Tag Archives: morality

Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.

A Thought on Physician-assisted Suicide

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The headline and subhead laid out the case in extreme terms:

Physician-Assisted Suicide Isn’t Healthcare
We all took an oath to do no harm. That includes killing our patients.

In the article the writer made the case against physician-assisted suicide in Biblical terms, and it’s a valid one:

Cain should have been put to death for what he did. But the Lord spared him, proclaiming that life and death belong to the Lord alone.

And

Medicine shouldn’t be entangled in the business of death. Killing isn’t healthcare.

Certainly. But what the Hippocratic Oath actually says is this:

I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman….

But that’s not what physician-assisted suicide does. If the patient wants to short-circuit an end-of-life period of misery, assisting his suicide isn’t “killing the patient;” it’s helping him move on. Withholding that assistance is most assuredly deeply injurious to the patient’s continuing body, and to his mind. Beyond that, it’s disastrous to the patient’s and his family’s emotional and economic well-being, consigning the latter, especially, to an extended life of impoverishment that could have been avoided. Physician-assisted suicide is palliative care in the extreme, but it is still palliative care.

The killing is the patient’s act, and that’s between him and God. Do no harm includes not getting between the patient and God. A doctor’s role assuredly does not include suggesting suicide; although, some governments do encourage it. A doctor’s role does, absolutely, include palliative care.

Along these lines, the Hippocratic Oath explicitly enjoins the physician from doing abortions:

Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.

I have to ask: how many abortions has this writer of the article at the first link performed? Plenty of his colleagues have done them, and proudly so, many even proclaiming abortions as “health care.”

Progressive-Democratic Party and Religious Freedom

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Consider the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a 42-bed nursing facility in New York that gives free palliative care to poor people with cancer. The State of New York is trying to force this Catholic institution to deliberately violate their religious beliefs. The New York State Department of Health requires the Sisters to begin

  • assigning patients to rooms by self-identified sex
  • [stop] segregating restrooms by biological sex
  • use…patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present
  • allow patients to cross-dress

The Department is threatening the Sisters with fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they do not repudiate their religious beliefs and commit these egregious to them acts.

The Sisters have applied for a religious exemption, and the State has ignored their application.

The Sisters are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg. This is Party’s attitude toward the 1st Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Party already badly wants to disarm us and deny us our right to speak as we see fit. Now we’re to have no conscience, as well.

Misreading

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In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.

ACLU Exposes Its Intrinsic Racism

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Janai Nelson, ACLU President, made the organization’s, and her own, racism plain in her Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, a letter in which she accused DoJ’s Assistant AG of its Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon of

undermin[ing] the rights she was appointed to protect. In a case before the Supreme Court, the department under her leadership filed an amicus brief arguing that Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Constitution. Her position on this issue would limit voting rights for black Americans by making it incredibly difficult for black voters to elect their candidates of choice.

Nelson is ignoring her BFF’s and favorite Progressive-Democrat ex-President. then-Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama’s statement at Party’s 2004 Convention:

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Especially that last: There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. Race doesn’t matter in this nation, for all that bigotry (hold up a mirror facing you, Ms Nelson) still exists here. There are only citizens of the United States.

I repeat the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, even though that’s lost on an entity and its chief for whom our Constitution has no meaning:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There’s not a black voter and white voter and Latino voter and Asian voter; there’s the United States of America voters. Gerrymandering by race is racist at its core.

Nelson would have a stronger case were she to argue that that same 14th Amendment clause makes gerrymandering on the basis of political party unconstitutional. It’s instructive, though, that she chose race as the core of her special-treatment-by-gerrymandering argument.