Legalizing Abortion was Never About the Good of the Woman

fetus 10weeks (Photo credit: drsuparna)

The trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell has raised issues concerning the safety and “proper operation” of abortion clinics. Yet the press, with a few exceptions, is strangely silent. The press is often eager to do undercover investigations in health care facilities suspected of mistreating patients, but the same press is quick to condemn similar undercover operations by pro-life advocates in abortion clinics. These two instances of hypocrisy reveal the abortion lobby for the evil that it is. Many of them never cared about the health of the woman as they claimed.

During the 1960s debate that paved the way for the tragic Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, abortion advocates constantly harped about “back alley abortions” and claimed to be concerned about the health of women getting unsafe abortions. They claimed that legal clinics would allow “safe abortions” to take place. After abortion was legalized and became so rampant, the abortion lobby behaved as a set of religious believers, with abortion advocacy becoming canon law in the Democratic Party and abortion itself becoming a liberal sacrament, “the body and the blood.” When there are well-documented claims of safety violations or excessive patient deaths (other than the children murdered) at abortion clinics, the left either ignores or downplays them and tends not to openly advocate aggressive prosecution of offending “doctors.” Even though women die in unsafe clinics, abortion advocates would rather stifle anything that could be used to criticize their evil sacrament than to protect the health of the women about whom they claim to care.

Abortion rights were always about selfishness. The rabid individualism of American society, once it became unfettered from religion, was bound to allow the evil of abortion to be legalized. Couples could then have sex freely, and if birth control failed, abortion was seen as an alternative to allow promiscuity to continue. It is no surprise that a high percentage of abortion supporters are young men aged 18-35. They want to have sex with women without any consequences, and if the woman goes through an abortion, they don’t care. If feminists really cared about male exploitation of women, they would care about the way abortion supports men sexually using women. But most feminists (outside “Feminists for Life“) rabidly support abortion.

Abortion is also about power–power over the most vulnerable members of society. If these individuals “get in our way,” we can get rid of them. That is the real agenda behind many, and I would say most, abortion supporters–power over people who interfere with one’s selfish, extreme individualistic, aims. Even Europe, with its collapsing tomb of Christian belief, has fewer abortions per capita than the United States, and even many secular Europeans (outside the UK) are shocked at the high abortion rate in the United States.

Let’s label abortion for what it is–the murder of innocent human life for our “convenience.” Abortion advocates should stop pretending to care about the health and well-being of the woman who gets an abortion. They are hiding their real agenda in a cloak of lies.

Related articles

• Abortion Doctor: We Induce Death (radio.foxnews.com)
• Hannity Debate Over Shocking Undercover Video at Abortion Clinic (foxnewsinsider.com)
• Barbarism – Inhumane late-term abortion footage show humanity at its worst | Live Action News (lunchtimeforum.wordpress.com)
• Abortion Clinic Tells Woman to Flush Baby Down Toilet (radio.foxnews.com)
• LifeNews Pro-Life News Report 4/30/13 (deaconjohnspace.wordpress.com)
• Government as Accomplice to Murder (nationalreview.com)

Keeping the Ignorant Ignorant: The Destruction of Core Curricula in American Colleges and Universities

English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Americans are known world-wide for their ignorance of basic history, geography, and natural science. More than half of Americans totally deny biological evolution (other than perhaps microevolution). A significant number do not believe that the earth revolves around the sun. In one classroom experiment, only about 10% of students could identify the state in which they were living while in college or university on a map. Students are abysmally ignorant of the Bible, one of the major influences on Western civilization. Many cannot tell the difference between Plato and Play Dough. Despite such ignorance, there is a major push to either eliminate or to curtail core requirements in colleges and universities. Sometimes administrators lead the push, and the majority of faculty go along with radical decreases in core requirements, including requirements in the humanities, the natural sciences, and foreign languages. Why would faculty at American universities be so ignorant as to approve the destruction of a basic liberal arts education for college and university students? There are several reasons–none of them are good.

