[BlackElk]

Nathan Bedord:

I agree with three of your priorities in this argument. First and foremost, abortion should be prohibited by law as the unjustifiable homicide of an innocent human being. Second, though I believe that birth control is a very bad idea, I agree that it should be legal like many other bad ideas. In a free society, we ought to be free to behave badly so long as no one is harmed. Finally, these issues must be argued on the merits.

I do not agree with you as to alleged overpopulation. Bob434 is right that you can fit the entire human race into Texas although not comfortably. I was born in and lived in Connecticut, a rather small and urban state, until 15 years ago. Driving from courthouse to courthouse in many parts of the state, I spent a lot of time on interstates 95, 84, and 91 and numerous state limited access highways. Five minutes outside any major city, a driver would not see a single human habitation but rather vast areas of trees and forest and farmland. I can only imagine what it is like in less densely populated states.

The lawyer (later a judge) who argued Griswold vs. Connecticut was a friend. His name was Joe Clark. He was one of nine children in a strongly Catholic family and he had nine children of his own. He was a terrific state court judge generally in courts reserved to criminal cases. At the time of Griswold, he was an assistant prosecutor in the court covering criminal matters at New Haven.

Judge Clark encouraged my representation of arrested pro-lifers and often invited me into chambers for private discussions having nothing to do with my actual cases. He told me that we would never overturn Roe vs. Wade permanently until we overturned Griswold vs. Connecticut and its pernicious fiction of a "constitutional right to privacy" the sheer invention of which is the linchpin of both Roe vs. Wade and Griswold vs. Connecticut. No one ever said that the state had an CONSTITUTIONAL OBLIGATION to prohibit birth control and, of course, no such obligation existed even then or since.

Judge Clark died of a heart attack while walking home from the New Haven courthouse where he was serving at the time. Keep him in your prayers if such is your belief as it is mine and was his.

When SCOTUS issued its social revolutionary decision in Griswold, Yale Law Professor Thomas Emerson (all purpose legal utility infielder for the revolutionary left although far old enough to know better) said in the then still conservative New Haven Register something to the effect that, with birth control secured as a "right to privacy," it was time to go for abortion as similarly secured. And so it was that Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton and a slew of similar cases found their way into the courts and have resulted in 60 million murders to date.

I am a Roman Catholic and I believe that birth control is a very bad habit to develop but I concede without reservation that whether other people use it is none of my business. I have enough challenges in my own life and do not need to run the lives of other folks. Forced virtue is not virtue. OTOH, abortion ought to be prohibited in any sane an moral society. We have no right (again, rights are granted to individual persons by God) to take the life of an innocent other. We have been relentlessly been propagandized by the baby killers for at least fifty years now and arguments from "overpopulation" are usually part and parcel of that effort as a rationalization for baby killing.

Granting that you are pro-life, you should not be surprised when your argument for the proposition of "overpopulation" is misconstrued by other pro-lifers. I am familiar enough with your posting history here to know that you are no liberal.

God bless you and yours!

[Bob434]

[[No one ever said that the state had an CONSTITUTIONAL OBLIGATION to prohibit birth control]]

Off topic, but your statement raises a question- judges have the discretion to prevent certain couples from having children- (even though it is a VERY limited cases by case basis, based on certain things like the ability of a couple or single person to raise a child, abuse considerations etc)-

Would decisions like that actually be based on a constitutional obligation to protect those that can’t protect themselves (ie: a child)?

Back on topic- You may think He isn’t a liberal- but He is espousing liberal ideology, and when a ‘conservative’ espouses terrible liberal ideology such as population control, then that person is what we call a rino- Someone who plays both sides of the fence

[[Granting that you are pro-life,]]

how is someone who thinks couples should be prevented from having children a ‘pro-life’ person? That is anti-life in most people’s books- I know he doesn’t call for legislation to prevent life, however, just holding the ideology that there are too many people and that the population should be restricted is a distinctly liberal rallying call

If there was a republican congressperson who thinks abortion is fine, I would not call that person a conservative, but rather a rino- While abortion and population control are ‘sort of’ two different issues, they both tie into one another-

[nathanbedford]

I suppose I should be flattered that I am the subject of debate between fellow conservatives especially since they spelled my name right. For the record, I appreciate Black Elk's support and find my brand of conservatism to be closely aligned with his.

