Tag Archives: rights

Religious Bigotry

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West Virginia had a requirement that all school students get vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus (my term, not the State’s), regardless of religious views regarding vaccines or how the vaccines are structured or made or from any other religious perspective. The State permitted no religious opt-outs at all. Raleigh County Circuit Judge Michael Froble waved the BS flag at that requirement and has ruled that parents can, indeed, opt their children out of the vaccination program based on their religious beliefs.

The larger question is why a lawsuit and judicial ruling was needed in the first place.

Is the State’s bar of religious exemption demonstrative of religious bigotry by the relevant State officials? Not necessarily. Some religion-based objections aren’t actually based on religion, but those false assertions are quite rare. It is strongly suggestive of officials’ religious bigotry, though.

“The trade in babies and women’s bodies is an affront to freedom.”

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That Wall Street Journal subheadline is about surrogate motherhood and whether it ought be allowed to exist. Lois McLatchie Miller’s lede and next two paragraphs consist of this:

A New York ballroom filled with men discussing how to procure women’s bodies to produce babies, then discharge the mother from her role.
It sounds dystopian, but the September gathering was the latest conference of Men Having Babies, a group that helps gay couples—and single men, and even groups of three that call themselves “throuples”—form families through surrogacy. Online, they post photos of smiling male couples holding infants still slick from their mothers’ birth canals, celebrating a triumph of “modern family building.”
Those newborns know nothing of politics or reproductive technology. They know only the voice and scent of the woman who carried them for nine months—and whom they will never know again.

That truly is terrible, but it’s far from the norm. Surrogacy is broadly employed to provide healthy babies to families unable to have any of their own.

Alternatively, adopt a baby? Certainly. But the adoption, while also broadly beneficial to both the baby and the new parents, doesn’t get the parents a baby of their own blood, their own genetics. Surrogacy opens a path to that, wherein the father’s sperm is combined with the mother’s egg and the result implanted in the surrogate mother. Or a mother’s egg is combined with a sperm bank donor’s sperm and the result either implanted in the mother, or for her health reasons, implanted in a surrogate mother. Or the same with a donor’s egg and the father’s sperm.

The surrogate mother, then, in those cases carries the baby to term and then turns it over to the baby’s parents. That can be wrenching for the surrogate mother, but it isn’t always, and it does allow the surrogate mother to participate in the formation of a loving family. Even in the wrenching, the surrogacy contract takes care of the surrogate mother’s post-delivery needs.

Miller is a Senior Communications Officer at Alliance Defending Freedom International, so she should know better.

What’s necessary is not banning surrogate motherhood, nor even heavy regulation of it. What’s necessary are strong regulation, with heavy sanctions for misbehaviors and civil sanctions for egregious mistakes, of the outcomes. Along with that is the necessity of producing quality information that will allow childless families and prospective surrogate mothers to identify reliable and effective facilities—and each other—so as to allow both sides of the surrogacy to have satisfactory, rewarding outcomes.

Banning surrogacy altogether is what would be truly an affront to freedom. It would be an affront—a denial—of the freedom of families and individuals to decide for themselves how they will approach a family problem.

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance”

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Jenna Norton, Program Director of the NIH’s Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, has strongly encouraged, in deed and writings,

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance” to stop President Trump and valorizes those “willing to ‘break the law’ when the law is evil.”
“To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world” and “small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers[.]”

Such acts, in fact, vary from civil disobedience to outright insubordination.

Civil disobedience, though, demands consequences be applied to the civil disobeyer, else the disobedience is just insubordination, or worse—vandalism or sabotage—with no message of value involved. Insubordination requires its own punishment separately from any attached to claimed civil disobedience.

And so: Norton was put on “non-disciplinary” administrative leave as of 2 pm Thursday [13 November].

She claims

I was not given a reason…but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing[.]

Yet the reason, even if not explicitly stated (and that has not been established), seems obvious; certainly it should be, even to the most ardent, blindered Leftist.

Some—the Left—will decry the evident unfairness of such retaliatory behavior by her employer. They will be, of course, badly mistaken, even as they revel in their Precious dudgeon. Individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance are not limited to one direction. Employers are allowed—and correctly so—to take explicitly individualized, person-to-person acts of resistance against those employees politically and socially resisting them. To that end, employers acting to resist insubordination couched in political and social resistance terms are necessarily acting, in part, politically and socially in their resistance to their employees’ misbehavior.