“Follow the money.” As majors in technical fields proliferate and as the hours required to fulfill such majors increase, students often spend more than four years in college. Since many students realize they cannot afford to stay more than four years, they avoid the so-called four-year degrees and go either to community college or technical school or try to get a job when they graduate from high school. In an increasingly competitive academic environment, colleges and universities seek students like mosquitoes seek blood. Students are much of the financial food for American colleges and universities, especially those without state support or without large endowments. Any policy that discourages students from attending college or staying there the full-time alloted for a degree is questioned, no matter how sensible that policy might be. Some students complain that they do not like liberal arts courses–they are difficult for students because they demand study and reading in areas in which the students are either not interested or do not believe will give them “job skills.” The fact that good communication skills and critical thinking as well as basic knowledge of the world around them is essential for jobs is lost on them. College administrators and sympathetic teachers, especially in such departments as Business and Education, support eliminating liberal arts courses to allow more hours for their major field courses without overburdening the “customers” that furnish a ready source of income for the college.

A second factor in gutting core curricula is accreditation agencies and their allies in the social sciences. accrediting agency staff, often holding weak Ed.D. degrees or degrees in the social sciences, prefer a strictly quantitative and utilitarian approach to core curricula. They push the idea of a “common core” across all degrees, which sounds good on the surface but in practice encourages a sparse core. The emphasis on outcomes-based education combined with a purely quantitative approach to evaluation is not friendly to the wisdom one can gain from a good liberal arts education, a wisdom that goes beyond the mere quantitative. Plato and Aristotle both recognized that qualitative knowledge is essential. Accrediting agencies do not deny this, of course, but they insist on quantitative measurability for qualitative criteria, a narrow approach fitting sciences such as psychology which remain stuck in a Newtonian mechanistic framework long surpassed by the natural sciences.

A third factor is the increasing role of corporate models in American institutions. Corporate models have already taken over hospitals, even non-profit hospitals, to the detriment of the fundamental ends of medicine to help sick persons in need. Business tends toward a utilitarian approach to reality in which the bottom line and “customer satisfaction” are what is most important. Considering college and university students to be “customers” is a major category mistake. If we are wanting “customer satisfaction,” why not eliminate the liberal arts all together and offer students only the courses they want to take. Those few students interested in a traditional liberal arts education can have their “consumer needs” satisfied at a college that focuses on the liberal arts. For the other customers there is a token core so college administrators and sympathetic professors can deceive themselves and pretend that their college offers a liberal arts education when it is doing no such thing.

Citizens who are woefully ignorant of history are not the kind of citizens needed in the limited democracy in the United States. Such citizens cannot place decisions of national import in historical context. They do not know enough basic economics to say anything coherent about the budget crisis. They are like the ancient barbarians who destroyed the Western Roman Empire–ignorant and uncouth, as monks struggled to keep the dregs of civilization from burning out. The saddest thing in American colleges and universities is that the barbarians–in the form of college administrators, accrediting agency staff, and many college professors–are within higher education. With the roots so rotten, the tree will inevitably die.

Related articles

• In Defense of Classics (and other Liberal Arts) (rogueclassicism.com)
• In Defense of the Liberal Arts (jacksonianamerica.com)

On Women in Combat

57684-2009-12-02-121214 http://www.army.mil (Photo credit: VA Comm)

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will formally announce today that women will be participating in combat in future U.S. military operations. There is no doubt that some women could be effective in combat. However, there are problems with a general policy allowing women in combat that supporters of the policy change ignore due to their own egalitarian ideological presuppositions.

Just because some women would be effective in combat does not imply that most would be. Nor does it imply that allowing women in combat will not harm U.S. military prowess. Women are not the same as men–anyone not blind can see that–and those differences go beyond distinctions of sexual organs and breast size. Overall, women lack the level of physical strength of men. Exceptions do not trump averages. Carrying heavy packs for many miles, heavy lifting, and other areas of hard labor will still be done mainly by men. The possibility of pregnancy remains a problem. In the U.S. Navy, pregnancy is a problem to the extent that the Navy must assume that a given number of women will be sent home from ship duty over a certain time due to pregnancy. Human nature does not become optional when men and women are in close quarters. The emotional bonds created in combat are deep–soldiers die as much for their buddies as for an abstraction such as their country. Only someone naive would believe that in the stress of combat that only Platonic bonds would be formed between male and female soldiers. Anyone who has been in love understands how such a powerful emotion can interfere with reason and good judgment. The military can write all the policies it wants, but in the end human nature will triumph–and human beings are sexual beings. Pregnancy would become a problem in combat units, perhaps even more so than in noncombat units. Women desiring to remain in combat may be encouraged to have abortions, and beyond this murder of innocent human life other women, not knowing they are pregnant, could be killed in action, taking two lives. True, Israel has women in combat, but even Israel has backed away in part due to problems with military effectiveness.

