Posted on 02/04/2013 12:52:47 PM PST by Biggirl
I am rather a barbarian myself, a confirmed straight, but I do have a doctorate.
Fudgepackers? Scary? Not likely since they would bring a purse to a gunfight. Even Saudi Arabia is not always wrong. Like Ron Paul ...stopped clock ...twice a day, etc.
I did not miss your point about the "reconquista." The southwest is no more being conquered by Latinos than New York City has been conquered by successive waves of Irish, Italians, Eastern European Jews, Puerto Ricans and others. Whatever its political heresies, New York City is the quintessential American city BECAUSE of, not in spite of, its welcome mat for immigrants.
I suspect that you are resentful that the Latino vote is being noticed as the Homecoming Queen and you are feeling increasingly like a wallflower. Poooooooor baby! Demographics are destiny. Low birthrates equal creeping irrelevancy.
Difference between Muslims and Mexicans? Muslims contain a number of very determined and disciplined people who are verrry committed to creating a worldwide caliphate. People who take a casual libertoonian attitude as to 55+ million surgically sliced, diced and hamburgerized babies and to fudgepacking as an allowable way of life are people who probably fail to apprehend the potential of religious solidarity to make a movement viable. Try and find an abortion mill in Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan or in Afghanistan or in Iraq or Iran. Ask the "religious police" for directions but make sure your will is in order and kept in a safe place outside the country where you have decided to be executed.
The Mexicans are more likely attached to a laid back lifestyle of manana. A few beers, some Tequila, some good food, some ethnic music and dance, good companionship, and coherent social views, an opportunity for well-paid work and, perhaps, to start businesses of their own. They have no desire to force you to eat tacos or to strike pinatas or to use castinets or to drink tequila. Genuine libertarians can recognize that this is one of those live and let live situations with the Mexicans as it can never be with the abortionists, the fudgepackers or with those obsessed with establishing a world-wide caliphate under Sharia Law. Mexicans are notably reluctant to hijack American airliners and fly them into our Pentagon or prominent office buildings and to attempt to do the same to the US Capitol.
We can even compromise with the Mexicans by giving them California. Pete Wilson's stupidity permanently ruined previously Republican California as to politics. By making California an independent Republic, we could get rid of Feinstein and Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, a hideously Demonratic legislature, and the quadrennial 50+ electoral votes that, courtesy of Pete Wilson, are now firmly Demonrat, all in one fell swoop. We would get rid of the University of California at Berserkly, one of the country's worst edjumakashunal systems (statewide chain of indoctrination centers, collectively P.S. 666), San Fransicko, Marin County and so many other residential centers of airheads. Hollywood would no longer have any claim to be "American" at all (probably make Hollywood happier too). This scheme might justify strict border enforcement less California voters escape the mess they have made.
You know as well as I do that "demographic trends" are going to continue. Not unlike our European cousins, all too Americans, ethnic or Anglo, have gotten too lazy or indifferent or materialistic or whatever to have children at all or more than one or two. To the extent that we are capable of having children, it is obviously up to each of us to do what seems necessary to conceive them or not as we individually see fit.
OTOH, decisions have consequences. There are folks all over Europe complaining (through their own disappearing birth rates that their nations are being taken over by Muslim immigrants. The childless have little standing to insist on what the demographics of their homelands will look like in the future unless they are voting for, say, England to be under that future caliphate. The Israelis are resisting such trends more robustly and are having some difficulty with the effort.
The only effective way of preserving a recognizably Anglo society here is for our indigenous population to have a lot more children. There are those, starting with the Margaret Sangers, who regard that as a not so "educated" and not so "civilized" solution. I disagree with them.
In any event, there are 11 to 25 million "illegals" here. They aren't going anywhere. People who don't like it can fantasize about a nation without Mexicans other than Mexicans with medical degrees or engineering doctorates or high tech capabilities but that's just fantasy. Practical conservatives will treat Mexicans as quite welcome here and regard them as fellow children of God to be wooed and won.
Now, the hard core of the resentful neo-Know Nothings can help make it impossible to woo the Mexicans and soooooo offend them that they become as Demonratic as the blacks are already. The resentful will then feel good and all morally superior and all but not one Mexican goes back as a result of the misbehavior of the rude nativist boors, and the Mexicans vote Demonrat out of understandable resistance to being treated as less than human by the resentful nativists. This is the very sort of Republican "genius" that guaranteed that generations of Irish and Italians and Poles and Eastern European Jews would vote reflexively Demonrat. Take a swig of that old "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" nonsense. Political effectiveness is NOT about insulting entire groups of people and willfully alienating them. To get Romney comfortable enough to attend a Mexican festival, he would have needed a week of lessons in how to eat a taco.
