, schooling, or health records, the guy who brought the John Kerry flip-flop back into style, the guy whose campaign facilitated brutal, unwarranted attacks on Sarah Palin and Samuel Wurzelbacher, the guy who first nationalized the use of Chicago-style politics…

A much higher ethical level?

Really?

Of course, the same guy is arguing for the return of the “fairness doctrine,” perhaps one of the most blatant violations of the First Amendment dreamed up in recent history, and a key component in any leftist’s dreamworld. So maybe he’s not the foremost expert on the topic of ethics.

Still, I can’t help but shake the feeling he’s not the only one taking this brand of crazy pills.