For years, feminism has been claiming that women do not play a special role in the lives of their children. However, this is not the case. Even in the days of the household economy, in which the fathers provided discipline and moral education for their children, children would more often in the presence of their mothers. Such is the nature of biology, a nature that feminists want to deny or to transcend. Placing women in combat is the end stage of a radical egalitarianism that took away a living wage from a man, forcing a woman to work outside the home, and forcing children without extended family in an area to live their early lives in day care. It is no surprise that the order on women in combat came in the administration of a radical egalitarian from a Marxist background (via Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn), President Barack Obama. Human nature will assert itself despite attempts to remold it, and the new policy will inevitably fail. If it does not, I will stand corrected–but I have a strong hunch that the ones corrected will be the radical egalitarian policymakers.

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• Women Sue for Right To Kill… (lewrockwell.com)
• White House says Obama supports women in combat (kvue.com)
• Female soldiers challenge US military over policy barring women from combat (guardian.co.uk)
• Pentagon to overturn ban on women in military combat roles (guardian.co.uk)
• Officials: Panetta opens combat roles to women (usatoday.com)
• Obama Ignores Deadly Risks to Women in Combat (frontpagemag.com)

The Super-Nanny of New York

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg opening the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At http://politicker.com/2013/01/bloomberg-slaps-down-criticism-of-painkiller-restriction-plan/ is an article focusing on New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to restrict the number of painkillers in emergency rooms. He argued that the increasing abuse of pain pills required mitigation, and that restricting pain pill supply would be an effective method to reduce such abuse.

Mayor Bloomberg, like many liberals, sees himself as a nanny–in his case, a super-nanny–who is there to protect the people from their own foolish decision-making. He apparently believes he is Plato’s philosopher-king who knows what is good for the ignorant masses. This behavior was seen in his restricting the size of cola drinks in order to reduce sugar consumption and thereby reduce obesity. Even at a practical level, that will do little good–someone can buy several two liter colas at the local grocery or convenience store and drink away.

Bloomberg’s actions may not only hurt the poor who use the ER as a primary care facility; it may also harm other patients who require painkillers when the allotted supply runs out. The fact that some addicts take advantage of a ready supply of painkillers does not entail that the supply should be limited. There are always going to be people who take advantage of the medical system to feed their own addiction or to meet their psychological desire for attention. Does Mr. Bloomberg have the medical expertise to tell hospitals what to do? The answer is self-evident. Such a decision smacks of totalitarianism of the kind found in Huxley’s Brave New World.

If anyone wishes to see the future of the United States under President Obama, take a look at Michael Bloomberg’s actions. Mr. Obama has put forth federal regulations at a record level. They supposedly meet a particular need–for example, as a university professor I have to turn in my textbook list for the following semester by a particular date or the school could theoretically be fined. The idea is to give prospective students the price of an education, including book costs, at a particular college or university. When colleges and universities take federal funds, they are subject to federal regulations–but other than the required statement on the syllabus for students with disabilities, this is a rare time that a regulation has directly affected me as a professor. In addition, I must use the university’s e-mail address due to abuse by degree mills. I do not mind doing that, though I like my account through a major search engine provider and use it more often–the point is the depth to which the federal government is getting involved in what a professor puts in his syllabus. How many more regulations will come from this administration? The New Deal of FDR and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson created the modern nanny state in the United States, Mr. Obama seems intent on outdoing both of them. To the mammoth state, citizens are like children–and people treated like children tend to behave like children. Aid means control–that is one principle the recipients of benefits from the welfare state forget. Given the decline in character resulting in the childification of people in the United States, I doubt they will protest–most people, like a frog in slowly heated water, will accept their enslavement without a whimper.

