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Posted on 01/15/2012 11:51:16 AM PST by Kaslin
In his book How to Stop Dialogue In Its Tracks, Sacha Baron Cohen provides three awkward statements for guys that can be employed to bring a lousy date to a quick conclusion; “I just believe that environmentalists should mind their own business.” Or, 2. “Don’t you find the obsolescence of the slide rule to be terribly regrettable?” And, 3. “Does the Roe versus Wade decision trouble you as much as it does me?”
In recognition of the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling this week, I am going to jump right on topic number three. OK, there is no such book calledHow to Stop Dialogue In Its Tracks. But if there were, Sacha Baron Cohen surely would have been the author.
In spite of there having been a Supreme Court ruling in 1973, the pro-life versus pro-choice political debate remains unsettled in America after all these years. There are three good reasons for this.
First is the abject sloppiness of the Roe versus Wade legal ruling. The majority opinion, delivered by Associate Justice Blackmun, cited a right to privacy given to pregnant women by way of the due process clause in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here is that very wording of the amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The reason that you don’t see the word “privacy” anywhere in there is because Section 1 was written to eliminate the practice of slavery in the privacy of the plantation. The notion that behavior done in private should be exempt from state laws is a Pandora’s Box that could apply to the worst of domestic behavior if carried to its logical conclusion. Harry Blackmun did not pull the idea of privacy out of sound jurisprudence. He pulled it out of his own jurist posterior.
Judge Robert Bork wrote this about the Roe v. Wade ruling in his landmark book, The Tempting of America, “Unfortunately, in the entire opinion, there is not one line of explanation, not one sentence that qualifies as legal argument.”
The second reason that the abortion matter is not settled is that it is disquieting to people of good conscience. And to my fellow pro-lifers, I will assert that we need to mature our side of the debate to a point where pro-choice proponents do not feel like we are casting judgement against them. Please understand that they are dealing with a personal uneasiness in their own lives. We should be about winning their hearts rather than defeating their priorities.
I believe that the primary reason that settling answers about abortion are so elusive is that the wrong questions were asked by the Supreme Court in 1973, led by Chief Justice Warren Burger. During the Roe v. Wade hearings, the justices posed questions in an attempt to establish conclusions about when life begins in the development of an unborn human. The prosecution provided expert testimony, presenting the latest scientific guesswork of the period. All of the phases of in-utero fetal development were described to the court.
Out of that conversation, the notion of trimesters was adopted in the majority opinion. The court reasoned that during the first trimester, the fetus was not to be considered a person. With that understanding, the Fourteenth Amendment wording, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life” would not apply.
As the fetus develops, states are allowed to add restrictions on abortions up to the point of birth. But no personhood is assumed until a live birth is complete. Even the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 merely outlaws the procedure. It does not attempt to outlaw the destruction of the fetus, which is likely how the law was possible to be upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.
The mess that will not be resolved began with the assumption by Justice Burger that the Supreme Court had the authority to determine when life begins; that they owned the role of assigning personhood to the fetus at a point in development; that the Supreme Court Justices could endow people with the right to life.
The problem is that the Burger court forgot that the Supreme Court is an instrument of the government, instituted by the people and deriving their just powers from the consent of those people. A branch of that government should not even entertain the idea that they are in the position of the Creator.
As the founders realized and recorded, “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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The Supreme Court does not endow us with our rights. They merely secure the rights already endowed to us by our Creator.
So, when does life begin?
Interesting conversation for a good date, but not the business of government employees; even those employed as Supreme Court Justices.
Liberals insist that dividing things into only two groups, good and evil, is over-simplistic. Nearly everything that is good has at least some bad quality, and nearly everything evil has at least some redeeming quality. Although their observations that good things have bad qualities and vice versa are correct, and they correctly judge that a model of the universe which divides things into such categories will be imperfect. They offer up as their alternative a more accurate model, in which everything is a gray. Adding distinct shades of gray to the model would make it more complicated and less accurate. Since the model in which everything is simply some undefined shade of gray is more accurate than one in which things are divided into good and evil, they believe it to be superior. What liberals fail to appreciate is that a model's usefulness is tied not only to its accuracy, but also to its specificity.
