Tag Archives: morality

Lawlessness and Instability

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Much is being made of the situation that will obtain in the Gaza Strip when Hamas’ war is ended and (ideally) with Hamas utterly destroyed. Worries about Gazan civilian lawlessness and general instability throughout the Strip abound, should there be a lack of governance in that aftermath.

It’s certainly true that an effective governing body, or bodies should the Strip be subdivided as some are proposing, but there’s another factor that’s not addressed.

That’s the behaviors of the civilians involved. Desperation and privation are harsh task masters, but they needn’t be controlling slavers. There’s nothing preventing the Gazan civilians from supporting each other rather than spending their meager resources supporting surviving Hamas terrorists in the latter’s attacks on Israel. There’s nothing preventing Gaza’s civilians from supporting each other rather than lethally competing with each other for those meager resources.

It’s even likely that foreign aid would flow more freely were the Strip’s civilians to move to support that flow rather than ransacking and looting it, or allowing surviving Hamas terrorists to steal it.

But that would require those Gazan civilians to behave like a worthy and virtuous people—not by Western standards, even, but by their own Quran requirements.

Count me naïve for pointing that out, but there it is.

The Disingenuosity of the Left

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The Texas Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that bans gender-affirming care for transgender minors. The Court in its 8-1 decision wrote

We conclude the legislature made a permissible, rational policy choice to limit the types of available medical procedures for children, particularly in light of the relative nascency of both gender dysphoria and its various modes of treatment and the Legislature’s express constitutional authority to regulate the practice of medicine

Tellingly, the Court explicitly ruled only that the state law was constitutional, not what treatment a minor who suffers from “gender dysphoria” should have.

Just as tellingly, the Left is busily distorting the facts.

Lynly Egyes, Litigation Director at Transgender Law Center:

The court’s decision to reject safe and affirming care will have lasting impacts on all people in Texas[.]

There is nothing safe about the transgender treatments currently on offer, for minors or adults. They are, by their nature, highly and permanently destructive of the individual’s body, with follow-on effects on the individual’s mind.

Neither are the treatments “affirming” as they are done to minors. Minors don’t have the capacity to determine what’s best for themselves, including what gender they wish to manifest themselves as. That’s what parents do.

The Court’s opinion can be read here.

Should be Easy

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Biden administration suit against Tennessee over whether that State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

[T]he court said it would hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a Tennessee law that bans gender-transition care, such as medications that can delay the onset of puberty and hormones that can cause physical changes such as the development of facial hair or breasts.

Leave aside the question of whether there is such a thing as “transgender minors.” There is, but they’re exceedingly rare, and those cases are easily identified by physiological factors like stunted development of physical sexual characteristics that are consistent with the child’s DNA-determined sex, or excessive development of physical sexual characteristics that are contrary to the child’s DNA-determined sex.

The Court’s ruling in the Tennessee case should be a short, sweet one-pager: Yes, the State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

What would be nearly as bad as ruling against Tennessee would be the Court expanding on that simple Yes by writing limits—minimum or maximum—to the State’s authority to restrict. Limits on the authority to restrict are themselves political decisions that must be left to the political branches of our Federal government—Congress and the President, or Congress overriding a veto—and to the State governments individually.

Limited Options?

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Some of The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities claim that not only are America’s options few, but we are Running Out of Options in the Gaza War. And further, as their subheadline intimates, those options are purely American political re-electability options.

Biden’s stalled cease-fire plan is a political vulnerability ahead of his debate with Trump. Israel and Hamas have a longer timeline.

Of course they do, and of course the news personalities’ bit is nonsense.

While it is true that our—not only Biden’s personal political prospects (and Trump’s, come to that)—are limited, it’s only in the fetid imaginations of pressmen that our options are running out.

Putting any emphasis at all on any sort of ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is dangerously misguided. There can be no hope of a ceasefire with an enemy that will strike at will regardless of the terms of any extant ceasefire agreement, just as Hamas did last October, in violation of the then-existing ceasefire agreement, and just as Hamas has done repeatedly before then in violation of all of those ceasefire agreements.

Our option as a nation—disregard self-serving politicians—is restricted to a single one. Support Israel fully in its war for survival against butchers whose own sole goal is the extermination of Israel. That war, of course, is the source of the longer timeline of Israel and Hamas (notice that: a single timeline, not separate ones for the nation and the terrorists). Hamas mucky-mucks have promised repeated October 7s, no matter the costs the terrorists inflict on Gaza Strip civilians, until the terrorists achieve their goal of extermination. Which makes Israel’s timeline stretch until they’ve succeeded in destroying (not exterminating—an out of line IDF general has badly conflated the two) Hamas.

On reflection, though, there is one more national option, even if Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden lacks both the political courage and the morals to apply it. That is to cut off Hamas’ source of money and arms: going back to enforcing existing sanctions on Iran (which are less effective, now, due to Russia’s and People’s Republic of China’s support, but still damaging), to begin sinking Iranian arms shipping and interdicting overland arms shipments through Iraq before it can deliver arms and ammunition, and severely damaging, if not destroying, Iran’s nuclear weapons development facilities cybernetically and, if necessary, kinetically. Dealing with Iran also would have the happy side effect of weakening Hezbollah’s ability to continue its terrorist attacks against Israel from the north.

A Thought on the Alitos

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News personality Lauren Windsor had a thought regarding Justice Samual Alito and his wife and some flag-flying. A number of letter-writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had thoughts regarding Windsor’s hit piece.

I have my own thought, beginning from this remark by one of the letter-writers who (also) decried Windsor’s piece:

Justice Alito is being blamed for Mrs Alito’s flag flying.

Along with all the other criticisms of Windsor’s dishonesty stands this: she deeply insults Ms Alito, along with women generally, by suggesting that the wife is necessarily subordinate to the husband and that the wife is nothing more than the little woman, who needn’t worry her pretty little head about things that are in the man’s realm of responsibility.

What bigoted, sexist garbage Windsor has spewed.