It is not for nothing that the GOP (except under Reagan) has been persistently known as "the stupid party."
The logistical problems of deporting 11-35 million "illegals" are beyond the capacity of this nation to accomplish. Incarcerating them is certainly not a possibility. Too many people like me, called to jury duty, would vote not guilty. Think how easy it is to convict a Republican politician before a District of Columbia jury and how hard it is to convict Democrat politicians before such a jury. That has a variety of constitutional implications including the ban ion double jeopardy. Trials are not free. Keeping track of those charged is not free. Except as to the most dangerous individuals, it is not practical to incarcerate them pre-trial nor can we afford to.
You are right that it is technically as possible to deport a child who has been brought here as it is to deport the adult who brings he child. As a practical matter, prosecutors will be more comfortable going after he unmarried bandito without kids. Prosecutors still have to deal with our mountain of conventional crimes among those born here: homicides, rape, burglary, robbery, etc. They are not going to allow our native born criminals to run wild so that they can concentrate full time on Juan, Pablo and Maria.
If the AFDC payments to girls in barrios are a bad idea, then such payments to ghetto girls are as well and so are such payments to any girls. Equal protection means that the payments will be made to all who qualify or to none. The 14th Amendment says that national origin will not be a qualification.
The "quality of children????" Lothrop Stoddard, is that you?
As a Catholic, I will do whatever I can NOT to pay for abortions, for abortifacient methods of birth control, sterilizations, sex change operations and other modern horrors that violate the Natural Law. I would far prefer to pay for welfare checks than for the murder of innocent babies. You may have noticed that the American Catholic bishops agree. I would also prefer not to pay for welfare and would prefer a wide variety of conservative alternatives, including workfare, medical savings accounts, actual education in urban public schools, or vouchers or many private educational alternatives, for starters. On that, the bishops do not entirely agree, unfortunately. Abolish welfare and your problem goes away. Isn't THAT the conservative answer?
I would certainly prefer a state of morality in which teen-aged unmarried pregnancy is very rare. First things first, however. First, absolutely abolish abortion as an elective procedure. Second, if birth control of any sort were not available, you might be surprised at how rare teen pregnancy might become. Double that if abortion were not available.
Overpopulation??? Maybe Manhattan is overpopulated but not the USA. Do you have any clue as to just how big this country is?
My wife wants to take over the computer. We can discuss Social Security on another occasion.
God bless you and yours.
You're very welcome. I don't have time to respond to your post in full either right now, but I do want to say that even if discussions get overheated and both of us throw in the tempting snide remark or two (as I surely did in the last post), I've always believed that people can be political opponents without being personal enemies.
Indeed, the thing that's missed most from the Reagan era is that he and those who disagreed with him saw each other as opponents rather than mortal enemies. That's certainly no longer true in Obamerica.
The first is the implication that those who support border enforcement MUST compromise on this issue in fear of alienating Mexican voters can be applied to any issue. For instance, the strong position that you insist Republicans take on social issues alienates millions of voters who might agree with the GOP on fiscal or national security issues but who are moderate or even liberal on social issues. Do you change your views on these social issues for the sake of winning these voters over? No, of course not. Nor should you. Therefore, I fail to see why I and millions of others should compromise on an issue we find important for cultural and economic reasons for the sake of pandering for some votes in the barrio.
This brings us to the issue of Romney, who was far from my ideal candidate (primarily because he tried to be all things to all people, so you never really knew where he stood on ANY issue), but I can guarantee you that if the GOP had nominated somebody who thumped more on social issues like abortion, gays, etc, he would have lost to Obama by an even greater margin than Romney. There are probably more socially moderate + fiscally conservative voters out there to be won than there are Hispanic conservatives. And while we're on the subject, what about all of the advocates of enforcing immigration law that the GOP alienates by pandering to illegals?
The other specious argument is the line that "there are tens of millions of here illegally, the logistics of deporting them all make it impossible." Perhaps that's so. There are millions of petty thefts that go unsolved and unpunished, that doesn't mean that we should support amnesty for thieves. The "you can't possibly catch them all" argument could by applied to any crime while we're at it.
Let's not forget that when discussing illegal immigrants, we are talking about people whose first action in the US, by definition, was breaking the law. Even if somebody doesn't believe in doing something about this for cultural or economic reasons, they should support deportation at least in principle because we're a society of laws.
