When Human Life Begins
Posted here for 1-30-12

Nancy Pelosi said, "I don't think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins."

Ms. Pelosi is wrong! Lots of people can tell you. The National Review OnLine, for instance: "From a purely biological perspective, scientists can identify the point at which a human life begins. [. . .] Your life began [. . .] when the fusion of egg and sperm produced a new, complete, living organism -- an embryonic human being."

Even Congress (if you can believe it) has legislation (Senate Bill 793), that states: "The life of each human being begins at conception." (Source, Line 55.)

This is not a complicated question. When an egg is fertilized, it it dead? No, it's alive. When a man's sperm fertilizes a woman's egg, and cells begin to multiply, is the result a tadpole embryo? No. A wombat? No. A Tasmanian devil? No. It's a human being!

Yet there are those who tend to ignore facts they find inconvenient. Some choose to distract you.

Dr. Tommy Mitchell, Board Certified in Internal Medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians: "Perhaps another way to ask the question [when does life begin?] is, when do we become human?" No, it's not. "When do we become human?" is a philosophical question, which has as many answers as there are philosophers pondering the subject. It has absolutely nothing to do with "When does life begin?".

Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado: "[T]he question [is] at what point [an embryo or] a fetus is a person. This is a question that cannot be answered logically or empirically. The concept of personhood is neither logical nor empirical: It is essentially a religious, or quasi-religious idea, based on one's fundamental (and therefore unverifiable) assumptions about the nature of the world." This is simply clever slight of hand: Don't think about when life begins. Instead, focus on ethereal questions of embryos, fetuses, and personhood. If you do, you'll be so confused, you may forget what we're talking about.

Some choose to change the terms from when life begins to when a being has the "right to life."

Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: "I don't believe human beings have the 'right to life.' That's a supremacist pervserion. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." This is more obfuscation. The question of who has the "right to life" has nothing to do with the question of when life begins.

Michael Tooley, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado: "[A]n organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity." What in heaven's name is he talking about? When did you believe you were a "continuing entity?" When you were ten? Fifty? Never?

Some choose to muddy the waters by talking about the meaning of life.

James Watson, director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the man who cracked the genetic code: "I think we must reevaluate our basic assumptions about the meaning of life. Perhaps [. . .] no one should be thought of as alive until about three days after birth. [. . .] [T]he doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering." I think we need to focus on the meaning of when human life begins.

Of course we all know why the question of when life begins is so thorny for some. It's because so many on the left wish to validate their central political issue: abortion. They'll go through all sorts of twists and turns and rationales to support their unsupportable position.

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and known as the father of animal rights: "[It's okay to kill a disabled baby] if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. [. . .] When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. [. . .] Very often it's not wrong to kill a child once it's left the womb. Simply killing an infant is never equivalent to killing a person." It amazes me that someone could cuddle up to such an atrocious idea.

We need to clear away all the smoke and confusion. Life begins at conception.

Then we need to review that part of the Declaration of Independence that says: "[A]ll men [. . .] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness [. . .]"

The Politics of Race
Posted here for 1-16-12

The Republican Party was founded for the express purpose of opposing slavery.

Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment, granting freedom to slaves; the Fourteenth Amendment, granting slaves citizenship; and the Fifteenth Amendment, giving them the right to vote.

The Ku Klux Klan was originally formed as a terrorist group to attack Republicans who had come to the Democrat South after the Civil War to help enforce legal equality for freed slaves.

Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867.

Republicans kept introducing federal civil rights bills and Democrats kept blocking them -- a bill to protect black voters in the South in 1890; anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938; and anti-poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946.

Nixon invented affirmative action. He worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for which he was personally thanked by Martin Luther King. He was a card-carrying member of the NAACP in 1960. His Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy, was not. On a statistical basis, there was more desegregation of Southern schools in Nixon's first term than in any historical period, before or since. Not only did Nixon desegregate the schools, he broke the back of the discriminatory building trades in 1968 with his "Philadelphia Plan."

