Category Archives: rights

The Senate and the Republic

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Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR) has said the quiet part aloud (to coin a phrase). His immediate venue is the coming Progressive-Democrat effort to Federalize our nation’s elections, which by our Constitution are set by each State’s own legislatures and only modifiable under narrow circumstances by the Federal Congress.

You can think of January as a moment when two different forces are converging. One is the functionality of the Senate and the other is the functionality of our republic.

No, these are not different “forces” at all. The functionality of our republic depends on our Federal Senate remaining the bipartisan body that it was designed to be. In the present case, that requires the Senate’s filibuster function to remain as it is, which enforces the Senate’s bipartisan nature.

It gets worse, though:

[Progressive-]Democrats have called passing new elections legislation their priority, arguing that minority voters need protections from new state rules.

This is Party being openly, loudly and proudly racist. There are no minority voters or “other” voters or non-minority voters. There are only American voters. As a man said not so long ago,

There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.

Even if that man turned out actually to not believe his words, the concept he pretended to espouse is true, nonetheless.

But, then, this is just another aspect of the Progressive-Democrats’ drive to fundamentally change America. The next year, and the two years after that, are going to be very dangerous times for our Republic.

Child Abuse

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Now the New Orleans government is requiring children as young as five years old to get vaccinated, whether they need it or not, whether their parents want it for their children or not.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is implementing the policy “to keep the omicron variant at bay,” amid surging cases in Orleans Parish.

And

“The vaccine mandate will expand to include children ages 5-11,” she said. “We will require proof of vaccination or negative tests at bars and restaurants and other locations for everyone ages 5 and older.”

(I’m not aware that patrons as young as five years are allowed in New Orleans bars, but that’s another story.)

And, she orders:

Starting in January, you MUST ensure that your children are getting vaccinated!

This too closely approaches child abuse. There is virtually no risk to children—or from them to others—from the Wuhan Virus, especially from the mildest of all the variants, Omicron. It’s also true that the risk of dangerous side effects from the vaccines against the virus seems very small.

However.

We have more than two years of empirical data from a sample size that is the population of children on Earth with which to assess the level of risk to children from a Wuhan Virus infection. We have a much smaller set of data, collected over a much shorter period of time, with which to assess any risk to children of serious side effect from any of the virus vaccines.

Stipulate, though, that the vaccines’ serious side effect risk really is quite small. The comparison of interest is not whether the vaccines have an absolute level of risk in isolation of other factors or risks. The proper comparison is the level of risk to a child from being unvaccinated compared with the risk to the child of serious side effect from the vaccine.

If the two levels of risk are comparable—and they seem to be, even with the so-far assessed optimistic side effect risk—then the risk from the vaccine is not worth the risk to a child from going unvaccinated.

Forcing that second risk onto the child is too risky, to the point of abuse.

Censorship in New York State

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Now the wonders of the New York State Senate want to ban, formally by statute, speech of which they disapprove.

A New York Senate bill if passed would criminalize the promotion of content that “includes a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.”

This is rank censorship. Whose definition of “likely?” Whose definition of “fraudulent theory?”

Here are just a few items that are threatened by this censorship:

  • Advertising
  • Political ads/speech
  • Satire
  • Comedy
  • Ridicule
  • Exaggeration for effect
  • Irony

This is an all too typical effort by Progressive-Democrats to control our speech.

O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t in this new year of New York.

What She Said

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Cynthia Millen, the erstwhile USA Swimming official who resigned over the NCAA’s and UPenn’s decision to let transgender swimmer Lia Thomas compete in women’s swimming meets, had some further thoughts on the larger matter.

The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities[.]

And

The statement for women then is you do not matter, what you do is not important, and little girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all of this[.]

And

…boys will always have larger lung capacity, larger hearts, greater circulation, a bigger skeleton, and less fat.

And

While Lia Thomas is a child of God, he is a biological male who is competing against women. And no matter how much testosterone suppression drugs he takes, he will always be a biological male and have the advantage.

And

All these women who worked so hard before Title IX when they didn’t have the opportunities that men had. It would be such a shame, such a travesty to throw it away now. This is what will happen.

Indeed, where is Title IX? Transgender athletes should have their own, equally funded and equally supported, athletic programs.

Contempt

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A Wall Street Journal piece centered on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) supposed plan to bring President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s “Build Back Better Act” to a Senate floor vote in January, and therewith dare Senator Joe Manchin (D, VA) to vote against it, had the following highly instructive bit buried toward the end.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA), Chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, castigated Manchin over his decision regarding the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill:

We cannot hang the futures of millions of Americans on the words of one man who represents a state that has a tiny percentage of the country’s entire population.

Never mind that Senators and Representatives, at least nominally, work for their constituents and not for Party or the nation at large. Never mind, either, that pesky 10th Amendment, much less the 9th Amendment.

This is the utter contempt that Progressive-Democrats have for our Constitution and for the federal republican structure of our government that our Constitution creates.

This is the utter contempt that Progressive-Democrats have for us average Americans.

Everything from the center, and the center over everyone.