Category: Abortion distortion factor

Tasty Tidbits 6/28/11

Here’s today’s tasty tidbits, concurrently Tweeted and Facebooked:

Sen. Lugar reportedly will unload on Obama today regarding Libya. Good for him! But the Hoosier blogosphere will be all atwitter with navel-gazing about how this is a “move to the right” to fight off challenger Richard Mourdock.

Continue reading “Tasty Tidbits 6/28/11” →

George Will’s Questions for Kagan

Why would nobody have the cajones to ask the questions George Will suggested Sunday and Monday?

Personal favorites (get a grip, Tipsy; not too many now!):

  • If Congress decides that interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers? If not, why not?
  • Can you name a human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce? If courts reflexively defer to that congressional pretense, in what sense do we have limited government?
  • The Fifth Amendment mandates “just compensation” when government uses its eminent domain power to take private property for “public use.” In its 2005 Kelo decision, the court said government can seize property for the “public use” of transferring it to wealthier private interests who will pay more taxes to the government. Do you agree?
  • William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, writes: “The astonishingly quick and complete transformation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from a law requiring all citizens be treated equally to a policy requiring that they be treated unequally, is one of the most audacious bait-and-switch operations in American political history.” Discuss.
  • Regarding campaign finance “reforms”: If allowing the political class to write laws regulating the quantity, content and timing of speech about the political class is the solution, what is the problem?
  • Incumbent legislators are constantly tinkering with the rules regulating campaigns that could cost them their jobs. Does this present an appearance of corruption?
  • Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom you clerked, said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” Can you defend this approach to judging?
  • You have said: “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.” But that depends on what the meaning of “is” is. There was no constitutional right to abortion until the court discovered one 185 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the right was spotted lurking in emanations of penumbras of other rights. What is to prevent the court from similarly discovering a right to same-sex marriage?
  • Bonus question: In Roe v. Wade, the court held that the abortion right is different in each of the three trimesters of pregnancy. Is it odd that the meaning of the Constitution’s text would be different if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number?

Diluting the pro-life message

I think I appreciate the interconnectedness of things as much as anyone. People’s commitments (or values, or whatever you want to call them) tend to come in clusters or constellations if only because people try to live by coherent philosophies (or ideologies, if you prefer).

I long puzzled that the pro-life position was predominately “conservative,” while conservatives simultaneously tended to favor capital punishment and imperial wars. I’m not trying to make a hackneyed point about hypocrisy; I really found it puzzling, because, in the immortal words of Sesame Street, “one of these things was (at least superficially) not like the others.” I had some trouble discerning the coherent philosophy behind such a mixed bag of views. I now suspect that it involved credulity about (a) the guilt of all convicts on death row and (b) the legitimacy of some pretty flimsy causa belli.

And why couldn’t liberals, with their vaunted care for justice, see the injustice of abortion? I’m still not positive, but I think it’s because they have made celebration of the sexual revolution so central a part of their ideology (or philosophy, if you prefer).

I long for the day when abortion will not be a partisan issue because both parties will be pro-life.

And because I long for that day, I resent it when an entire conservative agenda, including some of the dumber talking points, is crammed into an ostensibly pro-life publication — resenting it if only because it is a conversation stopper and increases the likelihood that abortion will remain highly partisan. The GOP has been trying to make the pro-life cause its wholly-owned subsidiary, giving darned little in return, for a good 30 year now, and I hate to see the cause succumbing.

Exhibit A: a recent mailer from Indiana Right to Life. James Bopp, Jr., GOP activist (with a long and distinguished pro-life record as well) editorialized in a “Freedom Manifesto” that occupied one quarter of the mailer. Examples:

  • “President Obama is pursuing a socialist agenda based on … equality of outcomes.”
  • “Mr. Obama’s vision of radical equality … transform[s] our country into a socialist state, where all life’s decisions are subject to control …..”
  • “Taking over the auto and banking industries was only the start of the country’s most audacious power grab.”
  • “Gun control … is about equating law-abiding gun owners with criminals.”
  • “Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is based on moral equivalence and multiculturalism, denying American exceptionalism.”
  • And finally, “This fight is between freedom and a new evil empire of tyranny – previously the Soviet Union, but now it is our own government.”

Forget for a moment how shrill and “on script” some of this is. Why is it in an Indiana Right to Life publication?

I’ll give Bopp credit for not giving the GOP a free pass. He didn’t. He said they were “on probation.”

But why probation? Because Orrin Hatch and others folded on stem-cell research? No. Because it tolerated pro-abortion Republicans like Arlen Specter? No (unless “liberal” is now code for “pro-abortion”). Rather:

[T]he party compromised its position as the champion of conservative values when its “no-new-tax” pledge was abandoned; when elected Republicans failed to stop excessive government spending, earmarks and deficits, and then proposed bailouts; when the party spent millions supporting liberal Republicans in primary and general elections who then switched parties and or endorsed Democrats; and finally when the party nominated for president the media’s favorite Republican, who then voted for a trillion-dollar government bailout. [Bopp supported, by the way, Mitt Romney — a vehement position I never figured out.]

