Archive for law

The War on Women and Population Control

Copyright © 2013 by P. A. Ritzer

10 January 2013

In a December 30 article in the New York Times, Heather Timmons and Sruthi Gottipati reported on the reaction of women in India to the recent brutal gang rape that killed a young woman in New Delhi and to the cultural conditions that allow for such brutality. The article contained this paragraph:

After years of aborting female fetuses, a practice that is still on the rise in some areas because of a cultural preference for male children, India has about 15 million “extra” men between the ages of 15 and 35, the range when men are most likely to commit crimes. By 2020, those “extra” men will have doubled to 30 million.

After admitting that the source of the problem is the aborting of female babies, we are informed that the reason for it and the criminal problem that ensues are due to males: “a cultural preference for male children,” and “15 million ‘extra’ men.” Really? I submit that the problem is not 15 million extra men. The problem is over 15 million missing women, who were violently destroyed while in the sanctity of their mothers’ wombs.

Rational and knowledgeable demographers have long warned that the coercive and brutal government programs, in which unborn children are savagely and often forcibly sacrificed to the false god of Population Control, would lead to an imbalance of male to female children. Contrary to population-control propaganda that such an imbalance would lead to women and girls being treated far better for being more rare, rational demographers have long and accurately predicted the present reality of horrendous treatment of girls and women when there are too few women compared to men: the raping, bride sharing, bride stealing, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and warfare that would ensue. The “cultural preference for male children” contributes to the problem when families are forbidden by law or otherwise coerced to have no more than one, two, or few children.

So in the real world there exists a genuine war on women born of liberal policies. That real war contrasts starkly with the one concocted by Democrats that consists of a thirty-year-old, third-year law student–who could expect to make $160,000 a year upon her graduation–not being provided free contraception by a Catholic university in violation of its core principles. And the real war is violent: the violence of abortion and sterilization committed against the mother, the violence of abortion committed against the baby, and of course the resultant raping, bride sharing, bride stealing, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and warfare. Throughout Asia female babies are disproportionately aborted, especially in China with its one-child government policy “complete with forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, kidnapping of ‘illegal’ children” (wonder what happens to them), “and other brutal tactics” with the help of United States taxpayer dollars provided by the Obama Administration (“UN Slammed for Its Forced Abortions in China Using U.S. Funds” by Alex Newman in The New American).

How many Americans would stand by and allow the government to forcibly abort a child and sterilize a woman after she had already had one child. And yet, now that the United States is under a Democratic administration again, that of the radically pro-abortion President Barrack Obama, we United States taxpayers help to support just such carnage through population-control programs of the United Nations and other organizations abroad, not to mention the sweeping work of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, here at home. As I wrote in an earlier post “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat”:

So the Democratic Party uses our tax dollars to support Planned Parenthood ($487.4 million in the last reported year 2009-2010), the largest abortion provider in the country, founded by the Democrat darling and racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who had a special enthusiasm for aborting black babies. (Sanger even addressed a meeting of the Lady’s Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, fully consistent with the racist history of the Democratic Party.) But don’t worry about Democratic funding of Planned Parenthood, because President Obama assures us that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms for poor women. Another Democrat lie. Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms; they commit abortions. And they make millions of dollars a year doing so. Here is one case in which the Democrats do not denounce making a profit. And Planned Parenthood also gave $12 million to re-elect President Obama. So, they get nearly $500 million a year from the Democratic government and donate $12 million of it back to re-elect the Democratic president. How . . . mutually beneficial.

By the way, recently released information indicates that Planned Parenthood received $542 million of taxpayer money for fiscal year 2011-12 from the Obama government to violently kill 333,964 babies in their mothers’ wombs. I wonder who the Planned Parenthood folks voted for.

And so much of this is justified by another liberal lie, that of overpopulation. The overpopulation lie has been so pounded into the heads of people over the last several decades that we have come to accept it as a given when all evidence points to the contrary. Overpopulation is just one more in the great mesh of lies that liberals have woven to blot out the light and subject all of humanity to a dreadful darkness of fear, from which the liberals promise to rescue us as long as we grant them ever more power and control over our lives. Think environmentalism, man-made global warming .  .  . (And keep in mind that one of Al Gore’s homes uses twice the energy in one month that the rest of us use in one year. Also consider his recent sale of his network to Al Jazeera for a big profit. Do you think he really believes the stuff that he and other Democrats have been shoveling at all the rest of us?)