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The Great American Sell-Out

U.S. Capitol (Photo credit: afagen)

Both political parties are selling out the American people, and many Americans are quite happy with that. The budget deal included some tax increases, but those are not as much of a concern as a refusal to cut spending. The same massive deficit spending characteristic of the Bush 2 administration and accelerated beyond anything the country has seen under Mr. Obama will sink the children and grandchildren of Americans. The Republican Party does not have the courage to support massive spending cuts because they are more concerned with staying in power than doing the right thing.

Their fear may be justified. Americans showed that they would support someone who kept bringing in the “benefit” dollars–it is the typical attitude of most (and I mean to say “most”) contemporary Americans: “What’s in it for me?” As if that attitude is not bad enough, most Americans have the view that “I want from the government what helps me and to hell with my children and grandchildren.” Massive deficit spending cannot be sustained long-term–that is basic economics which anyone but an academic can understand. The problem is not as much political ideology as it is old fashioned selfishness. As Americans retreat into their individual worlds, the fate of their children (if they have them) becomes immaterial to their own lust for “free stuff.” Of course there is no “free stuff” that the government gives the people–that money comes from taxes. The United States sells treasury bonds to China and Japan (its main customers) which are only as good as long as the United States can pay up. So far it has, and billions of taxpayer dollars have paid the interest in the national debt. Printing more money to pay off higher deficits will only lessen the dollar’s value.

Apocalyptic books are popular these days, as is speculation about apocalyptic scenarios in real life. Although I am not one of those who store barrels of grain in my house, I understand the concern. Congress and the president will not stop massive federal spending, and when the day of reckoning comes (through China calling us on our debt, a massive loss of value of the dollar, or some other deficit-related catastrophe), it will not be pretty. The 2007 recession (which continues today despite what the mainstream media with its Obama-worship says) will look like child’s play. Now ideological liberals may think that’s a good thing since income distribution will be leveled out. To a liberal ideologue, it would not matter if the United States becomes a third world country. I do not believe most people in Congress want that, but their refusal to discipline themselves is going to damn the country to economic disaster. No money can be spent without the House of Representative’s approval. People in the House need to take their fiduciary responsibility to be good stewards seriously. Conservatives need to vote people into Congress who mean it when they call for federal spending cuts. Those in Congress who refuse to accept fiscal responsibility should be voted out.

I am doubtful that will happen–it seems that most Americans’ characters have been corrupted regarding fiscal responsibility by their own greed and selfishness, by their wanting something for nothing. The American people are being sold out, and only a few voices “crying in the wilderness” speak against the sellout. Ultimately, republics tend to disintegrate by their own hands. The hands of most Americans are wrapped around the fiscal throat of the United States, and they refuse to let go. Sadly, amputation via economic collapse may be the only way to teach them hard lessons about economic reality.

Related articles

• Ron Paul Statement on Fiscal Cliff (economicpolicyjournal.com)

Belgium: The Return of “Useless Eaters”

English: Skull and crossbones (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At http://www.france24.com/en/20121218-belgium-looks-euthanasia-minors-alzheimers-sufferers is an article on a proposal that will most likely pass Belgium’s legislature that allows euthanasia for minors and for Alzheimer’s patients. Increasingly secular, godless Europe is finally passing laws that reflect the decline of the remnants of Christian ethics that held on for a while after the decline of religious belief. The phrase “useless eaters” was coined by a Nazi doctor who was discussing Nazi Germany’s euthanasia program. It had no problem killing minors and people with senility of whatever cause. With no clear cut behavioral diagnostic difference between Alzheimer’s Disease and senile dementia in general, the new law, when passed, could de facto be applied to some non-Alzheimer’s senile patients.

