Words obviously have no meaning anymore, so why bother? Have you seen this nonsense?

Nebraska abortion doctor LeRoy Carhart called on the federal government Monday to treat all activities by “anti-choice domestic terrorists” as hate crimes after last week’s fatal shooting of Dr. George Tiller.

“This is the equivalent of Martin Luther King being assassinated,” he said of the killing of one of the nation’s best known late-term abortion doctors. “This is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania and any other major historic event where we’ve tolerated the intolerable for too long.”

Scott P. Roeder, 51, has been charged with first-degree murder and two counts of armed criminal action in the Tiller case.

“I think there is absolutely no difference in putting a cross in front of a person’s home because of what race they belong to than there is putting a cross in front of our homes because we do abortions,” he said.

via Abortion doctor: Tiller killing a hate crime – Washington Times.

First, what’s with this “anti-choice” jive? By the logic of the abortionists, Roeder was exercising his choice not to be annoyed by Tiller any longer. The same way that healthy women who are days away from giving birth to healthy babies are exercising their choice to not be annoyed by formula, day care expenses and dirty diapers.

Choice. Roeder was as pro-choice as Tiller, wasn’t he?

Second, MLK’s death is “the same” as Tiller’s? Perhaps….in that both were shot and are now dead. But other than that? Not bloody much in common at all if you ask me. MLK was a civil rights leader preaching racial equality. Tiller killed babies. Assuming you’re pro-choice and this is a good thing for the mother….it’s a terrible thing for the babies, isn’t it? Did MLK ever preach that DEATH was an acceptable by-product of standing up for what you believe in? In a word, no.

Finally, it’s the language that’s killing us all by degrees. If MLK and Pearl Harbor are the same as Tiller, then nothing means anything. And when nothing means anything, we can use fancy words to convince ourselves that the baby living in is mother’s womb is not human. Because all this “pro-choice” business only makes sense if you rob the unborn of their humanity. If it’s a “choice” instead of a “human”, then of course you can decline the choice with no moral side-effects.

Tiller killed babies. He killed them because their healthy mothers “chose” to kill them.  They hired Tiller to kill their children. That’s not fancy talk. That’s not morally ambiguous. That’s the truth. In the end, Tiller was himself killed by someone who “chose” not to let that happen any more. Did Roeder have the “right” to kill Tiller? Of course not. But to claim that Tiller’s death was somehow different from the thousands of unborn babies whose own lives were terminated by Tiller himself is the height of ludicrousness…ESPECIALLY when  this is being claimed by the same people who ARE comparing Tiller to MLK.

If Tiller = MLK…then my God, people, how can Tiller NOT also = the countless unnamed and unborn babies who died by his hand?

I give up.

In which I channel Forrest Gump for a few minutes….:)

I am not a religious man. I was raised Catholic, but retain none of the religious formalisms from my youth. I don’t go to church..on Sundays or any other days for that matter. I eat meat when I want. I swear. I do recognize the existence of God and that Jesus was his son, but the writer in me knows that the New Testament was all about convincing a bunch of heathen bumpkins in the sticks to direct their miserable lives toward a recognition of a unified Creator. Therefore I suspect that much license was taken with the  actual life and works of Jesus. I believe in the power of metaphor. Therefore, I’m not so sure it makes much difference whether Jesus “actually” walked on water or whether the description of His doing so was meant to show that by believing in His teachings, you might transcend the physical limitations of this cruel and unforgiving world. Did he turn loaves into fishes? Maybe (if I know anything, it’s that I don’t know everything). But I recognize that people may have a better time understanding that Faith will provide for all needs if they see it spelled out in a nice story.

Simon and Garfunkel weren’t really “rocks and islands,” they just wanted to convey that they were as strong as rocks–feeling no pain and never crying.

Whether that all makes me a good Catholic, I’m sure I don’t know. Actually, that’s not true. I know it makes me a bad Catholic. It’s whether or not I care if I’m a good Catholic that’s got me puzzled. I like to think it doesn’t matter whether I don’t eat meat or go to Church on Sunday, so long as I do good things and live a spiritual and moral life, but I know reasonable people disagree on this.

This of course is a very long way of introducing the fact that I’m a decidedly non-religious pro-lifer (inasmuch as you don’t need to be religious to recognize that a human life is deserving of the utmost care and respect). I don’t defend the unborn because a human is made in God’s image and killing a human is a travesty to God. Some people do, and they’re entitled to. I don’t.

Abortion is wrong notwithstanding the existence of God.

