Category Archives: morality

Buncha Crybabies

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Officials at Six Rivers Planned Parenthood of Eureka, CA, launched a “40 Days of Prayer” “prayer campaign” in March that offers daily prayers for pregnant women and clinicians who perform abortions.

Naturally, the Progressives have their panties in a twist over it.  Liberty Counsel, a pro-life…litigation group…is bellyaching that this is just a “desperate attempt” to garner publicity and funding by mocking pro-choicers.

They whine, for instance,

Planned Parenthood’s prayer crusade is an attempt to mock and marginalize the highly effective “40 Days for Life,” which has unified half a million voices for the cause and saved at least 5,838 lives….

Here’s Liberty Counsel founder Matthew Staver:

“Planned Parenthood’s ‘prayer’ campaign is offensive.”

I might think, “poor babies,” were the beef not so cynical.

As a commenter at Villainous Company puts it in a related venue,

Pro-choice? Most on the Left side of the aisle are extremely ANTI-CHOICE; do it their way or don’t do it.  Applies to lifestyles (no conservatives, no big families, no religion), work (no traditional one-worker families), the environment (no industry, assumed to pollute without question, global warming), and so on.  NO CHOICE ALLOWED which contradicts, interferes or denies leftist policy; no flexibility, even when the participants agree on what they want.
WE MUST OBEY or be criticized in every available arena….

Lobbying with a Red Herring

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The Associated Press is joining the lobbying of the Supreme Court over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and its effort is either cynical or ignorant, depending on their motive for their chosen focus:

During the recent oral arguments some of the justices and the lawyers appearing before them seemed to be under the impression that the law does not allow most consumers to buy low-cost, stripped-down insurance to satisfy its controversial coverage requirement.

The AP presents this as a “possible misunderstanding” the “could cloud” the Court’s deliberations.

Of course, cost is only a peripheral issue, arising primarily from Justice Antonin Scalia’s discussion of the subsidy a young, healthy American (who does not need health insurance—and who used to be able to make that decision for himself) must pay, through forced purchase of unneeded/undesired health insurance, so that others, claiming the need, can afford to get health insurance.

The question before the Court—as all the players understood, making their arguments concerning the constitutionality of PPACA’s Individual Mandate, and by extension of the PPACA itself, as they did—is the question of individual liberties and the degree to which Government can, under our Constitution, limit our liberty for our own good.

Cost isn’t the issue—freedom and government control over an individual’s decisions is.

It’s Not My Fault

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In his diatribe against the Supreme Court over its potential (not realized) to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Obama is not demonstrating a breathtaking ignorance of our Constitution or of the Federal Courts’ power of review of Congressional legislation.  Instead, he’s just beating an old familiar drum: any failure is somebody else’s fault.

In “framing the court as a potential villain that substitutes its judgment for that of elected legislators,” he’s just setting up the next set of villains in his serial pulp novel, I Didn’t Do It.

Mr. Obama ticked off a string of popular benefits that would disappear if the law is shot down….

Thus, Obama cynically ignores the fact that, were they good ideas, they could have been enacted, after public debate rather than locked door deals, through constitutional legislation.  Or he could have let a free market agree that they’re good ideas and generate a (potentially large) niche for them.

But Mr. Obama…said he was confident the high court would not [strike down PPACA], partly because conservatives—who are in the majority on the court—have long argued against what some refer to as legislating from the bench.

He, just as cynically, conflates upholding the Constitution as judicial activism.  Also,

He said that without the mandate, it would be impossible to require insurance companies to cover everybody, including those with pre-existing conditions, at a reasonable price.

He ignores the fact that it’s impossible to require this at any price.  A free market, however, would allow such coverages at costs commensurate with the risks being transferred.

President Obama, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney, even argues with a straight face that for the Court to overturn PPACA would be to undo 80 years of precedent vis-à-vis the Commerce Clause.  This disingenuously ignores recent Commerce Clause overturnings that others have described.  Even more disingenuously, it ignores the fact that those “80 years of precedent” began with Supreme Court’s overturning of 100+ years of Commerce Clause precedent in Jones & Laughlin and Wickard—the former by a Court thoroughly intimidated by FDR’s court packing effort, and the latter carried out by an FDR-packed Court, a Court in which 8 of the 9 Justices were FDR appointees.