So here is the truth: Human beings have not and will not overpopulate the world. Proving that to you is beyond the confines of this post; so do your own homework with just a click of the mouse at Population Research Institute and/or Overpopulation is a Myth. Get informed. Remember, ignorance is one of the liberals’ most potent tools for enslaving people. (Just to give you one thing to consider: there is no relationship between population density and poverty or prosperity except that a community must reach a certain level of population density before division of labor, which raises the standard of living, is feasible. Some of the most densely populated regions and countries are some of the richest, and some of the least densely populated areas are some of the poorest. What really matters is the political and economic makeup of the place. Generally, those with the least controlling governments and the freest markets are the richest, those with the most controlling governments and shackled markets are the poorest.)

There is plenty of room for all the babies. So, get married first, and open yourself to the result of your loving relationship, more human beings graced with a supernatural destiny. Do not be afraid. Fear (like ignorance) is one of the great weapons liberals use to drive us into bondage. But according to the One who could not be vanquished by the lie, “the truth will set you free.” So shed your fear, take personal responsibility for your life, and come out from the darkness of liberal tyranny and into the light. Live in the light and freedom of the truth, and savor the sweetness of life.

 

The Republican Convention and PBS

© 2012 by P. A. Ritzer

29 August 2012

As I watched one speaker after another intelligently and engagingly put the lie to the Obama and Democratic Party record and talking points, I had to wonder at the PBS team covering the event.  First of all, I would have rather heard and seen Janine Turner and Nikki Haley and anyone else I missed when the PBS team deemed that their .  .  . what? .  .  . “commentary” and “analysis” should take priority over the contributions of the real players in this one-time event.  Among other things, I wondered if the amply seasoned partisan commentators Gwen Ifill, Judy Woodruff, and Mark Shields, and their token conservative–so suited to the role that he writes for the New York Times and was once inspired to prophesy about an inevitable Obama presidency while staring at the crease in Obama’s pants–David Brooks still made a pretense of objectivity.

Regardless, I thought back to an earlier time when I was glad of PBS Republican Convention coverage.  It was 1984, and I had finally landed on PBS after hurriedly clicking through the four available channels.  Why the rush? Well, because I had noticed that, off in the distance behind John Chancellor droning on to Tom Brokaw, it appeared that Jack Kemp was speaking.  No, the networks would not talk over one of the most dynamic and popular Republicans of the day.  But, sure enough, when I landed on PBS, there was Kemp.  But they would not do that to Jeane Kirkpatrick, the keynote.  Sure they would, and at least John and Tom did.  Again, I found her on PBS.  So, two of the brightest stars of the night, including a brilliant woman who was at the time still a Democrat who would switch to the Republican Party the next year, were kept from the view of the public by tedious liberal commentary.  I remember that Paul Harvey–this was still a few years before Rush Limbaugh burst onto the scene and signaled the beginning of the end of the liberal media monopoly, for now–the next day mentioned this abuse of power by the networks and how he would tune to PBS from that time on for coverage of the Republican Convention.

So, I did just that, as well.  And during a later campaign, when MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour was the only news program that, despite its liberal bias, would at least bring on guests representing the opposing point of view, I watched their campaign coverage.  I remember the glowing backgrounder report on the Democratic Party, stretching well past Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson and the Albany-Richmond Axis all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.  No mention of slavery, the Dred Scott Decision, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, the black codes, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, opposition to women’s suffrage.  Huh.  All right.  Well, anyway, I looked forward to the backgrounder on the Republican Party.  I believe it was Judy Woodruff who delivered it.  As I remember, it started out with how “the modern Republican Party” started with Richard Nixon.  What?  Not conceived as a reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its extension of slavery?  No Ripon?  No Abraham Lincoln?  No Emancipation Proclamation?  No Frederick Douglass?  No Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments?  No civil rights laws?  No Ulysses S. Grant?  No Susan B. Anthony, women’s suffrage, and the Nineteenth Amendment?  No Theodore Roosevelt?  No Calvin Coolidge?  No Dwight D. Eisenhower?  No century-long battle against the Democrats to secure civil rights for African-Americans?  No, it was Richard Nixon.  The “modern” Republican Party started with the most discredited, rightly or wrongly, Republican president in history.  How convenient.