A model which predicts that an object will be at some particular place at some particular time might occasionally be wrong. A model which simply predicts that an object might or might not exist at some unspecified location will never be wrong. On the other hand, which is more useful, a sign which states "Buses stop here three minutes past the hour on weekdays between 9:00am and 5:59pm" but might fail to accurately predict the arrival time of buses that show up at 10:01am or 2:05pm, or a sign which states "Buses stop here whenever they arrive to pick up or drop off passengers."
Liberals fail to recognize that if something which is 95% evil and 5% good, will as long as it exists actively destroy things which are 95% good and 5% evil, the total destruction of the 95%-evil thing, including the 5% good within it, may end up destroying far less good than would the evil thing's continued existence. If one can contain the 95%-evil thing well enough to separate out the 5% of good within it while preventing it from doing any further harm, that might be even better, but allowing a 95% evil thing to go around destroying good things, for fear of accidentally harming the 5% good within it, is a recipe for allowing evil to prevail.
When I want to shut a liberal up, I ask him/her “What’s your source?” Amazing how they can never remember where their information comes from. Or they are reluctant to say that they pulled it out of their hats...
Splendid logic both here and in post #4. I hope you will post more often.
Normal...a word that drives them nuts.
Usually because they aren’t.
I disagree with the notion that slavery happened in private. Slavery was enforced, publicly, requiring members of the militia to patrol for escaped slaves, requiring slaves to be captured and returned even from other states by civil authority.
Punishment of slaves also occurred publicly, so other slaves would learn from the experience.
This wasn’t kinky play between consenting adults. It was coerced, with local legal systems distorted to benefit slave owners and to oppress slaves.
Before we ask when life begins, we first have to ask ‘what is life’.
Then we can ask what is intelligent life.
Then we can ask what is human life.
“We should be winning their hearts rather than defeating their priorities’’. Grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts will follow.
then in an example a normal child in school is a well behaved child. it isn’t normal to miss behave.
No, actually I really would like to know why any kind of global warming is a problem in the middle of an Ice Age.
If the Ice Age had ended sooner, we would be eating Woolly Mammoth Burgers like Fred Flintstone used to do. YUMMY!
No one not even our side will deny that man does create 0.6 deg C warming to the earth which is direct heat we produce.
For socialists since man does produce heat how much is a matter of how gray and for them it doesn't matter how gray it is. Thus we can never win the argument if we stick with the argument of man made catastrophic global warming.
So, my question is why does warming matter during an Ice age?
Yeah, I like to rock their world by telling them slavery was a democrat thing, and the KKK, and segregation. Then I like to rattle off a few famous RATs, like Bull Connor, George Wallace, Robert Byrd etc
The Quaternary Ice Age has not ended and will not end for millions of years we at the end of an interglacial period.
the normal temperature of the earth doesn't even have ice caps at all.
My point is that the entire argument promoting the theory of Man Made Global Warming, and it is only a theory BTW, is ABSURD. The Earth has heated up and cooled down over and over again for millions of years, long before Man would have had any impact on the environment.
Notice how the Liberal Media moved the goalpost and changed the terminology to Man Made Climate Change? It only proved to me that they know they are lying and were looking for cover when the statistics didn’t support their initial claims. Thirty years ago the Global Cooling theory ruled.
My only direct response to your question is this, in an Ice Age we will be praying for Global Warming, so I guess it will really matter then.
"why does socialists (leftist) believe in taking from the working class and poor to give to the rich?"
The Socialists system is paid primarily from the working class and that includes the poor. Socialists system takes as much as it can from the working class and distributes it through big business.
In my best Johhnny Carson voice, ‘I DID NOT KNOW THAT”.
Thanks for the info.
You can stop a liberal from talking?
News to me. They never, ever shut up.
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