So I know that when some people watch what I’ve posted below, they’ll get hung up on the God thing, and that’s a shame. Forget God. If God isn’t your thing, just listen to the words and reflect on this: Is anything that happens within your family a private matter? If I murdered my brother, is that private? Would the state be foreclosed from pursuing justice?

Of course not. So the only thing preventing the state from pursuing justice against those who murder their children while still in their womb is a legalism which classifies the “unborn” as “inhuman”. Babies are human when they’re outside the womb, but inhuman when they’re inside the womb? Are you OK with that distinction? Especially you who have children or know people who do. You who have put your hand on a belly and felt a toe press back. Does classifying these people as sterile “fetuses” undeserving of that precious right not to be killed make you feel good inside? Or does it make you feel something else?

It makes me feel wretched.

If for no other reason than the possibility that it may force this administration to grow a conscience with regard to the unborn, I think I like the results of this new Gallup poll:

Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Sarah Palin was pro-life, yet so-called Republican strategists want the party to jettison her and her socially conservative constituency. That leads me to believe that these “strategists” are nothing more than Democrats wanting to sabotage the GOP.

To me, this issue has always been a relatively simple one. There are lots of things in this world that are inconvenient, and we would do well to remove them whenever we can. It’s inconvenient for me to be poor, so I work. It’s inconvenient for me to be alone, so I marry and have a son. It’s inconvenient for me to be hungry, so I keep food in the house and stay employed so that I can afford to do so. But as far as it being inconvenient for for me to deal with the homeless dude screaming at me on the street yesterday, I never for a second think there’s an option to murder him. And yes, while it is inconvenient for me to watch President Obama flush my son’s future economic independence down the shitter, I’ve got no option to do violence to him. I don’t have a right to choose whether to murder. I have an absolute obligation not to murder.

If you ask a pro-choice person about whether they view not killing the President or a homeless person as a “choice”, I’m sure they’d agree with me. We don’t get to choose to kill people who make our lives inconvenient. Except of course in an instance of self-defense where we must kill in order to fend off a deadly attack against our person or that of our loved ones. Other than that, however, just because a guy cuts you off on the LIE and you spill your coffee on yourself, the law doesn’t give you a legal choice to either a) let it go; or b) kill the bastard. The only option is A. We get no choice to kill in this instance.

So why is it so different with the unborn? You’d think that a defenseless baby inside your body deserves the same protection as the President, the homeless dude, and the guy that cut you off, wouldn’t you? Especially when that defenseless baby is your own family. Not so, apparently. If your unborn baby makes your life inconvenient (or even if she doesn’t!) you can hire a guy to take a vaccuum to her skull and suck out her brains. All within the bounds of the law.

What a country.

The only way the pro-choicers can conceivably reconcile this is to view the unborn baby as inhuman. Which one of these things is not like the other?

Rock

Newspaper

Soda can

Baby.

To the pro-choicer, there is no difference at all between any of them. To the pro-choicer, they are all inanimate objects susceptible to being tossed in a garbage can for any (or no) reason at all.

To me, that ’s sick.

An unborn baby human is a human. If it isn’t, what else could it be? And if it is OK for a woman to have the right to choose what happens to her body in re: her unborn child (after the most important choice of all is made to actually conceive the baby in the first place), then why isn’t that same right bestowed on the baby itself? Your right to choose to kill the baby isn’t trumped by the baby’s right to choose not to be killed? We have statutory rape laws that say a minor is incapable of consenting to sex. Shouldn’t it follow that an unborn baby should be legally incapable of consenting to be killed?

Again, this all depends on an important distinction that is ludicrous on its face–that unborn baby humans are somehow not human.

Anyway, that Americans view this issue as I do by a 51-42 majority makes me somewhat happy.

I suppose there are more immediate things to consider these days as Obama continues his ruination of our capitalist economy. But let’s take a second to reflect Obama’s decision to funnel public money to experimentation on living human embryos. 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama, who opposes limits on federal funding of stem cell research, will sign an executive order about stem cells on Monday, an administration official said on Friday.

The official could not confirm the details of what Obama would sign, but advisers had previously said he favored lifting the eight-year limitation on funding of human embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The issue is controversial because some people believe the destruction of any human embryo is wrong.

And why might some people think that destroying (notice they don’t say “killing”, which would imply that the embryo possesses a “life” capable of being “killed”) a human embryo is wrong?

Reuters doesn’t say.

What do you think?

