I sketched out the arguments and counter-arguments that make up the heart of this series on the ride home on the Sounder on Friday, and filled the rest of it out on Saturday. Then a deal on Ben Nelson's Stupaking was reached that gave another strike to an already compromised bill.
In my email in-box today, was the weekly message from the White House with the video of the President's weekly address. This week, he focused on why I should support the Senate's "health care reform" (i.e., the Insurance Company Revitalization and Stimulus Act of 2009). Without noting that the address was recorded before the Senate bill was finalized, Mr. Obama gave all the now tried-and-true reasons: historic opportunity, better than status quo, yada yada yada.
Robert Gibbs' initial statement was pathetic. There are some things the Administration needs to be clear about, and this is one of them. President Obama's answer to Jake Tapper's question is much more like it.
The Stupak Amendment has got to go. We simply cannot allow health care reform to be hijacked and turned into something that harms and insults women. Grassroots Democrats needs to keep up the pressure on the White House, the Democratic leadership, Congressional Democrats, and the committees that elect them (DNC, DSCC, DCCC).
No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society's widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.
Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.
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No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals' purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label - "marriage" - the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.
--Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.
Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.
But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.
An editorial at the NYT about John McCain caught my attention. It was about an ad that is going out about McCain wishing to overturn Roe v Wade.
The title of the editorial is "What if Abortion Became Illegal." Not only does it mention the ad by the National Institute for Reproductive Health, an offshoot of Naral Pro-Choice New York, but the editorial raises a very important question:
A lot of elected officials say they want to see Roe v. Wade repealed, clearing the way for abortion to be made illegal. But few of them go the extra step and say what they would like to see done to women who have abortions. Throw a scared 17-year-old woman in jail? For how long?
