That’s out of the way now.

My question to pro-lifers is: what’s the end game? What exactly are you wanting to accomplish with the pro-life movement?

Do you want abortion doctors convicted of murder? That would seem like a logical conclusion. But, I don’t see that being pushed.

Do you want it simply made illegal? If so, then on what basis is it an illegal action? Because the basis for it’s illegality determines what type of punishment is going to be tied to it. Again, I don’t see that discussion.

Do you want the women who have abortions to be convicted? If so, convicted of what? Murder? I haven’t seen an answer to that.

Do you want it to be a constitutional amendment? Because if it’s not, then it’s a state issue. And you don’t seem to want that.

Questions like these don’t seem to be generating any answers because the abortion issue has been so thoroughly politicized that it has morphed into something new that’s hard to nail down. The morality questions haven’t changed, but the politics have cause the whole argument to lose it’s framing. In a way, when you strip a question like this down to only it’s moral components, you’re left with an end that has no means.

So what’s the answer? Depoliticizing the argument. Abortion can’t be fought as an “issue” any more. There’s only one way to eliminate abortion, and that’s in the heart of yourself and your children. It’s not laws that will keep my daughter out of the abortion room. It’s me. It’s what I teach her. It’s her moral vision. It will never be a law that will keep any woman out of that room. It will always be what’s inside them that will make the choice. Government doesn’t help. Like with everything else, it just muddies the water with empty rhetoric.

Congress hasn’t declared a war since 1941, but hundreds of thousands of war dead since then prove that laws are meaningless. Making something illegal doesn’t stop it. The thing that stops sin and crime is what’s inside a man’s heart, not what a group of people I’ve never met before write down on some paper.

I’m pro-life to my core, but I also see the futility of modern law. We can’t look to government for any kind of redress or to mete out justice of any kind. They aren’t in the justice business any more. I choose liberty instead. And I’ll fight my battle in the heart, not in the court room.

I find there exactly the same evils that are rampant in the world — centralized education programs, the subservience of the church to the state, contempt for the rights of minorities, standardization of everything, suppression of intellectual adventure….I see more clearly than ever before that unless the gospel is true and there is another world, our souls are in prison. The gospel of Christ is a blessed relief from that sinful state of affairs commonly known as hundred per-cent Americanism.

 

–Stonehouse, Machen: A Biographical Memoir

The other quote is from his book The Christian Faith in the Modern World. Here he talks about the danger of losing our liberty and freedom in the name of national security. Anybody think that he would have subjected himself to a TSA naked body scanner? I don’t think so.

Everywhere there rises before our eyes the specter of a society where security, if it is attained at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom, where the security that is attained will be the security of fed beasts in a stable, and where all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an all-powerful state.

 

–Machen, The Christian Faith in the Modern World

Don’t hold your breath to hear those quotes in Sunday School class anytime soon.

But, it’s not just creeps and wierdos you have to worry about now. It’s the cops too:

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer has nearly 400 friends on Facebook. He got an offer for a new one about a month ago. “She was a good-looking girl. I usually don’t accept friends I don’t know, but I randomly accepted this one for some reason,” the 19-year-old said.

He thinks that led to his invitation to come down to the La Crosse police station, where an officer laid out photos from Facebook of Bauer holding a beer — and then ticketed him for underage drinking.

The police report said Bauer admitted drinking, which he denies. But he did plead no contest in municipal court Wednesday and will pay a $227 fine.

He was among at least eight people who said Wednesday they had been cited for underage drinking based on photos on social networking sites.

“I just can’t believe it. I feel like I’m in a science fiction movie, like they are always watching. When does it end?” Bauer said after court Wednesday.

Social networking sites are among many new tools law enforcement has adopted to find underage drinkers, said La Crosse police officer Al Iverson, who works in alcohol compliance and education.

“Law enforcement has to evolve with technology,” Iverson said. “It has to happen. It is a necessity —not just for underage drinking.”

Social networking sites are used to catch sexual predators as well, he noted.

–KJ Lang, Lacrosse Tribune

[HT David Kramer @ LRC]

It’s that last sentence that really chaps my hide. You see, that’s how it always starts. We begin to give up liberties and freedoms to our police overlords to protect us from legitimate moral crimes like sexual abuse. They then take those newly forfeited liberties and use them for other things that have nothing to do with the original intent. I don’t think children should drink alcohol. But I also don’t think that a 19 year old drinking a beer in his dorm is any of the state’s business, regardless of what the “law” says. We can send that same young man over to the middle-east to blow the heads off Arabs but we won’t let him drink a beer.

This is just another example of how, when it comes to giving up liberty, you can’t just look at whats “acceptable” right now. You have to think years down the line and consider what the authorities are going to do with that power you hand them. Because they always find ways to abuse it. Always.

Forgetting for a moment the effect that massive government regulation and mandates have had on healthcare premiums, the scenario that Obama is painting in that quote is one where the market completely ignores sound pricing. That’s not possible. At some point there will reach an equilibrium where the price levels out. That price level will be one where it’s too expensive to just use the system willy nilly and go to the doctor for every sniffle, yet it’s still there for catastrophic situations. The health insurance market is naturally pricing the abusers out of the system. It’s unfortunate that this is the case, but it’s reality. And it’s economic law. Trying to tamper with this scenario is how you end up with the other kind of rationing. State mandated.

