Should it be Legal to Shoot This?

Since this is only 20 weeks old, it is has been entirely legal to destroy it for any reason in the United States for over 30 years now. Indeed, approximately 2 million of these are killed in this country every year, 93% of them for socio-economic reasons such as financial problems and a woman feeling too young to have a child.

A few questions to provoke some debate; answer whatever you want:

1) What exactly is this?
2) When does/did this become a person and
3) What marks that change?
4) Should it be legal to shoot this (assuming it were not in someone’s body)? If so,
5) Under what circumstances?
6) Is this an independent being or a part of a woman’s body?
7) Would it be wrong to take this thing’s rights in order to secure the rights of another?

War Cry

Written September 20, 2008

Tonight, Senator John McCain lost the election for President of the United States to Senator Barack Obama. After nine long months of campaigning, America has decided that it has had enough of Republican leadership. In March, control of the White House will pass to the Democrats. Along with their increased control in both houses of Congress, the Presidency will enable Democrats to move ahead on a series of sweeping reforms and changes in the size and scope of the federal government. Due to our relatively weak numbers and failed brand, Republicans will have little say in how the government moves ahead to address a broad array of issues. Obama has campaigned on a platform of progressivism. From universal public health care to reinstating gun control policies to instating left-leaning judges to raising taxes on businesses, Democrats will set forth in 2009 to remake America into a more liberal, activist place. The federal government will be on the hunt for dragons to slay, dragons like violence, poverty, ignorance, and disease.

As conservatives, where do we now stand? Is it time to stop fighting modern liberalism and cede ground to the welfare state? Is it time to fully embrace secular values and abandon romantic notions of strict Constitutionalism? Is it time to accept the era of benevolent governance and become America’s Tories?

To these questions I answer a resounding “no.” We on the right, from traditionalism to libertarianism, stand for something different and valuable in America. Different because we rely on free initiative in a way that liberals from Washington to Paris cannot comprehend. Valuable because we are the last vanguards of the Revolution, which set forth the extremely radical and yet intensely conservative message that people, guided by the wisdom of the ages, are their own best hope. This message cannot, I repeat cannot, be lost to America in the face of modern progressivism.

Progressivism, or the desire to use centralized government to address the pressing needs of the nation, is both addictive and flawed. It is extremely addictive because it appeals in a very real way to the emotional needs of people. The dragons mentioned above are very real and cause a great deal of harm to many people. In a democracy, it is only natural that the people will look to the government for a redress of their every grievance. The great tragedy of the human condition is that nothing, not even the mighty forces of empire, can slay the beasts. As evidenced by the failures of every progress-minded regime from Bolshevik Russia to welfarist Germany to socialist India, centralized government is not the answer. Whenever government fails, however, people have a tendency to ask it to do more. However irrational it may seem, Americans today looked for more government after government-sanctioned HMOs and regulation imploded the health care system. Americans looked for more government after FEMA failed the victims of Katrina. Americans looked for more government after No Child Left Behind left America’s children behind. Is it understandable that people want powerful bodies to fix the messes? Of course. Is it irrational to expect wolves to protect chickens from… wolves? Quite.

The Right is unique in America in its insistence that the flourishing of human liberty in matters personal and financial and the decentralization of power are the greatest safeguards of freedom and prosperity. We will be called callous, heartless, savage, ignorant, and out-of-touch in the coming years as we fight a losing battle against the further bureaucratization of our society. In the coming decade, though, when Washington pencil-pushers establish the standards for the health care of every American, when tax rates approach 50% for businesses, when unarmed victims are shot in their own homes, when this country faces a demographic crisis because of abortion and unchecked immigration, and when Americans have a sense of apathy after all these years of chasing dragons, we will still be here speaking of liberty lost. We will be the promise of a new day for America, a new hope for a people ready to shake off the shackles of big government and set forth once again on the bold experiment that is life in a free market, representative republic.

