Tag Archives: Socialism

Commentary

Scott Klusendorf confronts a “pro-life” nun who voted for Obama

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Pro-life debater Scott Klusendorf wrote this article on the Pro Life Training web site.

Excerpt:

Nun: If only our students were completely pro-life on all issues.  I am consistently for life, and that’s why I’m voting for Senator Obama.

Me: Sister?

Nun: That’s right, I’m for Obama.  He’s the real pro-life candidate.  Most people focus too much on abortion.  I’m pro-life and care about all life.  So does Obama.

Me: What do you mean people focus too much on abortion?1

Nun: I mean Bush with the war in Iraq has killed so many people there is no way I could vote for someone like Senator McCain, who will do the same thing.  How can any person who cares about life vote for such a man?

Me: Are you suggesting the President unjustly killed innocent people?  If so, how?

Nun: Yes I am!  Think of all those innocent women and children killed in Iraq—over a million of them since we invaded the place six years ago.

Me: Did you say over a million?  How did you come up with that number?

Nun: I heard it someplace.  Besides, war is a pro-life issue like abortion and right now it’s even worse than abortion.

Me: To be worse than abortion, how bad would an unjust war have to be?

Nun: Abortion, war, poverty—they are all bad.

I’m sure you all recognize the tendency of some people to refuse to make judgments like “greater than” and “less than” when they are debating – because to put numbers to different things and admit that one thing is much worse than another (or more likely) would undermine their view.

The fact of the matter is that 30,000 innocent civilians TOTAL being killed in the process of liberating an entire country and deposing a dangerous tyrant, is NOT the same as 1.2 million unborn babies being killed PER YEAR because their parents refuse to be inconvenienced by the consequences of their own  hedonistic behavior.

And not only are the numbers different but the justification for the taking of a life is different in each case, too. Just wars are fought because the loss of civilian lives is not as bad as the failure to restrain a more dangerous threat to peaceful democratic nations. For example, the deaths of innocent civilians in the fire-bombing of Dresden in order to defeat the tyrant Hitler. But in the case of abortion, the justification is just that the selfish pursuit of pleasure of the parents justifies the killing of an innocent unborn child.

I have always been concerned by naive pro-lifers who think that big government socialism would someone be the answer to the problem of what to do with helpless unborn children. “Social justice” they call it. Well “social justice” won the election in 2008, and now we have taxpayer-funded abortions. Why? Because the people who voted to grow the government didn’t want to be inconvenienced with children. But the unborn children never got to vote – they were just too small to count.

Commentary

Do gun-free zones prevent multiple-victim public shootings?

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Article by John Lott in National Review.

Excerpt:

It wasn’t supposed to happen in England, with its very strict gun-control laws. And yet last week, Derrick Bird shot twelve people to death and wounded eleven others in the northwestern county of Cumbria. A headline in the London Times read: “Toughest laws in the world could not stop Cumbria tragedy.”

But surely this was an aberration. Because America has the most guns, multiple-victim public shootings are an American thing, right? No, not at all. Contrary to public perception, Western Europe, most of whose countries have much tougher gun laws than the United States, has experienced many of the worst multiple-victim public shootings. Particularly telling, all the multiple-victim public shootings in Western Europe have occurred in places where civilians are not permitted to carry guns. The same is true in the United States: All the public shootings in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where civilians may not legally bring guns.

The article has a list of MVPSs in Europe. They all occur in gun-free zones, where guns are prohibited by law.

When a government bans guns, the only people who have guns are criminals. And they know that there is no one to stop them when they open fire. That is why violent crime more than doubled in the 4 year period after the UK banned handguns.

News

Feminist wants UK government to provide free IVF

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From the UK Telegraph, an editorial by Theodore Dalrymple. (H/T RuthBlog)

Excerpt:

[The chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Suzi Leather] …has suggested that, henceforth, the clause requiring doctors to take account of the need of a child for a father, when offering in vitro fertilisation to infertile women, should be removed from the law. The idea that fathers are necessary or even desirable in the lives of children is, in the opinion of Ms Leather, too old-fashioned to be entertained any longer.

[…]In Ms Leather’s brave new world, women are to have children merely because they want them, as is their government-given right, irrespective of their ability to bring them up, or who has to pay for them, or the consequences to the children themselves. Men are to be permanently infantilised, their income being in essence pocket money for them to spend on their enjoyments, having no serious responsibilities at all (beyond paying tax). Henceforth, the state will be father to the child, and the father will be child of the state.

This paper from the Heritage Foundation cites a very interesting study.

A seminal British study confirms that a child is safest when his biological parents are married and least safe when his mother is cohabiting with a man other than her husband. Specifically, the family Court Reporter Survey for England and Wales presents concrete evidence that children are 20 to 33 times safer living with their biological married parents than in other family configurations.

I think that if you take taxpayer money from working fathers and pay for unmarried women to have fatherless children, you will get fewer fathers and more fatherless children.