The Death Penalty Challenge

A lot of people who are in favor of abortion on demand like to point out that a lot of pro-life people are also in favor of the death penalty – to them, this is rank hypocrisy. After all, in their view, killing is killing and if you’re against it in one case you must be against it in all cases. This is specious reasoning, of course – not everything fits into a neat, little box. There is a difference between killing someone in order to steal their money and killing someone who is about to kill you in order to steal your money.
In light of the recent murder of a pregnant woman and the removal of her unborn child, Jonah Goldberg over at NRO’s The Corner issues a bit of a challenge to the anti-death penalty people (all so many of whom are also “pro-choice” on the subject of abortion):

Assuming that there is no doubt about the identity of the murderers involved in the baby-snatching case and the evidence is overwhelming, which it already seems to be, I would very much like the anti-death penalty crowd to take up this case. It’s all very easy to talk about the problems with the death penalty in the “hard” cases — i.e. cases where there’s some arguable room for doubt about the guilt of the convicted.
But if you’re going to say the death penalty is always and everywhere wrong, you must take the hard cases too. You must defend the right to life of the people who do horrible things like this. And I suspect that will be very, very hard to do in this case.

As it is, I’m an opponent of the death penalty (and, of course, staunchly pro-life), but I also see no moral inconsistency in people who are in favor of the death penalty and opposed to abortion; because killing isn’t always just killing, sometimes it is the execution of pure justice. In the years since I changed my opinion on the death penalty from in favor to being opposed, I have pointed out to the people in the anti-death penalty movement that they are going about it all wrong: their problem is that they try to generate sympathy for the condemned and/or cast doubt upon are entire judicial process.

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Winds of Change in the Gay Rights Movement?

La Shawn Barber bring to our attention this New York Times article (registration required) regarding the gay rights movement and gay marriage:

The leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, at a meeting last weekend in Las Vegas, concluded that the group must bow to political reality and moderate its message and its goals. One official said the group would consider supporting President Bushís efforts to privatize Social Security partly in exchange for the right of gay partners to receive benefits under the program.

Ms. Barber is still a bit gloomy about the overall outlook – pointing out that a society which has to debate whether or not two men should be allowed to marry is a bit far down the road to perdition; I look at it in a more positive light, however. My view has long been that the gay rights movement strayed from the goal of greater tolerance of homosexuality and became a movement at war with western civilization and it’s Judeo-Christian roots. In short, they went from wanting the very American thing of being left alone to do what they please in private to trying to enforce the notion on everyone else that there was no moral difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Over the years I warned gay friends and people I argued with in the gay rights community that this was a shortcut to a massive backlash against the very concept of gay rights. The votes this past November 2nd vindicated me on this – the overwhelming victory in 11 States, some of which also voted for Kerry, for anti-gay marriage proposals clearly shows that the American people hold that there is a moral difference and that it must be maintained in law and custom. It seems that some in the gay rights community are also coming to this realisation. They are also coming to realise, it would seem, that their real friends are among the conservatives who prize individual liberty, rather than among the leftwing statists who were only cruelly using gay Americans as a whip to flog the United States in general and Christians in particular.

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Teen Sexual Activity Declines

For years now we’ve had the debate about what is best for the kids – to teach them how to have sex and use contraception, or whether to teach them not to have sex at all until they are mature enough to handle the consequences. For the former, the mantra has been that the kids are going to do it no matter what, so we’d better teach them how to do it “safely” – for the latter, the kids were not viewed as unthinking beasts but as human being amenable to education. The illogic behind the “they will do it” theory is that if you really could teach them to use contraception on a regular basis, you should be able to teach them all kinds of things – including not to do it. Be that as it may, there is a new, comprehensive study (annoying, but free, registration required) out which both sides of the debate are hailing as vindication:

American teenagers are waiting longer before first engaging in sexual intercourse, and an overwhelming majority of those who are sexually active report using contraception, according to a comprehensive, well-respected government survey released yesterday.
The report examining youth behavior found that more young men in particular have postponed sex — 46 percent were sexually active in 2002, compared with 55 percent in 1995 — and that 91 percent of those who had sex in the previous three months used contraception…
…”The news is almost all positive,” said Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. “This data clearly underscores teens are being a bit more cautious about sex. This is a real sea change.”
The report comes amid a ferocious debate over the value of abstinence-only education, an approach President Bush has backed with $170 million in federal funding next year. Yesterday, both supporters and detractors of abstinence-until-marriage programs asserted that the report was validation of their sharply differing views.
More neutral academics said the positive trends most likely reflect a combination of abstinence education and instruction on safer sex bringing about the notable decline in risky sexual behavior.
“They are both having an impact,” said Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates, which focuses on health policy. “In today’s polarized world, the very important message is that this [data] is not just abstinence-only or contraception.”

Both sides do have a point in their claiming of victory – after all, kids are less likely to have sex, and those who are having sex are using contraception more often. Everyone is getting what they want, it would seem. Still, though, I think all of the vindication in on the side of the abstinence education.

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Baby Killers

No, not a bunch of leftwingers shouting at our troops – but the Dutch. NRO’s The Corner brings to our attention this horrifying news report:

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Raising the stakes in an excruciating ethical debate, a hospital in the Netherlands — the first nation to permit euthanasia — recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures in a handful of cases and reporting them to the government…
…The Groningen Protocol, as the hospital’s guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.

The “death with dignity” people were always telling us that they’d only do it with consent – and now, just as we opposed to euthanisia always stated, we’ve got the first cases of people being killed without their consent. This is not “assisted suicide” – this is intentional homicide. For now its being done on babies with horrible problems unlikely to find a cure – but there has been a step by step process into barbarism here, and the next step is to start killing entirely upon convenience. If you want to know where the human species gets people who think that killing is a good thing I’ll tell you: it’s the same place we got those who ran the Nazi gas chambers, the Soviet Gulag and the Cambodian killing fields.
We have to put a stop to this – being pro-life is a matter of simple survival; if we don’t stop these barbarians then eventually each and every one of us will be killed when some government bureaucrat determines our life no longer worthwhile.

What is a “Right”?

An alert reader brings to our attention a website called My Moral Values; a liberal/left website which is asking people to sound off on their moral values. The concept being, I guess, that the moral values of the center/right which prevailed in the November 2nd election are not the only moral values worth fighting for. Fair enough – no one has a corner on morality and everyone really can learn from everyone else. But in reading some of the comments posted, I came across an excellent representation of the political divide in this nation:

Health insurance and education should be rights, not privileges for the wealthy.

This sentiment is echoed in many of the other posts on the website – and it simply begs the question: are healthcare and education rights? If everyone lacks access to good healthcare and education are they being denied, in a most immoral manner, their basic human rights?
In our Declaration of Independence, we hold it to be self-evident truth that we are endowed by our Creator with certain, unalienable rights – and this is the key, in my view; a right must be something which is inherent in an individual human being. If its not something inherent to a human being, then it is a privilege, not a right.
I do not have the inherent ability to do brain surgery upon myself, nor do I have an inherent ability to learn how to be a brain surgeon – my ability to either have brain surgery or become a brain surgeon is a privilege; a privilege of wealth, perhaps, but also (in the case of being a brain surgeon) of ability…much as I may want to learn how to do complex surgery, if I’m a butterfingered clod with tools, then no amount of a “right” to learn how to do such surgery will change reality.
In large measure, we talk past each other in the left/right debate; we have different concepts of what is moral and immoral. The reason our leftwing friends can have a kind word to say about a brutal tyrant like Fidel Castro is because, at least in theory, he provides universal healthcare and education for all – in fact, I do believe that Fidel’s constitution for Cuba specifically states that healthcare and education are rights (I may be wrong and anyone who knows for sure is free to correct me) – and, indeed, over time it has become for the left a matter of greater importance that a person have access to healthcare than they have access to the free exchange of ideas.
We are engaged in a struggle in the United States to determine whose values shall prevail – it is no longer (if it ever was) a debate over whether or not two different concepts of right and wrong can coexist; we battle in the political field to determine that one or the other shall become the permanent, governing worldview of the United States.