As for the argument that we must be compassionate to the illegals because they're human and God's children, doesn't the same line of argument apply to Muslims, homosexuals, and other groups that you dehumanize? All you seem to be saying is that your cultural preferences and biases are somehow better than mine. Moreover, usually if people are treated as something less than human, it's because their actions mark them as such. People who trash and vandalize everything in their path and turn our cities into slums don't exactly command the "respect" that they talk so much about. Nor does the libertarian "live and let live" argument apply because cultural issues affect us all, whether it's a matter of simple civic pride or declining property values.
I represented, as an attorney, 1100 people who were arrested INSIDE the abortion mills, who put the mills out of business one day at a time, de-sterilizing instruments, blockading the killing rooms, pouring broken eggs and other contaminants into the suction machines used to kill the babies, and, in the case of shopping center mills or office building mills, generally disrupting all other business operations in such locations, rendering the mills persona non grata with their neighbors and landlords. The clients were charged with felonies such as burglary, felony criminal mischief, resisting arrest by police (sometimes ridiculously charged as assault on police officers). None were convicted of felonies. A handful (less than 30) were convicted of anything, a small number of misdemeanor criminal trespass and more of infractions that were non-criminal and the legal equivalent of parking tickets. A small handful of those convicted of criminal trespass were "incarcerated" for a week or so after conviction in a country club location without locks inside or to the outside world. Paid vacation hanging out with their friends and colleagues courtesy of the taxpayers. Virtually none would sign probation papers or pay any fines or court costs. That was as it should be. They were doing the government's job that the government was too gutless and too Godless to do. We call this an exercise in Natural Law.
To change the platform and views of the Republican Party and turn the clock back to the GOP baby killer days of Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and others would be the suicide of the GOP. I guarantee you that ANY weakening on the issue guarantees that pro-lifers will abandon the party en masse. See how the GOP collapses without its pro-life base.
You don't have to compromise on "cultural and economic" issues you find important. If there is a divorce entered that separates the economic conservatives (if that is what they are) from social conservatives, social conservatives can easily drop affiliation with the GOP, dump the elitist economics (It's "class warfare!!!) approach, lose the political baggage of what FDR used to call the economic royalists, and really work the ghetto and barrio both of which are taken for granted by the Demonrats and despised by the GOP-E and the "cultural and economic" conservatives.
Then the "cultural and economic" conservatives will be left to do what? Try to make a deal with the Demonrats to lower their taxes and eliminate business regulation? Not very likely. Try to convince the Demonrats that they must resist the Hispanic Peril? Not at all likely. Fade into obscurity like the Federalists and Whigs before them, both of which parties died of elitism and greed and of despising ordinary people? Very likely.
That does not mean that genuine economic conservatism will die, just the elitist variety. If capitalism, as explained eloquently by Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, among so many others, is to survive, I cannot emphasize enough that it will depend on the ability and performance of capitalism for poor people who choose to learn it and use it. The Hispanics in Northern Illinois with whom I am familiar are often natural born entrepeneurs. First generation Mexicans strive to take two or three jobs to have economic surplus to start their own businesses, fixing cars, doing construction and rehabilitation work, groceries, restaurants. They are keenly aware of the need for steady employment, good credit and economic performance to gain the trust of bankers and others serving the business community. They want their kids to be utterly fluent in English to compete successfully in the American economy. They understand that capitalism is not a zero sum game. If they win, they will also spend and create other winners. As Milton Friedman wrote, the great thing about capitalism is that no dollar on its way to his hand ever asked if he was a Jew or discriminated against him in any way other than to ask whether he had competently performed so as to EARN that dollar.
Those whose big ambition is to close off the borders and deport 11-25 million Mexican "illegal" immigrants cannot go Democrat. That party will not have them. If the GOP turns against them, then they may a) be discouraged and stay home (as I did regarding Romney for every issue I care about) and weep in their Chateau Laffite Rothschild 1929 or even their Budweisers with no hope of any success on their issue, or b) try to build a third party without much in the way of institutional support from any significant institutions other than a handful of designer foundations and permanently marginalize themselves and their issue, or c) stay in coalition with defense conservatives, military interventionists, pro-lifers, pro-family (i.e., anti-perversion), education reformers, gun folks, the seriously and conservatively religious, and maybe get border closure and enforcement in the future but NOT deportations, but they will also have to agree to stop alienating Hispanics. I think that c) is the only sensible alternative but, hey, that's just me.