What are the limits on the age of minors? Apparently none–any minor deemed “too sick to live” by a doctor and by parents or guardians could be killed. The slippery slope that supporters of euthanasia claimed would not happen is already fact. Next door in The Netherlands, voluntary euthanasia quickly led to involuntary euthanasia, and there was, for a time, a proposal on the table to have a “quality of life threshold” below which a person would no longer have the right to live. It may just be a matter of time before the severely mentally retarded will join the list of “useless eaters” and euthanized. A godless society only gives life a utilitarian value. Although Kant tried to set up a secular system that allowed for intrinsic human dignity, his dream died, at least in some European countries, and the remnants of the Christianity that still influenced Kant died away. Now there is no bar to making decisions regarding euthanasia not based on alleged “mercy,” but on a person’s ability to “contribute” to society. The fittest survive; those considered unfit will be eliminated. The most frightening instances of murder are those murders that use mercy to justify them. The only “mercy” involved may be for the family to get a burden off their back and the state to save on medical bills due to fewer patients requiring long-term care.

The United States, for now, has enough residual Christian belief to avoid Europe’s direction for now. However, given the responses of most of my medical ethics students to questions regarding the moral rightness or wrongness of physician assisted suicide, it seems that those supporting PAS will win in the long run. If they do, it will be no surprise if PAS leads the way into voluntary active euthanasia and eventually to involuntary active euthanasia. Society will be at last be in part of a eugenics movement that will make the earlier movement in the first decades of the twentieth century seem like child’s play. God help us all if that happens–and it will happen in Western Europe (and probably in Canada) before it happens in the United States. But with 30% of young people in the U.S. classifying themselves as “irreligious,” the road toward Europe may be wider than one might think.

Atheists forget, when they catalog the crimes of religion, that the mass murderous regimes of the twentieth century were atheistic: Nazi Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, Maoist Communist China, North Korea, and Cambodia when it was under the rule of Pol Pot. The sanctity of human life does not make sense in an atheistic framework; the value of human life must be instrumental and not intrinsic in a consistent atheistic system. It is no surprise, then, that Belgium and the Netherlands are going the route toward allowing more and more classes of people to potentially be subject to euthanasia. The Nazi world of alleged “useless eaters,” a world Europe once claimed to eschew for good, is coming back to haunt a godless society. The price paid for such folly will be very high.

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• Belgian Euthanasia: Off the Moral Cliff (christianprolifenews.wordpress.com)
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Missing the Point on Atheism and Mass Murder

Pat Buchanan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, speaking to a gathering at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Atheists have reacted with outrage to Mike Huckabee‘s statements (http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151207029493634) as well as Pat Buchanan‘s column (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-dead-soul-of-adam-lanza-5428) on the role that atheism might play in such tragedies as the school murders in Connecticut. Some comments I have read suggest that atheists believe that Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Buchanan are attacking them personally or saying that atheism directly led to the school shooting. A more careful reading of Huckabee and Buchanan, however, reveals that their claims are more nuanced. The point they make, and I think they are right, is that a godless society is more likely to put the primary focus on the self and its desires. Now I am aware of James Q. Wilson‘s work on sociobiology and altruism, but more people are likely to have heard of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Most “lay atheists,” even highly educated or intelligent atheists, may not be aware of either work, but one motive for atheism among some (though not all) atheists is the desire to be free of divine judgment in order to fulfill the desires of the self. Kant was a theist of sorts, at least most of his life, and the remains of Lutheran divine command theory kept his principle of autonomy from degenerating into subjectivism–the identical moral law, Kant believed, was given to each individual by that individual self. With the remains of Christianity removed from autonomy, autonomy becomes the right to do whatever the self desires. Now that often comes with the caveat that one can do what one desires “as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else,” but without a divine judgment it is only internal conscience developed by habituation that prevents evil personal desires from being expressed. Ted Bundy made it clear to one of his victims that without a God to judge him, he believed that he should fulfill his personal desires to murder his victims and sexually violate their dead bodies. Without a sense that one’s actions can have consequences beyond this life, including negative consequences, it is easier for disturbed people such as Adam Lanza to act on their evil desires. Now he may have acted anyway–we cannot know for sure–but the point is that with one less barrier to fulfilling personal desires, it is easier for an evil or severely disturbed person to “go over the top” and act on his twisted desires. This does not imply that all mass murderers are atheists, nor does it deny that many atheists have moral lives that put some Christians to shame. In a way, the atheist who seeks only fulfillment of the self is acting more consistently than the one who affirms a larger social responsibility to the group. I am aware that evolution recognizes the nature of humans as social beings, and that a lack of all concern for others would prevent human genes from being carried on to the next generation. Yet there is no transcendent meaning to life in atheism, and as Bertrand Russell recognized, all human achievements would be lost in the final ruin of the universe. In such a meaningless world, hedonism may seem like the best option, as with Russell, but with less stable people egoism may be the course they take. Thus the point made is a general one: a society that eliminates any deity is more likely to produce more people like Mr. Lanza that one that accepts ethical monotheism.