I cannot in good conscious claim innocence for igniting this kerfuffle, as I said in my initial post (post #11), those who raise the issue of overpopulation can anticipate being accused of "Malthusian error." Meaning that I was aware that I would be accused of saying that there were insufficient resources for the population. That is not my argument, has not been my argument, and that is why I noted that the argument about the negative impact of overpopulation on liberty should nevertheless be made even though we would be accused of "Malthusian error."

One additional point about my first post (#11): it talks about "burgeoning" population and the fact that the population has more than doubled in my lifetime. We are talking about progression not about a static number. When my father was born in 1911 there were about 70 million Americans. When I was born in World War II there were about 140 million Americans. The population doubled in my father's lifetime. When my grandson was born around 2000, the population was 300 million. The population more than doubled in my lifetime. Today, the population is over 315 million and growing. In fact, it is growing so fast with out-of-control immigration that we really do not know the number of immigrants or the total number of people.

So we are talking not about a static number but a growing number , indeed, we are talking about a population that doubles nearly every generation. We are not talking about feeding these people, that is a different argument, we are speaking about the impact of a doubling population (that is a geometric growth table!) on liberty.

I ask you, Bob, (1) if is an anti-conservative position to quote an indisputable fact, i.e., the rate of population growth to be doubling in every lifetime? (2) Is it is an anti-conservative action to raise the issue of threats to our liberty. That is not presume that you agree with the threat, you obviously do not believe that generational doubling of our population threatens liberty, but I ask whether merely discussing a potential threat to our liberty such as exponential population growth is somehow to betray oneself as, in your language, a "Rino."?

I cannot believe that you will argue that either (1) or (2) somehow exposes one as being anti-conservative.

Let me skip down the thread, Bob, to your post #54 which I take is part of the cause of our misunderstanding. You quote a portion of my previous post #47 as follows:

[[Yes I am advocating birth control both as a measure of population control]]

What I meant to say was that I advocate birth control as a measure of voluntary population control and I might add I would strenuously oppose mandatory birth control as a method of population control. This is not an after-the-fact correction because the rest of that reply #52 which you do not quote says the following:

I support birth control in principle but not as a matter to be legislated for or against.

I think the meaning of that sentence is perfectly clear, (1) I do not countenance birth control as a subject fit for the state to impose. Equally, (2) I do not think that birth control is a measure which the state should deny. However, (3) I do not think the federal court system, contrary to the unfortunate ruling of Griswold vs. Connecticut which set the predicate for Roe vs. Wade, has the constitutional right to declare state laws prohibiting contribution to be unconstitutional, as unwise as I believe the Connecticut law was. As a matter of historical truth, Connecticut itself did not believe the law was wise and had long ceased enforcing it before the sham case of Griswold vs. Connecticut was concocted and litigated.

I think those three principles are clear and should be understood to be clear. I ask the fair-minded reader of this thread to find a single source of Rino-ism in these three principles.

Let me go out of order to address another poster as well as you, Bob, on another issue.

darrellmaurina, you alluded to me in a post without pinging me and, worse, you disparaged me,

"But it certainly does seem that someone who takes a founder of the Klan for his online avatar may have more problems than an unfortunate avatar."

As to the substance of that remark, I invite you to review my homepage and respond. When you disparage someone without alerting him, thus potentially depriving him of the opportunity to defend himself, you are behaving in an unfair fashion. The unfairness is not just directed at me but at the whole of Free Republic because it degrades our forum and would turn it into nothing more than a a cheap exchange for gossip mongering. It deprives the readers of the other point of view. I like to think we are better than that. I would not have seen your post because I have had eye surgery on Monday and should not be reading now but I cannot let such a miscarriage stand uncorrected. I have, after all, only my reputation on this forum with which to present myself.

In inviting you to review my homepage I invite you you also to review my vanity Ruthie "Remidies" is Preganant! A different view of Gonzolas v. Carhart which I cited above but which evidently has been ignored by my critics of this thread. I repeat the citation because I believe that no one can read this vanity and conclude that I am pro-abortion yet that calumny persists. Will you correct it?