Pro-aborts are heavily invested in the Demonrat Party. As a practical matter, they aren't about to join the GOP as a group. They have fully drunk the Demon-flavored Kool Aid. They are also immoral servants of the actual Demons and respectable folks of religious conviction rightfully will NOT ally with them. Likewise the lavender queens. Economic conservatives who are economically literate will not want alliances with environmental whackos or with much of today's AFL-CIO or with teachers' unions at any level, or most college professors (at least as an interest group), feminazis are taboo. Many other groups can be added.
Our political system has matured and the lines separating the coalitions are hardening. You and I may disagree but, while the Demonrats have a BIG head start over the GOP with the poor, they have delivered little that is worthwhile. The poor should not be satisfied with a welfare check, a housing subsidy, medical "access," in exchange for which they are to sit down and shut up and get out of the way of their affluent white "betters" who run the Demonrat Party from a verrrry upper, upper, middle class vantage point. "Give the boy a penny" is like "Jobs Available, No Irish (or Mexicans?) need apply" Neither provides long term satisfaction to poor folks. The blacks and Hispanics are the only sizable blocks of voters who can be moved to the GOP from the Demonrat coalition.
A new socially conservative, economically "moderate" coalition expressed as a political party has a potentially great future. A "culturally and economically" conservative GOP has no future. That is especially true when you recognize that "cultural conservatism" has little to do with nationalities of origin or ancestry or even primary language group and everything to do with MORAL conservatism. Therefore, you are really talking about "economic conservatives."
Your third paragraph is just wrong, wall to wall. Romney is a poster boy for spoiled rich brat Republicans of inherited wealth. He did not get ambushed by Demonrats putting those 47% remarks in his mouth. It was Jimmuh Cahtuh's grandson who anonymously attended a "private" Romney fundraiser for the GOP-E where Romney felt he could be himself. Once so convincingly convicted of despising so many Americans out of his own mouth, Romney failed to get 50% + 1 out of the remaining 53%. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! And let's face it, that remaining 50% included some lavender queens, some environmental whackos, more than some kill the babies activists, some additional feminazis; some "peace" activists, some communists, some Islamofanatics, some Hollywierd activists, some anti-God activists, etc. Of curse, there is considerable overlap but there are also substantial numbers of the 53% who fit into one or more of these categories.
Romney is and always has been a two-faced political cripple. He is a serial liar whose sole political principle is a sense of entitlement to be POTUS to avenge his father's dashed dreams. He is crippled by HIS ancestry since George Romney was his father and Lenore Romney was his mother. Both were pro-aborts, inter alia, BEFORE Roe vs. Wade despite their vaunted Mormonism.
Some of us who are not Mormon might have voted for Mittler if he had been a better Mormon. Many would not vote for him because of the establishmentarian stench and accompanying cluelessness on sooooo many issues that matter. Do you remember even one occasion when Mittler admitted that Romneycare was a grave mistake and the inspiration for national Obozocare? Neither do I.
If Mittler is a poster boy for "economic conservatism," what would an economic liberal look like? Harvard Law School or not, neither Mittler nor Obozo have a clue as to the Constitution either. Both attacked the Catholic (and other pro-life churches) Church with their abominable "medical care" programs, forcing employers to pay for abortion on demand, abortifacient "birth control," other forms of birth control, late term abortions, sterilizations and "sex change" operations. Assuming that the gummint has any business sticking its infernal and inefficient nose into "medical care" in the first place, maybe the gummint can limit its scope to actual medical [problems and not to eccentric lifestyle faux care. No death panels and no "transgender surgeries" or baby killing or other morally barbarian abominations. Both are gun grabbers. Both are reprehensible on just about every issue that counts other than the border.
That we cannot track down ALL of the "illegals" is not a real concern of mine. I am not an egalitarian. I don't want ANY of them tracked down other than those who have committed real crimes which does not include petty theft, or border crossing without one's busybody gummint-issued "papers," or any "crime" reasonably diagnosed as a result of corrupt Mexican national gummint framing non-favored people. I would limit trackdowns to respectably convicted violent criminals and a few other types of convictions.
We have more than enough home grown abortionists, and more than enough home grown lavender queens, and we might want to trade them in to, oh, Finland for upstanding folks who might be yearning for temperate weather. We should trade any suspected Islamoterrorists to Saudi Arabia for a few barrels of oil each.
In Europe, for instance, the focus of the political right wing is not on moral issues nor even on economics, but on culture. This culture is defined by language, ethnicity, shared history, shared folklore, etc. In the US, we don't have quite the same foundation for this, but we can still speak of some people who can culturally assimilate (speak English, adapt to the general ethos and values of the society rather than living and acting as though they're still in Nairobi or Guadalajara) and other who can't or won't.