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The Need for Practical Wisdom in the Federal Bureaucracy

Washington DC – Capitol Hill: United States Capitol (Photo credit: wallyg)

With the massive growth of the federal government comes growth in a complex bureaucratic structure that creates multiple layers of administration between government agencies and what they are designed to do. In the 1950s it was relatively easy to begin the interstate highway system–the government was more simply run and the number of “checkers” was reasonable. These days it takes years from conception to finish to build a small limited access route around a growing city. This is not only an issue of environmental regulation–it is an issue of paperwork, finding the right codes, administrator egos, and too many layers of management. In addition, any bureaucracy operates on a system of strict rules. In the case of the federal government, these rules are said to be necessary to protect the public from fraud, from unsafe products, from incompetent health care, or from shoddy construction on buildings and roads. Rules are essential to any organization–it would be irrational to deny that. People, left to themselves, are not often an orderly lot, and efficient, competent operation requires rules. However, beyond rules that are absolutely essential for safety or another vital value, rules often get in the way of common sense. A needed highway may be delayed by the failure to fill out some obscure paperwork that very few people knew about at the time. People in a local area may realize that what they request is badly needed, but someone in the bureaucracy nicks the request. Often, the requests of local people who know the needs of the communities in  which they live are overridden by someone who has never set foot in a particular community. The current trend in the federal government seems to be to follow the model of private business and focus on efficiency. Admittedly the federal government could do a better job of being efficient. However, efficiency should not trump service, and federal supervisors from upper management to “ordinary” employees should be given enough discretion to use practical wisdom to react in the proper way to a particular situation. As Aristotle pointed out, practical wisdom has to do with the local, the particular, rather than with an overarching universal. It is all too easy for federal officials to get caught in their abstract language and multiple abbreviations and lose sight of the very people that pay their salaries and whom they are to serve in a caring, responsible way. Discretion in spending of money should be broadened. Civil service should be reformed in such a way that seniority does not imply that an incompetent person or someone abusing his authority cannot be fired. But there should also be room for dissent and questioning of the decisions of middle and upper management as long as it is done in a respectful way. For example, suppose a federal employee lives in a community where a new bridge is supposed to be built. The employee knows that the road over which the bridge will be build will be re-routed so as to avoid the need for a bridge–at cost savings to the community. Higher federal officials say, “Congress appropriated the money for a bridge, and a bridge you shall have.” What would be wrong with local federal employees who know the situation informing their managers and those managers going up the chain of command so that Congress can allow the community to use the money appropriated for the bridge for re-routing the road? It is not insubordination to question a ruling. Not following a ruling after a final decision has been made would be wrong–but questioning if there is good reason to question should be a right of any American citizen including one who works for the federal government.

Some government programs work well; most do not. Why not work with those who do not to improve them, and if they are not viable, eliminate them? Federal programs, like federal employees, seem to be self-perpetuating no matter how useless or incompetent they are. This demoralizes good employees and empowers the cynical. Instead of focusing on “Which set of rules must we follow now,” focus on “What is the best thing to do in this particular situation?” The best thing will depend on the particularities of the situation and will require practical wisdom, learned by experience, rather than a list of rules to reach the best decision. This implies good observation and evaluation skills as well as the skills to creatively find ways to stay within the rules while stretching them to fit the limits of a particular situation. Experienced local officials should be trusted, unless they have proven untrustworthy, to make prudent decisions. Normally middle and upper management should, if sufficient funds are available, yield to the suggestions of the people who know an area and its problems best. Civil service, designed in the Chester Arthur administration to prevent political favoritism, should not be used to maintain the incompetent, the arrogant, and those managers who harm others by their laziness in performing their tasks. At the local level, conversations in the workplace between different units should be as open as possible so that “the right hand knows where the left hand goes.” Wise decisions are based on the most accurate and thorough information possible. Hopefully federal employees can then go beyond mere rule-following and exercise their discretion