According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill’s $355 billion in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just $110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing given that Congress’s justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help the economy right now, if not sooner.

And the red Congressional faces must be very red indeed, because CBO’s analysis has since vanished into thin air after having been posted early last week on the Appropriations Committee Web site. Officially, the committee says this is because the estimates have been superseded as the legislation has moved through committee. No doubt.

via The Stimulus Time Machine – WSJ.com.

This is only upsetting to those who believe that the purpose of the stimulus is to help the economy. What’s that you say? Of course the purpose of the stimulus is to help the economy? It’s what you’re reading in all the papers? Why then is most of the money not due to be actually spent until 2011? And why is $87 billion being spent on Liberal pet projects like family planning and birth control?

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, criticized a part of the bill’s $87 billion package to help states with Medicaid costs that would allow states to expand their family planning services. Leaving a White House meeting with Obama on Friday, Boehner said, “How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?”

Well, Mr. Boehner, Nancy Pelosi says that spending money to make sure babies don’t get born in the first place will mean less children and adults that the country will have to pay for later. And if we were talking about cattle or cockroaches, I’d believe her. We’re humans though, and humans make our economy go. We grow up to build things and hire people and invest and create revenue. Since we’re set to transfer all this debt to our grand children anyway, I want to make sure that they’ll have lots of help.

But imputing the best of intentions for Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Obama (something I’m actually willing to do on occasion), and assuming that they really do think that a stimulus such as this is the only way to bring us back to prosperity (and that it isn’t all about them capitalizing on a crisis to funnel tax dollars to Planned Parenthood), are they likely to be right?

No.

The stimulus bill . . . [is] based on an old, and largely discredited, economic theory. As Harvard economist Robert Barro pointed out on these pages last Thursday, the “stimulus” claim is based on something called the Keynesian “multiplier,” which is that each $1 of spending the government “injects” into the economy yields 1.5 times that in greater output. There’s little evidence to support this theory, but you have to admire its beauty because it assumes the government can create wealth out of thin air. If it were true, the government should spend $10 trillion and we’d all live in paradise.

The problem is that the money for this spending boom has to come from somewhere, which means it is removed from the private sector as higher taxes or borrowing. For every $1 the government “injects,” it must take $1 away from someone else — either in taxes or by issuing a bond. In either case this leaves $1 less available for private investment or consumption.

[ . . . ]

The government spending will be a net stimulus only if its $1 goes to more productive purposes than those to which private investors would have put that same $1.

If 15 small businesses on Long Island can’t each hire 2 or 3 new people because they have to pay higher taxes to contribute to the $87 billion going to fund condoms, abortions and spermicidal gel for teens, then that’s 30-45 less people with jobs on Long Island. Let those companies keep their tax money (ie–cut their tax rates), forget that $87 billion for condoms, and get those 30-45 people hired and producing and manufacturing and selling and buying….

Which is what an economic recovery is all about.

Isn’t it?

Deadly And Proportionate Force: The Tragedy Of Hamas – Forbes.com.

The claim is that it is not permissible for the Israelis to kill many individuals, including civilians, to stop sporadic deaths from rocket fire. Sorry. As with individual aggression, proportionality has no place in dealing with deadly force, where the right rule is that all necessary force is permissible.

The Israelis are not required to slowly bleed in Sderot because Hamas is at present only capable of using primitive rockets against it. It need not wait until the attacks become ever more deadly to raise the ante. It should of course do whatever it can to avoid the killing of civilians, even those who serve as human shields. It can, of course, back off to take into account the political repercussions, and it has been well-advised to dance the peculiar minuet that couples bombings on one day with relief conveys on the next.

As these examples show, the riddle of self-defense has no tidy theoretical solution. If overwhelming force is needed to stop persistent deadly attack against nations or groups that flout international law, then so be it. The sooner the international community acknowledges that principle, the sooner it will intervene constructively to stop bloodshed–by putting troops on the ground in Gaza if necessary, and by convicting top Hamas leaders of crimes against humanity.

A couple of additional things to think about in this context:

1. The “Bush Doctrine”, insofar as it relates to pre-emption, seems permissible under this context. 9/11 exhibited to us that terror groups, acting openly within the borders of ideologically symmetrical nations, threaten the security of the United States.

2. Abortion, insofar as it relates to the “health of the mother” seems permissible only when the life of the mother is actually in jeopardy. In all other instances, where the life of the mother is not at risk, it seems that the “proportionate” response of the mother should be to have the baby and give it up for adoption.

As long as we’re talking about proportionality, that is.