I would say that I'm a cultural conservative first, a fiscal conservative a distant second (I deviate from libertarians on trade issues), while moral conservatism isn't even on my radar screen. Why? Not because I condone immorality, but because I don't believe that most of the supposed hot-button moral issues people talk about are the province of the State. I think that most people would agree that cheating on a spouse is a despicable thing to do. That being said, any Presidential candidate who makes stopping adultery the centerpiece of his campaign would be laughed off the podium, and rightly so. I apply the same reasoning to drug use and homosexuality. I don't particularly relish the company of drug addicts or homosexuals, but that doesn't mean that I don't recognize how utterly contrary to the spirit of personal liberty our (failed and hypocritical) "war on drugs" or anti-sodomy laws were.
As for abortion, the fact is that while most Americans don't support no questions asked abortions and (rightly) question the Constitutional legitimacy of Roe v. Wade, most voters, especially women, would not support an outright ban on the procedure. Now, I'm not saying that this means you or anyone else have to compromise your views on the issue to pander for votes, just recognize the fact that a hardline stance on abortion scares away many people with conservative views on other issues just as my views on immigration may scare away some of your beloved Hispanic voters.
I would also add that the Catholic position of opposing BOTH pre-conception both control and abortion is self-contradictory. The fact is that abortions are fairly rare among middle class Americans and common among the lower classes, especially among blacks. This isn't because middle class white kids have less sex than lower class black kids, it's because they are more likely to have enough foresight to prevent pregnancy. Premarital sex, including teenage sex, has and always will be with us, it won't be legislated or preached away. Within the boundaries of this fact, our alternatives are a) millions of pregnant single teen mothers with little support and no economic prospects for themselves or their children, b) more abortions or c) pre-conception birth control. By preaching against c, the more hardline members of the Catholic Church give us a), and, ironically, more of b) instead.
I also can't understand why you insist that all fiscal conservatives are either trust fund brats or corporate fat cats. I'm neither - my family wasn't wealthy, and I'm not wealthy either. I simply recognize that "soak the rich" economic policy will probably harm me in the long run more than it harms the fat cats. They'll just move their wealth (and businesses) overseas and lay people off here to offset the burden. Directly or indirectly, the fat cats pay the salaries of people like me, and it's in my interest that they keep as much of their wealth to spend and invest here rather than abroad or in hidden accounts to avoid the IRS or the SEC.
In an earlier post, you lumped libertarian-leaning fiscal conservatives in with sleazes like Karl Rove as "GOP-E". Rove, and indeed the entire Bush administration, represented one of the worst instances of the corporate cronyism and expansion of government power that are anathema to fiscal conservatives. If most of the same policies were carried out by Democrats, few would notice the difference.
Incidentally, I found it supremely ironic that people who were all gaga for Bush found Romney unacceptable because he was "rich," "spoiled," and a member of "the elite." Bush was hardly a character out of a Horatio Alger novel, but none of the his populist supporters ever held his blue blood or family dynasty against him - this in spite of the fact that Mitt Romney at least earned some of his wealth himself, as opposed to having it all handed to him. So when it comes to matter of elitism, perception usually trumps reality.
I have a far greater affinity for those of whatever faith (including Islam) or none in other countries or in our country who, upon mature reflection, earnestly yearn to become Americans or remain such because they accept the principles of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek than I have for most Ivy League professors, Marxist activists, most public school teachers, most government bureaucrats, lavender queens, child molesters, or most leaders of today's British Tory Party. Europe is useless and (other than the Vatican and a few small satrapies like Andorra and Monaco) dead and it died a long time ago. It is not worth our attention other than the tiny fraction that survives. As Robert Taft the Elder observed shortly after World War II, Europe had its chance for freedom and rejected it and it is better to concentrate our concerns and support on those nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America which have neither yet had their opportunity for freedom nor rejected it.
Conforming oneself to or being assimilated by the "general ethos and values" of the increasingly degenerate and formerly civilized and moral nations of the West is not a very good idea.
In the so-called Third World, we will find a high percentage of people who resist the Planned Barrenhood culture of murder for convenience, who resist sexual perversion, maintain traditional family standards and so forth. To the extent that the United States has been seen as sliding away from traditional morality in favor of devil take the hindmost (and a lot more) "morality" of homicidal convenience.