And it puts Obama in the strange position of implying that Brown was wrong because it overturned 80 years of precedent flowing from Plessy.

It’s not my fault.  The devil made me do it.

A Thought on Self Defense

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The uproar over a shooting in Florida brings up the concept of self-defense, and Joe Palazzolo and Rob Barry raise a number of points about this in their The Wall Street Journal op-ed.  In it, they write about “so-called justifiable homicides,” “leeway to attack and even kill someone who is threatening them,” and a victim’s duty to retreat when threatened or attacked.

What is self-defense; do we have a right to it; and if so, are there any limits to self-defense or to that right?

Our Declaration of Independence acknowledges the existence of a right to self-defense as a component of our suite of inalienable rights endowed by our Creator and so inherent in the fabric of our being:

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.

Plainly, the right to Life includes within it a right to defend, for ourselves, our own Lives and those of our families—and those of others related to us only through friendship and those not related at all.  “All men are created equal:” thus the right to defend a life includes the right—now the obligation—to assist in the defense of another’s life.  And this defense, and its underlying right, must come from within each of us.  We can—and we do through our social compact, of which our Declaration is our principles statement—assign to government certain tasks and obligations to help execute that self-defense.  However, we cannot surrender our right to do so to that government, for two reasons: first, as a part of our Creator’s endowment, the right is not ours to give away.  Second, and of secular and immediate importance, were we to surrender primary responsibility for our self-defense to a government, we would lose that right altogether.  By that surrender, that “right” becomes a thing that government can grant or withdraw at its whim.  At best, when the bad man comes, and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.

Having demonstrated the existence of the right, what is it, exactly to which we have a right?  What is self-defense?  I described one aspect of it above: “a right to defend our own Lives and those of our families—and those of others related to us only through friendship and those not related at all.”  But there’s more.  Self-defense includes defense of all property, not just our property in our body: we also have a property in our thoughts, our Liberties, and our physical property.  Our thoughts are inherent in both our lives and our Happiness, as are our Liberties, and our physical property is part of the outgrowth of our pursuit of Happiness* (and without which, our Liberties and Lives are severely constrained, if they exist in this state at all.  The components of our endowment are tightly intertwined with each other, but that’s the subject of another post). Thus, we also have an inherent right to defend our possessions (and thoughts and Liberties) from attackers.

Given all of that, there can be no possibility of a “duty to retreat.”  There is no defense if we must give way to an attacker based on where we might be located at the time of the attack.  Our right of self-defense is in us, it is not in any location we might momentarily occupy.  There is no defense, if we must give up our property—any aspect of it—to a criminal’s demand, and hope that the property can be recovered intact by “authorities.”  Indeed, any retreat, of its nature, carries within it the characteristic of allowing our attacker to strike first, or threaten to do so.  Our Lives, if taken by our attacker, cannot be recovered at all, no matter how dedicated and efficient those authorities.  Retreat is only a tactical decision, driven by the exigencies of particular circumstances; it is never an obligation.

What then, are the limits to our right of self-defense?  The short answer is when the behavior ceases to be defensive and becomes offensive.  But it’s not that simple: no man has an obligation to allow his attacker to shoot, or stab, or otherwise strike first and only then to respond.  Clearly, when faced with such a threat, our right of self-defense includes a right to pre-empt our attacker’s potentially fatal assault: we can shoot first.  A couple of examples will serve to illustrate legitimate limits to our right of self-defense.

Our right, for instance, does not permit us simply to arrange our defense deliberately to kill our attacker.  That man also has a right to his Life, for all that he is endangering ours with his attack. (But we have no obligation to arrange our defense deliberately not to kill our attacker.  We have no obligation to handicap ourselves in so potentially a fatal-to-us way.)  If we kill him in the course of our defense, that’s unfortunate, but no wrong redounds to us.  If we kill him deliberately and as our goal, that legitimately can amount to one of the variations of murder.

Our right to self-defense does not allow us to hunt down our attacker in order to kill him.  We can chase him in an attempt to recover our property, and if in the course of that pursuit a struggle occurs and we kill our attacker in that struggle, we’re still engaged in self-defense.  However, we cannot chase our attacker with the goal simply of killing him, even if we recover our property in the course of that killing.  Nor, if we lose contact with our attacker in the course of our pursuit, can we then search for him in a separate act (although we certainly can aid the authorities in their search) and kill him after a successful hunt.