And how can the GOP get off probation?

The Republican Party can reclaim its leadership by recognizing that it is – the party of conservative principles and policies and thus the party of freedom, prosperity and security. But deeds must match words.
A united congressional Republican opposition to Mr. Obama’s socialist agenda is a critical step.
Also key is putting the Republican Party’s money where its mouth is, by engaging in aggressive lobbying against Mr. Obama’s entire socialist agenda, and by making available the party’s financial support to only bona-fide conservative candidates.
And finally, the party should never again remain silent when Republican public officials betray the trust of the American people by abandoning their conservative principles or engaging in unethical conduct. The Republican Party must recognize that it, too, will be held accountable.

Only one brief mention of abortion in the whole Manifesto. No mention of euthanasia. No mention of stem-cell research. Just lots of “power grab” and “socialist” and sundry other horribles.

Did I mention that this was an Indiana Right to Life publication? Doesn’t this kind of ideology dilute the pro-life message as surely as incorporating it into the “seamless web” so beloved of Catholic “social justice” folks? Or even more?

Exhibit B: Indiana Right To Life Political Action Committee announced a few months ago a blanket policy of endorsing no Democrats because, in essence, party pressure makes pro-life Democrats fold. I can defend that decision on its own, but then a few months later we get this “Freedom Manifesto.”

Virtually every Sunday, we sing from the Psalms “Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth. On that very day his plans perish.” I’m not very trustful of interest groups, either, and nothing about this newsletter raised my trust in the judgment of IRTL.

Am I nuts to say this? Am I just being petulant? No, this sort of thing is a pretty settled conviction with me these days. See here and here.

More on Red and Blue families

Ross Douthat writes today some further analysis of the provocative new book and Red and Blue families in America, on which I wrote last week.

Read it if interested, because what follows is not (with one exception) a summary.

Notable to me is that the Blue state approach does not produce lower teen pregnancy rates, just lower birth rates. In other words, the price of the “new equilibrium” of the professional classes is widespread abortion.

Some years back I read an arresting summary. Part of America thinks everything would be hunky-dory if every teenager in America was sexually active if they were all faithfully contracepting (and aborting when contraception failed). Another part thinks teens shouldn’t be sexually active and refuses to acquiesce (e.g., “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, but if you do, here’s a condom – wink! wink!”).

That may be an exaggeration, but it often seems only slight. The tacit assumption of the “pro choice” side is that the new economic arrangements, and the contraception and abortion that keep us competitive in that millieu, are good or at least neutral.

Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing preview

We don’t even have a nominee yet, but the posturing — academic and political — is shaping up, as signaled on the editorial page of today’s Washington Post.

In the right corner, weighing in with the mantra of “commitment to the text of the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers,” is senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

In the left corner, weighing in with the historical untenability of ascribing to the Founders any unified “original intent,” is Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Ellis is would win the match on points, but Sessions has a knockout punch: by and large, Americans agree with him, whether or not original intent is tenable historically.

It is perhaps probably significant that neither one speaks of abortion, the issue that, whether explicitly or encoded, has dominated confirmation hearings for decades. The current hot button issues for Sessions are political speech, guns, and eminent domain.

Is abortion the seed or the flower of Culture Wars?

The buzz about the new book Red Families, Blue Families continues with a conservative columnist I greatly respect, Maggie Gallagher.

Maggie, author of The Abolition of Marriage and a tireless advocate of traditional western marriage, thinks the culture wars start with different views about abortion and those different views ramify in earlier marriage versus later, out-of-wedlock birth rates, etc., rather than the latter ending in controversy over abortion (the quintessential Culture War issue).

It would be interesting in this regard to test how much the “red state, blue state” differences were shaping up before Roe v. Wade, and (if reliable data is available – very unlikely), how the blue states and red states stacked up on abortion rates, legal and illegal, before the Supreme Court basically gave us one, utterly permissive national abortion law.

Globalization + the Pill = Culture Wars

A very interesting post at FPR clued me in to a Jonathan Rauch article in National Journal, which in turn discusses a new book that essentially publishes a Grand Unification Theory of the origins of “Red” and “Blue” America.

I hesitate to summarize. Read either the Front Porch Republic piece or Rauch’s for a summary instead.

What this leaves me with is a couple of intuitions, none of which I’m remotely prepared to defend to the death:

  1. I have taken some solace that “Red America” is growing demographically while “Blue America” is at NPG. This new theory makes me think that teeming Red America will continue to work for Blue America and will continue to be relatively ineffectual in carrying out any red agenda.
  2. Any red agenda is already in trouble. Red America, relatively speaking, tramples on the values they profess and which, in their pulpits, they literally preach. Why? They’re spitting into a very, very strong headwind of sexuality and lower wages, and their early marriages, plus the newish necessity of both parents working, make musical beds a far more popular game in Red American than in Blue.
  3. What happens when the Trillion Dollar Ponzi Scheme collapses? Red America knows more about the practical arts like gardening, homebuilding, etc. than Blue America knows. Will Blue America be picking Red America’s asparagus in a few Springs?