It may well be the primary "moral" standard of our fastidious wind tunnel upper classes and upper middle classes for that matter, that Suzie not become pregnant out of wedlock but the traditional standard is that a young man who is not prepared to take personal responsibility for the well-being of the young woman who has captured his fancy, has no business using her like a hotel room and moving along to further conquests. ("Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get." --- Forrest Gump) is not an ideal standard for harvesting substantial members of the opposite sex before accepting (if ever) well, marriage. The "morality" that says grab all you can get but, whatever you do, avoid pregnancy at all costs is NOT morality but the utilization of others as material objects.
In the event that you have daughters, are you hoping that they have as much sex as young men can talk them into so long as pregnancy does not result or are you soooooo old-fashioned as to care about the intentions of the young men whom they encounter and for whom they develop affection? I prefer to cop the second attitude.
In the event that the condom or other form of birth control "fails," do you prefer abortion or childbirth? Do appearances trump reality on your moral scale?
No presidential candidate is likely to focus a campaign on effectively prohibiting adultery. Like homosexuality carried out even in secret, adultery is not a social asset nor an asset to the practitioners. Our nation would be a far better place with a societal consensus that those and abortion, above all, disappear from our land by popular demand (vox populi). We might also benefit from men and women (preferably married to one another learned to make love to one another again rather than to inanimate latex. And that IUDs and "Morning After" pills and other mechanical or chemical abortifacients be recognized for what they are and prohibited accordingly.
Marxists have an antipathy to the idea of private property rights. Should the GOP or conservatives pander to Marxist voters, especially in constituencies where they exist in substantial numbers, by encouraging jury nullification in cases of property crimes? Marxists may well view "liberating" the property of others for their own use to be a basic human right. Why should they not have their fantasies pandered to as much as the feminazi fantasies are catered to by the entire Demonrat Party and by the GOP-E?
People who want to preserve their right or the right of others to kill innocent babies ought to scare all of us and not be pandered to. I would not pander to them if I were the last pro-lifer in America. I fail to see why support for baby-killing is not a far surer ground for exclusion from this society than speaking Spanish (or Ukrainian or Chinese, etc.), not having paid homage to the immigration bureaucrat gods, and not assimilating to the currently degenerating and infernal "ethos and values" of Kardashian/ Sheen/ Lohan Nation.
I gotta go right now but will be back for Round 2 in response to your post later tonight.
May God bless you and yours!
It is good to reject the free trade policies that are destroying (with a major assist from Obozo's other policies) our economy.
I fail to understand how the anus can be legitimately regarded as a sexual organ. Or how so pretending has anything to do with personal liberty. "Gay" or "straight(???)" or otherwise. I know that I am rather old-fashioned. Just the kind of guy I am. I am not alone.
Killing other human beings to satisfy one's convenience is not a liberty interest either whatever the twisted organ that passed for the brain of Herod Blackmun may have hallucinated. Robbing banks is not a liberty interest.
The Catholic Church forbids abortion as the killing of an innocent human being. It views a very tiny handful of such procedures as being morally acceptable where, otherwise, both the mother and the infant are sure to die (tubal pregnancies and such) under what is called the law of double effect. You save the mother who is the only savable person in that scenario. The unborn dies as a necessary by-product but had absolutely no chance of survival in either event. This does not include Muffy claiming that, unless she gets that abortion she demands, she will kill herself or any number of other ridiculous scenarios meant to open up gaps through which tractor trailer loads of dead babies may be driven. Bad cases ought not to be allowed to make bad law.
Now you claim that Catholic hardliners give us more teen pregnancies and more abortions. That reflects your apparent view (and Planned Barrenhood's) that job #1 is preventing fertility among poor single girls, among blacks, among Hispanics, and defining "birth control" as including abortion. OTOH, the Catholic Church views sexuality as a gift of God to be exercised properly only within marriage and having two functions to which it must always be open: the unitive and the procreative (see Paul VI's Encyclical Humanae Vitae). I suspect that the Church is silent as to the use of birth control (actual contraceptives not abortion or abortifacients) outside of marriage. First, the Church is not in the business of advising those engaged in sex outside of marriage as to how they may best do so, nor how to exercise the unitive aspect of sexuality so as to strengthen their illicit relationships, but the illicit nature of such relationships does not justify the further and far more monstrous evil of murdering any resultant child. Second, some of us in the pews believe that the use of effective means of birth control by those in illicit relationships might hasten the destruction of illicit relationships (See John Paul II, The Theology of the Body). The church's teachings on sex, birth control, etc., are a tad more complex and textured than: The pope spoke about sex today and again he said NO!
Ah, but do the Church's teachings not interfere with our vaunted freedoms and liberties? Well, first, we draft no one into our ranks. We prevent no one from leaving. We recognize another gift of God called free will which allows each of us to decide individually on matters like contraception and to be held responsible, not by us but by God, for unforgiven transgressions. THAT (the eternal disposition of each soul) is what is beyond the competence of the state.