But if our right to Life enjoins us to help defend another’s life, how are we enabled to take another’s life, ostensibly in self-defense?  We are not so enabled while the taking is a goal.  But our right to our own Life is the primary interest.  We must protect ourselves first: we cannot see to any of our duties, including that to assist the defense of another’s life, if we are not safe and sound.  If we must kill in order to fulfill that primary interest, this is unfortunate, but it may be a necessary adjunct to our defense of our properties—whether in our selves, or our thoughts, or out Liberties, or our physical property.

As to limits on the right itself of self-defense, there is a very critical one, alluded to above: it is a part of our existence.  We neither can, nor may, surrender that right or any part of it to anyone else or to any authority.  Even that government which we hire, under our social compact, to help us protect all of our inalienable rights is hired to help us, not to substitute for us.

*As John Adams noted in his 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, in Article I of the First Part, “All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

More than just Cheating

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last Sunday the results of its extensive investigation into standardized testing results across the country, and its discoveries were appalling.  The links under “Related” in the left margin tell the tale (read them all; the series is illuminating).  I’ll just offer a few highlights.  It’s important to note that the AJC makes no bones about their analysis: the statistical results do not prove cheating.  However, the results to demonstrate utterly anomalous test scores and score movements from year to year.

Extreme swings in test scores, the paper reported,

occurred in several major urban school systems, including Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Mobile County, Alabama.

In Houston,

test results for entire grades of students jumped two, three or more times the amount expected in one year, the analysis shows.  When children moved to a new grade the next year, their scores plummeted[.]

One particularly egregious example occurred at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy in St. Louis. MO.  The AJC reported that in 2010 42% of fourth-graders passed the state’s math test (an appalling teaching performance in its own right). The following year, just 4% of those same students passed the state’s math test when they took it as fifth-graders.  The AJC added that while the 2011 tests were administered, the school was under intense scrutiny as a result of earlier cheating allegations.

Dr Andres Alonso, Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore, MD, school district, noted that the AJC’s analysis found very large year-on-year changes that, in general, were score reductions following intensified efforts by his staff to prevent cheating in his Baltimore schools.  That intensified effort was a result of Alonso’s own investigation, triggered by a complaint at a PTA meeting.

Others, though, like Nashville, TN, district officials, responded by challenging the AJC’s methodology.  These officials emphasize both the high turnover of children in and out of their districts and that for many of their children English is not the primary language.  The AJC, though, while addressing Nashville’s concerns, points out that lots of other districts—vis., Chicago, Los Angeles, Amarillo, Texas—have similarly high student turnover, and similarly high numbers of students for whom English is not their primary language, and these districts did not have a similarly high incidence of suspicious test results.

There also are the usual cop-out excuses from those more interested in turning a blind eye to the problem than in doing the hard work of actually solving it.  Standardized test scores, they complain, put undue pressure on the teachers to do their jobs.  It’s true enough that test scores typically inform teacher evaluations and/or bonuses.  Other, more interested, educators correctly point out, however, that “cheating is a moral choice.”  No one stuck guns in these cheaters’ ears’, if cheating is what’s going on, and forced the misbehaving educators to misbehave and shortchange our children and their education.

Indeed, the objections to the analysis outcomes do not serve to deny that any cheating is occurring.  The objections instead center on three items: a) justification of the behavior because the teachers are under so much pressure; b) objection to the analysis’ methodology, as with Nashville above; and c) denial of the results.  Detroit, for instance, insisted that its scores were not “unusual or out of line in any way.”

Overall, the AJC reports, 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had tests results whose odds of occurring by chance alone were less than 1 in 1,000.  That’s fully 6% of those largest districts.

Cheating on this scale, if that’s what is behind those suspicious scores, is more than just cheating.  These cheaters are doing more than just defrauding you and I out of our tax money.  These cheaters are doing worse than short-changing our children.  These cheaters are doing worse than abusing our children.  These cheaters are setting a devastating moral example for our children.  These cheaters also are threatening our nation’s security—and threatening the welfare of those children’s children thereby.

How is our nation supposed to compete in the world when our citizens are just adult ignoramuses because teacher and school administrator organizations like this make no effort at all actually to educate our children?  How is our nation supposed to compete in the world—or set an example for it—when tomorrow’s adults are morally destitute?