The Republican Leadership Deserves Only Contempt

English: Crude drawing of the “No RINO” buttons used by American Republicans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sucessionism

Map of USA with Hawaii highlighted (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A colleague of mine compared secessionists to the people in Germany who supported the rise of Hitler into power. Despite the obvious oddity of a group in favor of decentralization of government being linked with a group in Germany who were for more centralized government, the claim remains absurd for other reasons. A number of people in more conservative states feel disenfranchised by the recent re-election of Mr. Obama. Older members of this group are frightened as a man who hates their vision of America is confirmed in power. Now Mr. Obama clearly won the election–even if accusations of voter fraud in Pennsylvania and other places were valid, Mr. Obama still had the numbers to win. Yet if one examines a map of the vote for Mr. Obama, a few densely populated urban areas, especially in the northeast, along with the usual “left-coast” voting, determined the outcome of the election. Small town voters, rural voters–most voted for Mr. Romney. A map of the United States showing counties won by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney reveals a sea of red surrounded by a few urban pockets of blue. Urban tax consumers can now routinely outvote rural and small town taxpayers. In addition, the values that many Americans hold dear–moral and religious values–are increasingly under attack by a more aggressive federal government. The “contraceptive mandate” is the most egregious threat to religious freedom in recent years, yet it slides through court challenges as if the constitution no longer means anything–which is de facto what has happened. The succession movement is symbolic–no person who signed the petitions thinks that the federal government would allow a state to succeed. The petitions are expressions of frustration, a way of “letting off steam.” Now I have always believed that the states are sovereign units, that any unit that voted to join the United States should not be forced to stay within the United States. This was the general viewpoint before 1861, and Mr. Lincoln went against established law in trying to force the Southern states back into the Union. With the illegal passage of the 14th Amendment, the domination of the states by the federal government became enshrined in law. Although I believe succession to be legal under the original Constitution, it would be practically impossible to pull it off today. Now if in the future a massive economic collapse occurs and a country of this size becomes ungovernable, then succession may become a realistic possibility. Given the diversity of populations within the individual states, I doubt that even a nonbinding resolution for succession would pass. The recent petitions, however, reveal the complete frustration of people who have seen the world in which they were reared turned upside down by the forces of radical leftists. Mr. Obama does not govern as an economic socialist; however, his background is Marxist and I doubt that he has fundamentally changed his earlier philosophical stance. Conservatives realize that Mr. Obama supervises, albeit indirectly, a vast federal bureaucracy which is already dominated by leftist thinkers. They also realize that it will be further radicalized by the Obama Administration appointments, especially at the middle management level, and that such bureaucrats write federal regulations. The regulations coming down on the states are growing exponentially. How long will it be before such regulations wrest control of education from the states? How long will it be before abortion is rammed down the throats of religious organizations or else–excuse me, that has already happened. Conservatives would like to be free from such overarching control, and they resent the fact that the difference in the election was the votes of people dependent on the federal government (this is not to deny that many working people also voted for Mr. Obama, but to point out one of the key voter blocks supporting Mr. Obama). They want real independence from the overarching tyranny of the federal government and see no way out. Thus they sign (foolishly, I think since they have to give their names on a federal government site) petitions for succession to assuage their emotions. This is the opposite of a Fascist move to force their views down others’ throats–if anything, it is the most peaceful form of protest in which people can engage–in signing a petition. At least the left should stop making ignorant comparisons between groups, especially if they do not understand one of the groups they are insulting. Such behavior is all too typical of the political left.

Related articles

• Secede, Or Don’t: The Beginning Of The End Of The Federal Monopoly On Power (personalliberty.com)
• Citizens from 19 mostly Southern states file petition to secede from US (deathandtaxesmag.com)
• Petitions to secede are filed for 23 states since election (washingtontimes.com)
• Ron Paul: ‘Secession is a deeply American principle’… (politico.com)
• Ron Paul: Petitions on secession raise ‘worthwhile questions’ (thehill.com)