But people are beginning to know better today.  The new media is shredding the monopoly of the liberal media, though many–including the Republican establishment–have not yet fully realized it.  And thus people have access to sources that belie what was spoon-fed to the public by the old media.  And the media did look old on that PBS panel.  Nevertheless, they still try, and feisty old Mark Shields thought he had really got one of the guests when he pointed out that the Morrill Act and the Homestead Act, both first passed in 1862, were Republican “government programs.”  Yes, but these were not liberal Democratic programs like those of the New Deal and the Great Society designed to create dependence on an ever-expanding government.  To illustrate my point, I refer to the following excerpt about the Homestead Act from Seven Ox Seven, Part One: Escondido Bound, pp. 55-56:

In the case of homesteading, the government made available public property, not confiscated from its citizens, to those citizens who could benefit from it and were willing and able to improve the land and bring forth its produce to augment the production of the nation. The government did not retain ownership of the land, but turned over ownership to the private citizen after the citizen had earned it and, in the process, proven himself suited and worthy to own it, benefiting the nation in the process. Thus, whereas through an income tax the government confiscated private property, through homesteading the government created private property by distributing parcels of the public domain to those who earned them.
 
And, after all, was not the United States of America a nation of people in a geographic area with a system of government devised by that people: “We the people of the United States of America.” The land did not belong to the government: it belonged to the nation, a nation of people. The representative government of that nation, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” merely fulfilled the role of administering the nation’s public land. Since the land of the nation belonged to the people of the nation, and since the land in question did not belong to any particular citizens, why not make it available to the greatest number of citizens or potential citizens (especially those without the capital to purchase it) who would earn ownership of it by improving that land and making a living from it, toward the end of making them productive, propertied citizens? Why not, where it was feasible, open the land to ownership by those citizens who would prove their worthiness to so own through their commitments of time and effort and their achieved improvement of the land? If an applicant could not improve it, could not make it, then he did not earn the property. The property would be open for another to attempt to earn. This process would continue until those who earned ownership of the land were those most suited to inhabiting and making a living from it. It was an investment of the nation in itself, to place upon the land those most suited to bring forth its produce.
 
Was it not in the best interest of the nation to place upon the nation’s land the greatest number of deserving people who could benefit from it, rather than allow the land to be concentrated in monopolies by persons or entities? Did it not give more citizens a stake in the nation, give them more reason to participate as free citizens? And this was not a giveaway. It was a sale, in which those with little or no capital could purchase land through their labor by “proving up.” And it would not contribute to dependence but to independence, as those who earned it were awarded ownership. And it was Republican. Though the roots of homesteading were older than the Republican party and could be traced back to a proposal by Thomas Hart Benton in 1825, and even further back to Thomas Jefferson, who had said, “as few as possible should be without a little parcel of land,” it was the Republicans who had made it law. It had been a plank in the Republican party platform, and Republican Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania had authored the homestead bill that President Lincoln had signed into law in 1862. Lincoln had succinctly said of the policy, “I am in favor of cutting the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home.”

Conscience, Law, and the Buffalo Hunt (Part Two)

1 March 2012

From Seven Ox Seven, Part One: Escondido Bound, the second of three excerpts from pages 219-228.

Copyright © 2007 by P. A. Ritzer

And to whom or what were the lawful and the lawless passing on their responsibility and freedom when they passed them on to the state? Well, at least in the United States of America, a republic, they were passing on their freedom and attendant responsibility to a seemingly innocuous form of government, a representative government, a government of elected peers. But those peers, too, were human. They, too, only ruled as well as they were willing to form their consciences to the rule of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” and to act in accordance with those consciences. Besides, once a matter like the slaughter of the buffalo was referred to the state, the state, in regard for all its citizens, was required to rule at a higher degree of generality than that of the individual conscience with its single subject, so that the general law of the state would be less adaptable than the more immediate and specific law of the individual conscience. Ergo, the individual lost freedom. For at that point, even if circumstances presented a situation in which the individual could act in a certain way in good conscience according to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” he might no longer be able to do so according to the laws of the state, because he had relinquished his responsibility and freedom to the state and was the more subjected to it.