Indeed, the individualized part is mandated by law, and the person-to-person part is simply optimal business practice. The acts by the employer in such cases also are nothing more than enforcement of the inherent nature of the employer-employee relationship and an emphasis of who works for whom.

Whose Inheritance Is It?

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A son wrote to The Moneyist, worried that because he makes so much more than his siblings and freely lives like it he’ll be cut out of his parents’ will. He closed his letter with this paragraph, and Quentin Fottrell seems to have made a meal out the distraction contained in it, instead of giving the short and sweet answer that the question needed.

My siblings don’t make nearly as much as me. They’d say I’m crass or rude for saying that. I’m concerned that my parents are going to strike me from any will/inheritance. If siblings earn different amounts, should that be the primary driver for how much they should get?

Fottrell opened with most of the right answer.

Your parents can divide their estate as they see fit.

Unfortunately, he went on to talk about siblings being differentially poorly- (or well-) off, and so the lesser well-off can receive a larger slice of their parents’ pie. He then proceeded to suggest, over several paragraphs, that the letter-writer’s arrogance and self-importance could well play a role in any parental inheritance decision. Never mind that Fottrell had no evidence in the letter that that played a role, although the letter-writer seems to have made no effort to hide his financial success under a bushel.

Fottrell would have done well to end his response with that opening sentence. He would have done better to add this short bit to that opening: the estate, the inheritance, is the parents’ money and assets and no one else’s. It’s their property to do with as they see fit, and no one else has any claim on it, whether child, parental sibling, or stranger. Parents have no intrinsic duty to leave their money, their assets, to anyone in particular, and they can leave it to no one at all and let the State sort it out.

Full stop.

Doubting NATO’s Utility

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Trump I questioned the utility of NATO and wondered aloud whether the US should continue supporting it/staying a member. In immediate response, some (not enough) European member nations started honoring their promises of some years prior to contribute more to NATO—all of 2% of national GDP at the time. Over the ensuing years, most (though still only 2/3) of the member nations increased their contributions to very nearly meet (a large bump by these) or to meet or exceed those 2%. Trump’s overt disdain and blunt threats resulted in a material strengthening of the alliance.

Recently, the member nations met and agreed to push that contribution commitment to 5% of national GDP, and some nations are meeting that commitment (notably, the eastern and far northern European nations fronting on Russia). Also notably, though, Canada and western European members continue to freeload, and in order to get the agreement at all, the alliance was required to give Spain explicit permission to continue to freeload, despite its strongly growing economy.

Unfortunately, now the alliance is facing this. The headline and subheadline is the short and bitter of it:

NATO Member’s Top Court Considers Whether Saying Men And Women Are Different Is A War Crime
Finland’s Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday about whether quoting the Bible is illegal “hate speech” under its war crimes laws.

Yes, this is one of those far northern members, recently acceded to the alliance. Even so, this is a case of censorship by the nation’s chief prosecutor, unrestrained by either Finland’s President or Prime Minister, despite lower courts having repeatedly cleared the alleged miscreants of any wrong doing.

[Member of Parliament Paivi] Rasanen was first investigated for tweeting a Bible verse in 2019 to criticize Finland’s state church sponsoring a queer sex parade. Three criminal charges against her arose from the investigation, which also resulted in one criminal charge against [Lutheran Bishop Juhana] Pohjola for publishing a booklet Rasanen wrote about the Bible’s teaching on the sexes.

And

Two lower courts cleared Rasanen and Pohjola of all charges, but the prosecutor kept appealing, now to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member’s highest court.

 

This is government censorship, government sexist bigotry, and government demand for political correctness all rolled into one.

If this case results in any form of conviction, then given the spread of censorship and sexist bigotry into the rest of NATO members—most notably, Germany, Netherlands, and UK—then it will be time to consider anew our withdrawal from an alliance too enamored of its political shower appearance to be able to resist the barbarian farther east.

It will be time to stand up a different, more serious mutual defense arrangement involving the Three Seas Initiative nations and the US.