In 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools. The Democrat platform did not, and would not, as long as Democrats were winning elections by appeals to racism.

It was Republicans who introduced, promoted, and passed every civil rights act from the end of the Civil War right up to and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

President Eisenhower introduced a bill to create the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and to fix the enforcement provisions of the 1957 civil rights bill that had been gutted by Democrats. In response, Democrats staged the longest filibuster in history -- more than 125 hours. The bill was eventually passed and was signed into law by Eisenhower on May 6, 1960.

Barry Goldwater was a vehement foe of segregation. He was a founder of the NAACP in Arizona, donating the equivalent of several thousand dollars to the organization's efforts to integrate the public schools.

Lyndon Johnson voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure in the Senate. But by the time he became president, he had flipped 180 degrees.

Democrats only embraced civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to affect election outcomes. Then, with unimaginable chutzpah, they actually claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked for the prior century!

So how did Democrats pull off such high deception and trickery? Lyndon Johnson did it. With massive handouts to blacks, thanks to his "Great Society" program (which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars), Johnson in effect bought the black vote. He demonstrated that an entire race can be bribed to vote for Democrats.

His support of civil rights legislation in 1964 wasn't to help blacks; it was only to help Democrats. He himself admitted, "I'll have them n****rs voting Democratic for the next two hundred years."

Now, more than 50 years have slipped by since the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the great political hoodwinking continues. Johnson's politics continue to demonstrate that those who give you freedom are forgotten when there are others who will give you money.

Is that what's going on today?

(Source for much of the above: Demonic, by Ann Coulter, Crown Forum, Crown Publishing Group, Random House, Incorporated, New York, 2011, pages 175-185.)

Deconstructing a Moral Society
Posted here for 1-2-12

Why is it that so many cultural activists have been leftists? Not just people who have influenced thinking, but individuals who have significantly degraded and corrupted the culture and morality of the nation. Here are a few examples.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin originally based the idea of human evolution on a racist assumption [after God was rejected as Creator], made in the late 1830s, that Fuegians (natives of Tierra del Fuego) resembled primates he had observed in the London zoo. In 1837, Darwin drew his now-famous depiction of common ancestry in the form of a branching tree. The next year he discovered the concept of natural selection. Darwin insisted that naturally occurring phenomena and factors working together in blind tandem have produced nature and eventually mankind. He probably abandoned Christianity as a student when he disappointed his father by refusing to become a minister. In 1859, Darwin published his famous theory about how all the species were produced without any aid from a Divine Creator. On his deathbed, however, Darwin admitted the idea of a human eye evolving out of nothing was absurd, he changed his ideas about religion, and apparently died as a Christian. (Source.)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He was an atheist, pseudoscientist, and founder of psychoanalysis. Few figures have had so decisive and fundamental an influence on the course of modern cultural history as has he. Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx have often been regarded as that unholy trinity who laid the foundation for today's pagan society. Darwin gave the world biological evolution in 1859. Freud later developed the notion to give us the evolution of the human psyche, while at about the same time Marx told us how society would evolve. Freud read German editions of Darwin's Origin and his Descent of Man and confessed that Darwin's work had been the main motive in his deciding upon a scientific career. (Source.) The Freudian explanation of human mental life says that we are all the result of the dark stirrings of an unconscious mind. That mind is formed in earliest childhood and adolescence and is sexual in nature, a reservoir of unfulfilled incest wishes. (Source.)

