All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
News

Obama administration threatens South Carolina for saving prisoner’s lives

4 Comments

Story here in the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Two unpleasant topics of conversation most of us avoid are the epidemic of HIV/AIDS among prison inmates and a variety of sometimes violent events resulting in transmission of the disease. Some states long ago implemented policies to protect the uninfected part of the prison population while providing exceptional medical treatment and counseling to the infected population.

In South Carolina, it has worked so well since 1998 that there has only been a single transmission of HIV/AIDS to a noninfected prisoner. All that may change, however, thanks to a threat from Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

South Carolina received a letter from the now-infamous Civil Rights Division that the policy of keeping infected inmates at a designated facility, instead of scattered across the state in the general prison population, may unfairly stigmatize infected prisoners. To the Obama political appointees in the Civil Rights Division, this constitutes discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The Justice Department objects to separate living facilities and specialized medical treatment for the HIV/AIDS prison population. Naturally, DOJ has threatened a lawsuit.

[…]South Carolina spends more than $2 million a year helping infected inmates in the very program the DOJ is challenging. “We couldn’t ever hire specialists at all of the facilities spread across the state like we can in the single Columbia facility,” Ozmint told me.

The DOJ is in a lose-lose situation. Even if DOJ wins a lawsuit, sources tell me South Carolina is simply going to cancel all of the special testing, treatment and counseling, thereby saving the state $2 million a year.

This reminds me of the activists who shut down Catholic adoption agencies because they refuse to place children with same-sex couples. They don’t care about helping people, they care about punishing people who disagree with their politically correct biases.

This is the same DOJ that declined to prosecute the Blank Panthers for voter intimidation, remember.

Commentary

Why libertarians should care about the breakdown of the family

1 Comment

Stephen Baskerville explains how the breakdown of marriage leads to bigger government and less liberty.

Excerpt:

Unmarried women and single mothers (the main abortion constituency) are more affluent and better-educated than two decades ago.  They are also more politicized and comprise Obama’s most committed and vocal supporters, having voted for him by 70%.

As with many measures designed to weaken the family, no general public clamor preceded the move to nationalize medicine, apart from a few vocal constituencies.  One of the biggest was single women.  “American voters in general may shy away from ‘radical’ steps such as importing a Canadian-style (health care) system,” the liberal polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner reported some years ago.  “Unmarried women, however, embrace such a powerful step.”

[…]Sadly, many unmarried women live — willingly or not — to some degree in dependency on the state. And for single, middle-class women whose incomes disqualify them for Medicaid, health care is the most expensive cost.

[…]Statistics now reveal that welfare has been a powerful force behind the break-up of the family in low-income families. Now, in the middle class, we see the breakdown coming largely through divorce and the “liberated” lifestyles to which much of it can be attributed. Yet our growing allegiance to an ever-increasing culture of divorce now demands ever-expanding “services,” such as government medicine.

So, public medicine, like all welfare, facilitates family dissolution. And the breakdown of the family in turn creates a constituency pushing for more welfare, fostering a vicious circle of government growth and social decay.  It just so happens that all of this also builds electoral support for the party that enacts it.

Libertarians need to be practical: you need social conservatives and you ought to be actively promoting traditional marriage.

Videos

Jennifer Roback Morse and Michele Bachmann respond to Prop 8 decision

Leave a comment

Here’s Dr. J of the Ruth Institute, first.

The music is a bit loud, but isn’t it fun to SEE her talking? Indeed!

(Her hair looks fine – I don’t see why she thinks that anyone would say anything bad about it)

And here’s Michele Bachmann.

Press release:

District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision last week to overturn a California ballot initiative that prohibited same-sex marriage was an example of “judicial activism at its worse,” according to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

Smith and fellow House Republicans Steve King (Iowa) and Michele Bachmann (Minn.) introduced a resolution this morning disapproving of Vaughn’s ruling. The resolution, according to Smith, has 15 co-sponsors in the House. However, it is uncertain whether it will attract the support of Republican leadership in the lower chamber.

In his decision, Walker ruled that moral objection to gay marriage on the part of California voters was not a rational enough reason to uphold Proposition 8. In addition, Walker wrote that the measure violated Equal Protection laws for homosexuals.

The trio of highly conservative lawmakers insisted today that their opposition to the ruling does not stem from the fact that it benefits the gay community, but rather that it highlights a growing trend of activism from behind the bench. Bachmann said she found the ruling “infuriating.”

“Are we now in the position of giving the judge the decision to decide whether or not the American people are rational when they go to the voting booth and make their wishes known?” she asked. “It certainly seems the answer would be in the negative.”

Too bad the video gets cut off at the very end – I think she was going to say Supreme COURT. I’ll bet you all thought she was just a fiscal conservative, right? But no – she’s really thought things through – and that’s why we like her! Because she’s perfect!