Tom considered a simple hypothetical case in this matter of the buffalo. In that case, those hunting the buffalo, lawful and lawless alike, would continue the slaughter despite the obvious signs of it being wrong, if in nothing else than the prodigious waste of meat. Elected representatives of the people, outraged at the waste and the precipitous reductions in the numbers of the animal, would eventually pass a law to forbid the killing of the buffalo. Given that scenario, the following case unfolds. A man out on the prairie comes upon a lame buffalo bull that has been left behind by its herd and is obviously going to die. The man has a family who, though they have some food and are not starving, could make good use of the meat from the bull. Now, however, according to the new law, the man with the family must not kill the bull, and so the lame buffalo moves on to die in some remote place where the meat will go to waste. Before the law, the man could have legally killed and butchered the bull and fed his family with the meat, and he could have done so in good conscience. Now, after the law, his only legal option is to not kill the bull. His conscience must now weigh the law against the hunger of his family and the waste of the meat. If the man decides in good conscience, after weighing the matter, that it is better to kill the bull to feed his hungry family rather than to let the meat rot, he has decided, in good conscience, to break the law. This is no small matter, because in a free society laws should exist to protect the unalienable rights of the citizens; therefore, the conscientious person, in good conscience, should normally obey the law.

In such a case, then, the law, the conscience, or both have been compromised. This conflict between conscience and law comes about as a result of the refusal of earlier hunters to form or obey their consciences. It is a result of those earlier hunters’ failure to rule themselves, a result of their having handed over responsibility to the state, which, by its nature, must rule in a more general way than the conscience. That the man in the hypothetical case is not a hunter illustrates another point: when citizens turn over responsibility to the state, not only do they turn over, with it, their own freedom, but also that of every other citizen, even the most conscientious.

Tom reflected on how his hypothetical case also illustrated the communal nature of man, the latent sacramentalism awaiting men’s acceptance of and cooperation with grace. “No man is an island,” wrote John Donne. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” If one is diminished, all are diminished. So John Donne let the world know in poetry, some two and a half centuries before, what the Church had been teaching for some sixteen centuries before that, having been taught it by Christ. Neither man nor a man lives in a vacuum. The act of a single man changes the world, the universe, regardless of how private or public the act. A good act has the capacity to yield good consequences far beyond the immediate effect; so does an evil act have a similar capacity to yield evil consequences. Therefore, for man (the creature in whom matter and spirit are combined in one nature, created with free will, in the very image of God), all his actions entail responsibility. Responsibility is a natural concomitant to human actions. To shirk responsibility is but an illusion, as the shirker is responsible for that shirking. And because human actions entail responsibility, each human action deserves its due consideration. When humans fail to accept the responsibility for their actions; when they refuse to give those actions due consideration; when, after such consideration, they refuse to act on the conclusions of an informed conscience, then events like the slaughter of the buffalo result.

Thus, Tom considered three broad categories of men: the conscientious, those who formed their consciences and acted according to them; the lawful, those who waited for the state to pass laws to legislate their behavior and thereby relinquished their freedom and its attendant responsibility to the state; and the lawless, those who had no respect for the law and would defy the law as they saw fit, until they were prevented by the state from doing so, thereby passing on all of their freedom and its attendant responsibility to the state. Consideration of these led Tom’s mind onto consideration of another category of man, call them the semi-lawful.

(continued in Part Three)

Conscience, Law, and the Buffalo Hunt (Part One)

1 February 2012

From Seven Ox Seven, Part One: Escondido Bound, the first of three excerpts from pages 219-228.

Copyright © 2007 by P. A. Ritzer

Tom, for his part, still reflected as he rode along through the region in the dust of the trailing herd. One thing of which he was sure was that the slaughter was wrong. The hunting of the buffalo was not wrong. The skinning of the buffalo was not wrong. The sale and use of those skins for clothing, industry, or any other legitimate use was not wrong. Even the reduction of the vast buffalo herds to make way for other uses of the land was not necessarily wrong. What was wrong was the greed behind it all and what that greed had wrought.