A word to wagglebee: in your post (#70) a you asserted among other things that

"Nobody is suggesting" installing 9 billion people in one state. Actually Bob has done that at least twice on this thread and defended the position. Please see:

27 “Densely populated”? Do you realize you can fit the whole WORLD’S population in just one state? Texas? This country is NOT ‘densely populated”

35 “Densely populated”? Do you realize you can fit the whole WORLD’S population in just one state? Texas? This country is NOT ‘densely populated”

In response to you and to Bob I cite:

Let's Put Everybody into Texas and particularly the following quotation:

Some like to assert that everybody on Earth could be fit into the State of Texas, using logic as follows. The area of Texas is about 262,000 mi2. Dividing this figure by the current human population of 7 billion leaves each person with less than 100 square meters, a small plot the size of a big room about 10 m x 10 m. Sounds plausible enough, right? Without going into the fact that almost half the State is desert, notice we have not allowed for any roads, shopping malls, schools, hospitals, football stadiums, prisons, sewage plants, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, golf courses, parks, and what else? How much land does it take to support a human being?

The numbers are even more scary if we consider the population of the world:

If all the habitable land on Earth were equally distributed among all human beings present on Earth, this is the per capita share of good land per person. Again, however, we have not allowed for any nice amenities such as roads, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, parks, golf courses, etc. Even so, could you live on 2.3 acres?

Efforts have been made to estimate the amount of land needed to sustain an average individual human (link). A person living the lifestyle of an average American requires almost 24 acres, ten times the world per capita share.

Perhaps you can argue with the numbers, perhaps you can argue with the source but the argument is there and to accept that argument is not prima facie evidence of lack of conservative virtue. Mindless parroting of a contrary argument is equally not evidence of conservative bona fides.

The point of my arguments concerning burgeoning population as a non static exponential growth pattern is not so much its Malthusian components, although if we continue this rate of increase they will inevitably come into play, rather it is the effect on liberty. It is in this context that I used as an illustrative example the attempts in New York City to outlaw 16 ounce soda cups and suggested that had not, and would not, be done in a sparsely populated area of the country such as the Dakotas. It should not be necessary to say that the point attempted to be made was not the scarcity of soda pop which is absurd but the absence of liberty in a densely populated area such as New York City, which is very real. It should not be necessary to chase down every absurd reaction on this thread but events have clearly made it unavoidable if one is to rebut what must be regarded as deliberate distortion.

To state my proposition clearly: there is an inverse relationship between liberty and population density.

The relationship is self-evident. If you live in New York and you like light and air coming into your apartment window your rights to that light and air are in direct conflict with some developer (dare I utter the name Donald Trump?) who wants to build a high-rise building adjacent that will cut off your sunlight. Your liberty to keep your sunlight conflicts with the developer's liberty to build on his land-whose liberty will prevail over the other? These are real problems and one side or the other is inescapably going to lose liberty. When people turn, as they inevitably will, to the government to sort these things out the government will intrude as it has done in this case in Wyoming and impose mindless controls because they are bureaucrats and that is what bureaucrats do. But let's stay in New York, developers are now turning to the government (dare I say Donald Trump again?) and propose the government condemn that apartment with the air and light because they want to build a highly profitable office building on those grounds and you, government, will garner higher tax revenues if you condemn the property and sell it to us. So we have the Kelso decision and we will have countless other judicial and bureaucratic decisions chipping away at liberty as a direct result of the density of population. A rancher in sparsely populated Wyoming can not have a harmless pond because the density in New York City demands the creation of an EPA and liberty is soon lost in of all places in Wyoming.

Note: the point is not whether we can feed the people, the point is whether the people will be nourished in liberty?

In order to avoid the dystopia of overpopulation (at whatever absolute level of number constitutes overpopulation) we need not resort to mandatory birth control or to abortion. Both of those regulations would be tyrannical and should be resisted with all our might. It is equally tyrannical to deny the people the right to birth control, although I believe it should have been constitutionally authorized as a legitimate, if manifestly unwise, power of the state . People should be free to practice birth control if they wish and if they do so in sufficient numbers to curb population growth, I applaud their choice.

I regret any inarticulateness on my part which might have given rise to the choleric reactions on this thread. I have tried and tried to set the record straight.

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