Abortion Ambivalence

The abortion issue is one where I am firmly in the undecided camp. Not because I disagree with either side but because I agree with both.

The Libertarian streak in me bristles at the thought that the state should control what a woman can and cannot do with their own bodies when it comes to having babies. What could be a more intrinsic and natural right than the right to decide one’s own reproduction? So a part of me agrees that a woman should have an absolute right to abort a fetus if she so chooses to do so — it’s her body. And there are ancillary arguments that are not without weight as well: 1) that if abortions aren’t legal and carried out by licensed doctors, they will be done anyway but by quacks with potentially fatal results for the woman, and 2) that if the pregnant woman is poor and without material support from either a husband or a family or both, by forcing the woman to have the baby, you are condemning her to a financially precarious and very difficult life.

But there’s the other part of me that cannot deny that killing a fetus is to some degree, inescapably, murder. To deny that is simply that — you’re just in denial. So if you endorse legal abortions, there is no doubt in my mind that you are also endorsing murder, and that of completely innocent, albeit still unborn, infants. And to make matters even more egregious, you are doing this murder for what reason? Really, just for the mere convenience of the woman — she just decides that having a baby is not something she wants to do right now because, for whatever reason, it is inconvenient. There you have it — murder for convenience. How do you square that one? No one can.

In fact, I think even young women who wholeheartedly endorse the Free-Choice point of view must know in their heart of hearts, having had an abortion, that they have killed an infant, and that must be a dreadful passing thought and a cross to bear. But even worse, the woman who has abortions but then goes all the way through her child-bearing years without having had children, and then, when it’s too late, wants to have children, only to realize the door is now closed for that option, so she has murdered the children she could have had, but now will have none. Dreadful.

So I am firmly in the undecided camp because both arguments seem compelling to me, which leaves me in nowheresville. But the one thing I do think might be a better solution than what we have now is a different approach to legal abortion. Right now, Roe v. Wade makes abortion legal throughout the entire United States, even though there are states where the Pro-Lifers are clearly in the majority, so you are forcing those people to live under a form of government that they may despise — a highly unrepresentative situation, which goes against all of our traditions of democratic government. One can see why states like that could engender so much animosity that you end up with abortion clinic bombings and murders, as there are many fanatics on the Pro-Life side that believe they are doing god’s work by such acts.

Therefore, what I think would be a better solution than what we have now — and certainly one more in sync with representative and therefore democratic government — would be if the abortion issue were decided by each state, not by the federal government. Fanatics on both side of the argument would then have the choice to live in a state whose abortion policy they agreed with, and since a good many states would certainly remain Free-Choice states, women who found themselves in Prof-Life states but wanted an abortion could always get a legal and medically sound one simply by travelling to one of the Free-Choice states to have it.

This alternative approach to legal abortion would go a long way toward defusing acrimony around this issue simply because a larger percentage of the population would be living under a state government whose abortion policy they agree with.

State by state voter breakdown on abortion

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The Big Slur

The Democrats — the party of the big slur. Surprising how many people fall for this kind of thing. Mostly the young and the gullible. But it’s all very consistent with their fake news media — just more slurs. I must admit, they have a gift for it. But it definitely leaves an icky residue on them. And it’s very transparent if you have any judgment at all.

Mind you, both parties indulge in slurring their opponents, but then again I think the Democrats are better at it, or is it that’s all they have left? The party of Bobby Kennedy used to be a party of principles, but now it’s the party of sleazy character assassination. He must be turning over in his grave.

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Slander in Politics

Now we see how low the Dems will go to slander the opposition. Scumbags really, but very creative — a 35-year-old slander that no one can either prove or disprove. It’s a perfect slander for taking down an honorable man. I suppose if you have bankrupt ideas policy wise, slander is the only alternative. But it has made a lot of people very angry to watch an honorable man like Brett Kavanaugh get skewered by sleazy politicians.

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Slimy Liberals

Liberals have long used such slurs as racist, homophobic, sexist, religious bigot, etc. — the entire arsenal of political correctness — but the new and explosive one is the sexual misconduct slur. It’s another arrow in the Left’s quiver for destroying their opposition, and the public has been totally primed for this new type of mud slinging by the truly horrific cases of actual sexual predators in some very high-profile cases.

So this new slur is a very potent one, even when used for incidents that would ordinarily pass as less than noteworthy, even harmless — certainly nowhere near blameworthy enough to destroy a man’s reputation and even his livelihood, and yet that’s exactly the intent despite having little or no justification. But the point is the sexual-misconduct slur, even when unjustified, works very nicely to skewer the targeted — and now hapless — political opponent.

Yet it raises the issue, who is really slimier here: the Left-winger exploiting such a baseless and therefore foul accusation or the accused? I think we all know the answer to that one.

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Water Towers and WTC

watertowersandwtc

Manhattan, A Photographer’s Journey by Henry Barnard

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If you buy this photograph, I will be sending you an email in a day or two with a link to its JPG file. You will then download the file into your computer in its Download or Picture folder or whichever folder you choose. You can use it on your PC as you will, just to look at now and then or as a screen saver after you configure your computer to use it as such. Up to you.

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Anti-Trump Lunatics

So we’ve had the silly Russian-collusion allegation, the porn star slur, now the trumped up (there, I said it) illegal campaign finance charge — and that for a candidate, get this, who paid for most of his own campaign himself. But I think the anti-Trump lunatics should go all in, and bring up all Trump’s unpaid parking tickets. Certainly that at least must be a reasonable basis for impeachment, is it not!?

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Perspective

Liberals live in a “what if” world; conservatives in a “what is” one — never shall the two worlds meet.

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Is the Democratic Party Coming Apart?

The big political story in the United States is becoming less and less about the various bogus political attacks against Trump, and more and more about the splintering of the Democratic Party into two mutually distinct and potentially incompatible camps — the traditional Democrats (who have held power) and the so-called “progressive” wing of the party whose members tout themselves as “socialists”. The fissure between the two groups is growing larger and larger, to the point where one might conjecture a complete rupture of the party where the progressives break off to form their own new party.

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Everyone’s a Racist

This is what you get when the Democrats call everyone a racist. Where is the press calling out this type of liberal demagoguery? Instead of being critical of it, they endorse it — everyone’s a racist, don’t you know. Pathetic. The liberal press and truth don’t have much in common anymore — they are just preaching an ideology. You can see where the concept of “fake news” comes from — journalists as advocates for political correctness.

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Iago in the White House

The only news here is that there is a mole in the White House (WH) pretending to be one thing when he’s really something else, while thinking that he knows better than the president. In other words, a real scumbag, like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello — a totally dishonorable person and liar with malicious intent. And then you have the New York Times (NYT) eager to pick up his droppings so that they can smear Trump and peddle more newspapers — a new low for the NYT. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with Trump, but it reveals boatloads about the NYT and about one despicable person in the WH — whoever that might be. Bottom line: the WH has an Iago on staff — that’s the news here.

Actually, if you think at all critically about this situation, it is not particularly noteworthy that there is at least one Iago on the WH staff, as the WH staff totals 450 people assisting the president, a large number. In fact, if there were only one Iago out of the 450, that would be remarkable.

What we have here is yet another case of an unelected person working in government who thinks he has a right to assert his particular views and agenda. It seems the federal government is filled with these people, not just career civil servants but even appointees by the party in power as well — what are being called the “deep state”. Unfortunately, the concept is demonstrating some validity.

But perhaps the true takeaway from all of this should be that it is naive to assume individuals can completely divorce themselves from their own unaligned political views once they join the government — they may very well not, and so it is foolhardy to assume they always will.

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