What that greed had wrought was the waste of untold tons of meat (and even the waste of many of the hides for which the animals had been killed, due to hasty skinning, curing, or both). It had wrought a slaughter that, if it continued apace (and there was every reason to believe that it would), was sure to wipe out the species without due consideration of all the ramifications of that extermination. It had wrought further enmity between whites and the Plains Indians and the further reduction of those peoples to a pathetic dependency.

It had wrought all of those things and more, Tom could see. And yet, as disturbing as all that was, there was another work of that greed that encompassed all the rest, and that was the work of perverting freedom into license. Tom believed that such a large-scale perversion of freedom was detrimental to, and indicative of, the relative health of a nation, especially of one that had been founded with the security of the inalienable right of liberty as one of its central tenets and had recently fought a bloody civil war to preserve itself and abolish the singularly most glaring and festering contradiction to that tenet. Where freedom degenerates into license, he mused, man has already relinquished the mastery of himself to his passions, and it only remains to be seen who or what will succeed his passions as his master. In such circumstances, a free society is very much in danger.

There is no true freedom without responsibility. In light of that truth, Tom thought of some of the buffalo hunters he had met along the trail and before. Despite the common characterization of the buffalo hunter, some of these hunters were respectable people, some of them whole families, and many of them regretted the wasteful slaughter of the buffalo, actually lamented the part they were playing in it. Yet, they licentiously continued in it, killing as many as they could as quickly as they could, before there were no more to kill, because they were desperate to get as much as they could out of the slaughter, desperate to secure their part of the fortune that the buffalo hides represented. Had a law been passed to stop the slaughter and preserve the breed (and there were several attempts at such legislation throughout the 1870s), they would have gladly obeyed it and been glad for it, and yet, as long as there was no law, they would continue to play their part in the slaughter up to the very extinction of the animal.

Due to greed, and the pride behind it, these hunters were willing to reject their God-given stewardship of the earth. They were willing to relinquish their own judgment of what was right and wrong, as well as their freedom to act upon it, because they wanted to get all that they could get, and they did not want to fall behind anyone else who might be profiting from the same motivation and the same refusal to govern himself according to right and wrong. Tom thought about how that tendency was not so uncommon, how that tendency was, indeed, universal. Still, there were individuals, call them the conscientious, who, through prayer, reflection, or both, came to know such tendencies in themselves and to see the evil in those tendencies and, with the help of grace, to overcome or check those tendencies, to greater or lesser degrees. In doing so, the conscientious were forming their consciences, and in doing so according to objective truths, these individuals were subjecting themselves to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” cited in the Declaration of Independence, a subjection without which a free society must degenerate into anarchy or tyranny or the ugliest amalgamations of both.

A free society depends upon the will of the individuals in that society to take personal responsibility for their freedom, to govern themselves according to objective truths of right and wrong, Tom reasoned. When the individuals of a free society refuse or even just neglect to take responsibility for their freedom, when they refuse or neglect to form their consciences and to be ruled by those consciences attuned to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” then those individuals choose license over freedom, and they give in to a progression toward disorder or toward being ruled by something other than the self guided by conscience.

Tom saw just such a progression in this matter of the buffalo. He considered those hunters, not the lawless element of that occupation, but those respectable ones, call them the lawful, as they were willing to submit to the laws of the state. He considered those lawful, who would willingly and gladly stop the slaughter, and even feel relieved to do so, if only the state would enact a law requiring it. He considered how those lawful were passing on the responsibility for their actions to the state, and with it, they were passing on their freedom, their right of liberty, their right of self-government. He thought of all that it had cost in human sacrifice to establish and preserve a nation that had been founded to protect freedom and other human rights. Then he thought of how such shirking of responsibility and freedom and relinquishing of rights were unworthy of that sacrifice, and of how it would be better to have one’s freedom and rights usurped rather than to have them so carelessly discarded.

Interestingly enough, even the lawless element of the buffalo hunters (those apparently most opposed to being ruled by others), though they might refuse or neglect to discern the wrongness of the slaughter that the lawful had discerned, and, in fact, because they refused or neglected to do so, they too were passing on their freedom to the state, because they would not even accept responsibility for their freedom to discern. These lawless too were giving the state greater power with which to rule over them, even if they intended to defy that power. Both kinds of men, those who had some respect for the law and those who did not, were willing to let their freedom be overwhelmed by the dictates of the state.

(continued in Part Two)