It is easily within the competence of the state to restrain legally any number of exercises of free will that involve sexuality. We normally restrain people removing their bathing suits to show off on public beaches where families are present (not that public nudity is very advisable for most of us anyhow if we are REALLY trying to show off). Few (although some) are so motivated by the imagined profound commitment that if it feels good do it, as to deny the state the weapons to outlaw prostitution for reasons of public health or morals. Few would deny the state the right to prohibit sexual access to children or young adolescents.
If anyone wants to raise the question of that (smaller than you may imagine) number of priests who have sexually abused children, I think that if the state restored the right of the Church to sentence them to be burned at the stake, that problem would evaporate rapidly. Since most of the pervs/perps are homosexuals, the left will be appalled but so what? The perv/perp abuser who is burned at the stake will not offend again.
What is "hypocritical" about the war on drugs or anti-sodomy legislation?
Your post is in many ways the perfect illustration of the concept of "demoralization." Teen sex will always be with us. Therefore you suggest that we not try to stop it at all. Just provide birth control and all will be well. Or that abortion is going to continue to be legal and common. Therefore don't fight it. Contraception is practically the paramount human right. We just cannot do ANYTHING about it or so the de-moralizerswith such attitudes about the Soviet Union and communism? Should he have been "realistic" since, after all, the USSR had been in existence for nearly 64 years and showed no likelihood of collapsing? Or is it a good thing that his policy vis-a-vis the USSR was "We win. They lose." Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft and an army of GOP-E sellouts were, no doubt, appalled at Ronaldus Maximus's obvious naivete and country bumpkin simplicity. Dwight Eisenhower would have agreed but he was dead. John (Did you know he served in Vietnam?) Kerry probably had a full scale nervous breakdown at threats to his idols. Jimmuh Peanut, Slick Willie and Obozo were no doubt fleeing for the exits in terror. Nonetheless, We won. They lost. You don't win if you don't fight.
Finally, the GOP-E. Libertarian leaning "fiscal conservatives" are GOP-E because they do not want to fight against abortion, sexual perversion posing as "marriage," in favor of guns (because whatever their ideology, most are lifestyle leftists who are not Marxists), for a strong military (same reason) and they have no use for tradition and for traditional morality.
Mittler is not GOP-E just because he is rich. Pooling money with other children of privilege to buy factories, sell their equipment to the Third World and/or send the jobs to the Third World to suck the lifeblood out of the American factory workers and pad that all important corporate bottom line by paying nine-year-olds in Bangladesh 10 cents an hour to beat the private sector unions into submission and impoverish their members is GOP-E behavior. Mittler is a proven gun grabber, a lifelong pro-abort (who came to Jesus on abortion only for last year's campaign), a governor who personally shoved "gay""marriage" down the throat of the Commonwealth of Taxachusetts by going far beyond the court decision and, without authority, ORDERING town clerks to immediately issue marriage certificates for lavenders or else because Mittler said so, A man with a powerful preferential option for the wealthy, a man who repeatedly denied voting for Reagan, a man who voted for Tsongas, a man who, like his family, has been devoid of military experience, George Romney's son, and, ummm, a rich, spoiled brat. He is also the father of Romneycare upon which Obozocare and its total support of abortion and persecution of the Catholic Church is based.
I was thoroughly fed up with Poppy Bush. I did not want Dubya to be nominated in 2000. Dubya created a megabuck group to buy the nomination just like Mitt;er did last year. All that having been said, Dubya appointed two SCOTUS justices who seem likely to protect us in most circumstances. When he tried to appoint Harriet Myers and conservatives erupted against her apparent wimpy lack of ideology (an old GOP-E tradition in SCOTUS nominees), Dubya pulled her nomination. Dubya refused to allow his father's near treasonous crowd of foreign policy gurus near his administration. While both Dubya and Mittler had elite fathers to be quite wary of, Mittler is a chip off the old block and Dubya is not.
I would love to see Dubya's Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, criminally investigated, indicted, tried, jailed for the max for the cronyism known as TARP. In fact, I have a little list of elitists from both parties who need this treatment for the good of the country and as an example to others. If someone could arrange for the same treatment of Rove for any reason, I would be delighted.
What unites the GOP-E with the "libertarian leaning fiscal conservatives" is their mutual utter obsession with money to the exclusion of all else.
