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Tiberi on Right Side of Health Care Issue

Aug 13th, 2009
by Dan.
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I had a nice call from a Democratic pollster yesterday evening. I think she thought we were going to get along just fine when I told her that I didn’t like many actions by Senator George Voinovich. The questions were half about general issues such as health care, environment, etc., but much of the latter half centered on Rep. Pat Tiberi, whose name the pollster couldn’t pronounce even after I pronounced it for her correctly several times.  Tiberi is pronounced “tea-berry”, not “tib-boor-ee”. :)

{{w|Patrick Tiberi}}, member of the United Sta...

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I said that Tiberi and I wouldn’t agree on everything; I recall that he likes to vote for farm aid. He was in the right in voting against the stimulus and the climate change bills that nobody read, and he is in the right on fighting “public options” and “single-payer” health care. The pollster asked several questions about whether Tiberi sided with businesses over average people, and I happily informed the pollster that in many cases the interests of businesses and “average people” coincided, such as in the area of taxes and regulation. She was a professional, but there were a couple of times she sighed like Al Gore in his second debate with George W. Bush.

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George Tiller Murder Wrong on Multiple Counts

May 31st, 2009
by Dan.
2 comments

Dr. George Tiller, an infamous Wichita abortionist, was murdered at his church this morning, the AP reports.

Vigilantism has to be condemned in the strongest of terms. If the government decides that it is going to try and convict doctors for the murder of unborn children, that is completely different from someone taking the law into their own hands and murdering someone, no matter who the target.

The City of Wichita as much as it can needs to douse the public statements of the killer. If he were to claim the act as some sort of religious justice, everyone ought to be ready to repudiate him with Romans 12, Romans 13, Hebrews 10, and Deuteronomy 32. Vengeance is not a Jewish or Christian behavior. Murder cannot be the tool of those who seek to end abortion — it is the simplest of inconsistencies!

Who knows whether Tiller’s pastor would have gotten to him today, or the next Sunday, finally convincing him that Tiller’s practice was not only against his vocation and his Hippocratic oath to do no harm but against God’s Law. Tiller could have repented. He could have turned his talents to godly service.  But no.

The Devil has more ammunition now, to cloud the minds of those who support grisly acts of violence in the womb and to steel those remaining abortionists from seeking forgiveness at the cross.

There is forgiveness to be had, for murderers, for abortionists, for the mother who terminates her pregnancy, for those who take RU-486 and “Plan B” in a deliberate attempt to miscarry, and for everyone else. No sin is too great or too many. The cross is bigger than your guilt. Repent, be forgiven, and be free to turn away from such behavior.

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Earth Day

Apr 22nd, 2009
by Dan.
3 comments

On Twitter Chris Rosebrough considered leaving his car running all day to protest Earth Day. I noted that it only hurts him, in his pocketbook. He wanted the statement, so I asked in jest if there was a hill in his home state of Indiana he could park his car on.

I believe we should be mindful of our surroundings, taking care not because there is some Gaia to be offended, but because what we do has consequences for us and those who come after us.

Environmental activists tend to see the issue in an us vs. them mentality. If you are to march to the drum of GE-NBC-Universal, you should use an outhouse instead of wasting water in the toilet, and you should replace all of your light bulbs with CFLs.  Never mind the fact that when we did have outhouses, we had nasty diseases like cholera and dysentery, and never mind the fact that CFLs have mercury in them which make them difficult to dispose of properly.

We didn’t progress because we thought it was awesome to give the Earth a smackdown. We pursued activities such as power generation, commercial farming, metallurgy, etc., because not to do so would leave people to die in a zero-sum, survival-of-the-fittest game. Given the public faces of the environmental lobby, one has to think they wouldn’t fare well with pure Darwinism.

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Comment on Anti-Conscience Rules

Mar 25th, 2009
by Dan.
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HT: CAT41

Regulations.gov is giving the public an opportunity to comment on potential rules that forbid personnel or businesses that receive HHS money from abstaining from acts which violate their religious conscience, such as abortions.

Someone who supports this may call themselves “pro-choice,” but this is not a pro-choice action. Nothing currently stops a patient from going to another “doctor” to get the “health care” they desire.

This will raise medical care costs by restricting the supply of medical professionals. Consider all the people who, not needing a controversial medical action, would be required to find a doctor who would perform these actions. These rules do a lot more harm than good.

Hippocrates would not approve. Make your voice heard.

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Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Jan 22nd, 2009
by Dan.
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We are nearing 50 million abortions performed in the United States since 1973. We are well into the second generation of Americans missing because seven people couldn’t leave these life or death decisions in the hands of the States. We have no idea how much stronger this country would be were those lives saved.

There are more rights at stake than just those of pregnant mothers.

36 years after Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the words of the two dissenting justices still ring true.

Justice Byron White, in Doe:

Byron White
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I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

The Court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries. Whether or not I might agree with that marshaling of values, I can in no event join the Court’s judgment because I find no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the States. In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ, I cannot accept the Court’s exercise of its clear power of choice by interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it. This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.

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California Court Violates Market, Consciences

Aug 18th, 2008
by Dan.
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The AP reports that California’s Supreme Court has decided that fertility doctors cannot refuse treatment to gays and lesbians because of the conscience of the doctor.

Justice Joyce Kennard wrote that two Christian fertility doctors who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian have neither a free speech right nor a religious exemption from the state’s law, which “imposes on business establishments certain antidiscrimination obligations.”

That last quoted phrase I have no argument with.

Fertility doctors who have moral objections will close their practices or move them to another state. This results in a net decrease of care.

Those doctors who have no moral objections now have one less thing to separate from other doctors. They could have charged a premium for their service, but now they are a commodity.

For both sets of doctors as well as patients, this is a lose-lose-lose situation.

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