In order to be ready to meet the needs of America, we must spend our time in the opposition renewing the Right and returning to the core principles that have always defined our worldview. It is time to move on past the politics of yesterday. America lost faith in conservatives the moment they lost faith in themselves. Over the past eight years, the GOP has sacrificed its heart to the gods of power and control. Once upon a century, we were the party that fought the unneeded deployment of American troops to Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, and even Vietnam. We stood toe-to-toe against Democrats with a vision of creating a friendlier, more Utopian world to live in. Now, we are the party that “liberated” Iraq, threatened to enter into a nuclear war with Iran and North Korea, and kicked off a new Cold War with Russia. Once upon a decade, we forced a liberal Democrat to balance the federal budget and almost passed a constitutional amendment that would end the days of spending money that the government does not have. Now, we are the party responsible for record increases in the federal budget for education and health care. Once upon a millennium, our philosophical forbears wrote the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers. Now, we are the party that made extraordinary rendition ordinary, waterboarded prisoners of war, and argued that security demands sacrificing the liberty of habeas corpus. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be mortified.

In order to keep our power to do such things, we have run campaigns of deception. We spat on the war record of John Kerry, a rather poor presidential candidate but an exceptional winter patriot. We blamed liberals for everything from Southwestern-Mexican assimilation plots to hating America and forgetting 9/11. We accused our next president, a devoted public servant, Christian father, and faithful husband, of being a Muslim black nationalist traitor who cannot wait to teach your kids sex ed. Is it any wonder we just lost to a man quite unafraid to base his campaign on hope, change, and service?

What is it that made us such cowards in the world? We can win debates without the use of fear and authoritarianism. We do not need threats of terrorism and anti-Americanism at home to win elections. We stand for personal enterprise, liberty, and tradition. Is this really so lost a cause that we need to be slanderers and bullies to win anything? We do not need to fight baby-killers to win protection for the unborn. We do not need to fight Hollywood elitists to keep our guns. We do not need to fight Frenchmen to hold judges to the letter of the law. We do not need to fight communists to cut taxes. We do not need to fight traitors to keep America safe. All we need to do is remind Americans of their Constitution and their sacred freedom in the face of temptation to give the government free reign over our lives.

If I am wrong on this note, may the Right rot forever in hell where it belongs. Any ideology that needs terror and intimidation to win the day is surely morally depraved to its very core. Any philosophy that need only call people to free themselves, learn from the wise, and take responsibility for one another directly, however, belongs enshrined in the depths of our hearts.

Tonight, we have a chance to reclaim our mantle of freedom from the neoconservatives and liberals within our party who have hijacked us for their own designs and ambitions. Tonight, the politics of old died entirely. Senator McCain, who could have begun the transition back to conservatism in earnest, will not be given that duty. Now, it is incumbent on us to force that transition in here and now in full force. Tonight is a resounding blow to our identity in these recent years. Tonight is a mandate for a Right so old it looks new.

Tonight, the Right is dead. Starting tonight, long live the Right!

Postscript, written October 22, 2008

This is not to excuse the Obama campaign and ought not to be taken as a sign that the Democrats are pure, virtuous, and positive on the campaign trail. Though the most blatantly gross attacks have come from the right, Democrats have asserted that Governor Palin is nothing less than an American theocrat and would-be Puritan. She faked her own pregnancy, banned books, and supported militant separatism, according to extreme liberals. According to reality, she is a devoted family woman and reasonable patriot.

According to mainstream liberals, McCain is about to tax your health benefits “for the first time” and destroy employer-based health care, while Obama will cut taxes for 95% of Americans. Employer-based health care is a broken system and McCain is simply proposing switching existing benefits from employer health care to personal health care. Obama cannot cut taxes for the one-third of Americans who do not pay income taxes to begin with. McCain also “wants” the Iraq War to go on for another hundred years, Palin is not a “real woman” because she is pro-life, and McCain’s energy plan is less “comprehensive” than Obama’s, despite the fact that it contains nearly all of Obama’s proposals plus some aimed at traditional energy production.

Though these are more policy-oriented attacks, they are potentially even more destructive than GOP tabloidia, given that many Americans put more stock in them and believe them more readily. If we truly want a new kind of politics, we will have to acknowledge that one candidate truly does want to cut different taxes more than the other, that one candidate supports abortion rights more than the other, and that one wants troops in Iraq without timelines while the other does not. Once we get that far, perhaps we can actually debate the relative merits here rather than trying to steal the other man’s essential talking points.

Postscript, written November 5, 2008 at 12:45 AM

Tomorrow morning, I will wake up in what is still very much Washington’s America. Perhaps the day will come when America wakes up and remembers how very disturbingly radical Washington actually was and realize that our rights, freedoms, liberty, and prosperity do not belong to the city.