I'm curious as to which of Bush 41's foreign policies you consider "borderline treasonous." If you were to suggest his trade policy with China, I might agree, except for the fact that he wasn't unique on this count. His son's trade policies with China were very much the same.
If you're referring to the fact that Bush was lukewarm in his support of Israel and that he didn't go far enough with Iraq and other "rogue" mideast states, you ignore the fact that his foreign policy team was basically from the same ideological school as much of Reagan's. Caspar Weinberger and Lawrence Eagleburger weren't particularly concerned for Israel either, and both were critics of the second Gulf War and much of Bush the younger's foreign policy. So if anything, Bush the elder's "realist" Defense and State Department is closer to Reagan's views than the neoconservatives who surrounded George W. The Ron Paulites are wrong to claim Reagan's foreign policy mantle as theirs, but so are the neoconservatives. Realists like Weinberger, Eagleburger, and later James Baker represented a sane middle ground without the loopiness of the Paulites or the hidden agendas of the neoconservatives.
Returning to the moral issues, my remarks about the war on drugs being hypocritical had to do with the fact that the same people who support Draconian drug laws are often the same ones who coddle alcohol and (especially) big tobacco. If either public health or morality were their motives, they would be as opposed, if not more so, to alcohol and tobacco as to marijuana. The fact that they aren't marks them as either mindless or as having some hidden agenda (such as helping big tobacco, alcohol distributors, and other "approved" drug dealers corner the vice market, so to speak).
If a person has the right to destroy his lungs and bronchi with tobacco and his brain with alcohol (not to mention all the collateral damage that alcoholics cause society), he should have the same right to do so with THC or even "hard drugs." And if he doesn't, he shouldn't have the legal right to do so with alcohol either. There lies the hypocrisy.
This brings us back to the role of the state in sexual morality. You present arguments as to why morally and socially, promiscuous sexuality, particularly among teenagers, is not a good thing. I'm not disagreeing. Where I disagree is the question of how it's the domain of the government, particularly the Federal government, to deal with this matter. I return to the example I gave earlier - we both probably agree that adultery is wrong and bad for families and society. But if somebody ran for President with a platform of stopping adultery, my first question would be what exactly could the executive branch of the Federal government do about adultery that is within its constitutional rights? To me, that's why people like Santorum who make moral issues the centerpiece of their campaigns seem like fools - not because I disagree with them on the fact that sexual immorality is undesirable, but rather because there isn't much that they can legally do about it, and if they could, the cure would be worse than the disease (as we learned with Prohibition but haven't learned yet with the War on Drugs).
You may say that expansion of Federal powers is a small price to pay for stopping abortions or other immoralities. I would argue that a government given the power to ban something also has the power to make it mandatory, so be careful of what you wish for. A realistic way of dealing with the issue is continuing to fight Roe vs. Wade because regardless of how one feels about abortion, it is an undeniable intrusion of the Federal Government upon states rights. With RvW overturned, the net result would probably be abortion remaining legal in some states, illegal in others, and legal but restricted in the balance. That still should be preferable to what we have now, and preferable to an expansion of Federal power that allows Washington to decide what procedures should be legal or illegal at all to begin with.
Concerning the issue of the Church's teachings on contraception, abortion, or anything else, what it choses to teach is fine because, as you note, being a member of the Catholic Church is entirely voluntary. However, when religious teachings, regardless of faith or origin, become public policy, they are no longer voluntary matters of private affiliation. You can't defend moral teachings on the grounds of private affiliation when their policy implementations are quite public and obligatory. Moreover, these implementations often backfire and give the opposite of their intended results (as my example of making contraception less readily available actually makes abortions more common).
As to the difference between libertarians/fiscal conservatives and the GOP establishment, one of the issues you highlight is 2d amendment rights. Libertarians are wrong on trade and immigration (as is the Republican mainstream), but one issue they are right and uncompromising on is the right to keep and bear arms. I don't know where you're perception that libertarians are weak on the 2d amendment comes from.
The fact that both libertarian fiscal conservatives and Rove-type GOP establishment "care about money" is not particularly informative. The first "care about money" earned in a free market, the second, as exemplified by TARP, cares about money earned by taking it from (middle class) Peter to pay (wealthy) Paul, either through bailouts or crony sweetheart contracts. There is a world of difference between companies making money in an open market and a company making money because the Vice President of the US happened to sit on its board of directors. The same mindset that lead to the nomination of a family friend with zero qualification for SCOTUS (Harriet Meiers) is the mindset that gave us TARP and windfall bailouts/contracts to various favored corporations.
Ron Paul served in the Air Force, so I guess his head is on the chopping block, too.
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