John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey is recognized as the father of modern education. The N.E.A. gave him high recognition for his works. Much of his changes to schools was made possible by the theory of evolution being so strongly accepted after the writings of Charles Darwin. Dewey wrote a theory of education and democracy that was based on evolution. A key tenet Dewey believed and taught was Relativism. God is absolute; the word of God teaches absolutes, but evolution flies in the face of God's word. Relativism was used by Dewey and Carl Marx and even Joseph Stalin to lead people away from traditional thinking and morality. John Dewey was a signer of the Humanist Manifesto. Many give him credit for writing most of it. Humanism makes men their own gods. Humanism makes everything relative to what the individual perceives as improvement or detriment. Humanism denies the Salvation of God and replaces it with salvation by men. Thanks to John Dewey, it is now printed in school literature how students need to be raised up to be better citizens of the new world economic order. Country, family, and God are no longer the goals to be achieved but are instead seen as causes of bigotry, narrow mindedness, prejudice, and intolerance: thus deserving to be destroyed. (Source.)

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). She founded what became known as Planned Parenthood, and spoke of sterilizing those she designated as "unfit," a plan she said would be the "salvation of American civilization." While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. Sanger's obsession with eugenics can be traced back to her own family. One of 11 children, she wrote that "I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families." (Source.)

Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956). An extremely perverse individual masquerading as a scientist, Kinsey sparked a sexual revolution with his books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. By distorting facts and representing them as scientific data, he hyper-sexualized American culture, stated everyone is either homosexual or bisexual, and led many sexually confused people to feel legitimate in perverse activities. Through his books, he changed sexual attitudes, laws, and actions for the worse. (Source: "10 Men Who Destroyed American Culture," by Mary Faulds, AFA Journal, March 2010, page 17.)

Margaret Mead (1901-1978). Mead championed a radically new approach to education. "Education for Choice" for Mead meant rejecting any importance of fundamental belief, and whose fundamental belief was that there was no fundamental belief. Mead presented a classic illustration of the power of ideology (manipulating truth to what we happen to desire) over philosophy (the love of wisdom) in creating an existential pseudo-science methodology. (Source.)

Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). His 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, describes how to gain power through undemocratic means, like stuffing ballot boxes, shaking down corporations for money, and protesting in front of banks that refuse to make risky loans to the poor. Alinsky helped Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, an endeavor that spent and wasted close to a third of a trillion tax dollars. (Source: "10 Men Who Destroyed American Culture," by Mary Faulds, AFA Journal, March 2010, page 16.) Barack Obama taught Saul Alinsky's principles as part of his community organizing activities.

Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999). Bloom's Outcome-Based Education (OBE) is about changing student behavior. He said the mission of education is to change the thoughts, actions and feelings of students. According to Bloom, the desired school outcome is "formulating subjective judgment as the end product resulting in personal values/opinions with no real right or wrong answer." Bloom's theory denies there are absolute truths, and it makes everything relative. One idea is as good as another. There are no absolutes, so the goal of good teaching is to modify student "thoughts, feelings and actions" to achieve an alternative thought system, which is controlled by the government. (Source.)

Richard Andrew Cloward (1926-2001) and Frances Fox Piven (1932- ). In 1966, these two radical Columbia University sociologists published a strategy (the Cloward/Piven Strategy) that seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Using the strategy in New York City had a powerful result: From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York for every two working in the city's private economy, and the city was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The ACORN organization adopted the strategy and has introduced a level of fear, tension, and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. (Source.)

Hugh Hefner (1926- ). His passion was (and probably still is) pornography, and his Playboy magazine was his major means to achieve this end. Hefner wanted to give popular credence to what Alfred Kinsey had achieved in the world of academics. Kinsey established a "New Sexuality," and Hefner established a "New Morality." Both "achievements" damaged society's morality. Hefner dedicated the first issue of his magazine to Alfred Kinsey. (Source: "10 Men Who Destroyed American Culture," by Mary Faulds, AFA Journal, March 2010, page 17.)

With the consuming influences of these leftists, our society has been severed from many of its positive cultural traditions. What will bring our culture back from the precipice?

I asked my granddaughter a few days ago what reading assignments she had in the college literature course she just completed. Her answer: Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Margaret Mead, Friedrich Engels, and a few others.