I mentioned yesterday that the so called “government option” that’s being proposed will absolutely destroy the private insurance market. When that happens, and everyone is universally covered for “free”, that natural market directed rationing will disappear. Supply will be swamped by demand as the abusers – those who go to the doctor ten times a year for every little sniffle and pain – flood back into the system. Again, what’s the only logical result? Rationing. This time by state mandate. And it’s going to come, first, in the form of an advisory panel that creates a set of guidelines on who gets what care, and secondly, by simply having huge waiting lists for routine procedures like has been happening in Canada and the U.K. for years now. If the idea of a buearacratic health advisory panel that gets to determine who gets what care doesn’t scare the hell out of you (pardon my french), then you are clueless.

This panel that will get to decide each of our fates individually is called the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparitive Effectiveness Research, and it was created by the first stimulus package legislation to pave the way for government single-payer insurance. This isn’t tin foil hat folks. It’s real. The British version of this is called NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), and it pretty much decides who gets to live and who dies in critical health situations. Remember the Democrat’s outrage back in the 90’s over HMO’s denying care to certain people based on cold calculations of age vs. price? Well, they seem to be just fine with it now since they get to be in charge. It’s the same type thing but worse, since now, it’s not just an economics decision. It’s political.

Want to see what this looks like straight from the horses mouth? Here’s a clip of Obama talking to a lady who’s mother had been saved from death by a pacemaker after many doctors told here she was too old to survive the operation. They finally found one willing to do it and she’s been alive for five years. The lady simply asked Obama if her mother would have been afforded the same opportunity under the government plan:

And yet for some reason the stupid, idiotic, selfish AARP and AMA are supporting Obama’s plan. They have always been willing to screw future generations just to glean a little off the top for themselves, but this one takes the cake. Note to the AARP: “After an initial settle in period, your members will be sent to the back of the line for all waiting lists for medical care you idiots.” Note to the AMA: “If you think that by backing this bill that you’ll somehow not get your medicare payments reduced then wake up morons. There won’t be any medicare in a few years if this all happens and you’re gonna be even more screwed than you ever dreamed of.” Please people. Wake up. Healthcare is not going to get any better than it is right now. Any change is just going to make things worse. And with this plan, much, much worse.

I made the point in the last post that decentralizing the church into small groups would have the beneficial effect of making it much harder for our opponents to target a single organization or group. A loosely organized collection of small groups that band together and pay a preacher to minister to them on a circuit basis is basically immune from this sort of legal harassment. There is no central group to target. The Alinsky rules don’t work very well when the group your agitating against is built the same way as the group doing the agitating. I’m not saying the church needs to go “underground” or anything like that, but if you don’t think that laws like this one are coming to the U.S. then wake up. Stop kidding yourself and let’s get ourselves prepared for the inevitable. Small group churches have always existed and thrived, even in the most extreme conditions like Communist China and Russia. Persecuation has a unique way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

I have two pieces of news for Mrs. Stewart and Mr. Kirwin. First, you can take your kids out of those classes any time you want to. It’s called homeschooling and their are two million kids doing it as recently as 2007. The numbers are most certainly higher now. Secondly, even if you somehow win this battle (which you won’t) and your kids are able to opt-out, what is the end result? Now your kids don’t have to go to a 45 minute LGBT training session, but they still have to spend 8 hours a day in a place with hundreds of other kids and teachers who have. Excuse me if I think that’s not much of a victory. Do you not think that a teacher that is willing to teach that stuff will restrain his/herself from including references to those concepts in their other lessons? That’s naive at best. Your kids are being indoctrinated for eight hours a day by an organization of people whom you do not know, with agendas that you’ll never find out about. Stuff like this is only the ever-so-slight tip of the iceberg that peeks out from time to time. The bulk of the agenda is always hidden.

But, these issues, overall, expose a lack of understanding on the part of parents as to just how political the education machine is. That’s why I quipped earlier that it’s a foregone conclusion that these parents will lose this battle. Showing up at a school board hearing is no different than showing up at a town-hall meeting for some senatorial candidate. The agenda is set in advance. What you say in that setting is meaningless. No minds are going to be changed because it’s not about the ideas. It’s about union money and political power. Case in point:

At least this guy named David is finally waking up to the real concern. Hopefully this will be a trend, but I’m going to maintain my cycnicism for now. When it comes to education it’s really hard to shake yourself out of the status quo. It’s too easy to just go to some school meetings and then be mad when nothing changes. The “I did all I could” mentality doesn’t help your children though. The fact is that it’s the same thing as going years in an abusive relationship or an abusive work environment and never working up the courage to shake your life up. Sometimes stability is over-rated. This is one of those times. It’s not worth maintaining the status quo and an easy, predictable daily routine if your kids are going to suffer for it.

Like I said, that freaks me out to no end, but it is also the sole reason this massive terrorist plot was thwarted and thousands of lives were saved on both sides of the pond. From the article:

Well, in this country that “covert” operation would have been outed by the New York Times and given the terrorists plenty of time to get away and change their plans so as not to be caught the next time around. Another quote:

That pretty much sums it up. In order to catch secret terrorists, carrying out secret plots using secret surveillance on us, we have to have secret programs, that carry out secret operations using secret surveillance of our own. It’s not rocket science unless you’re a liberal and then everything is rocket science.