Sad to say, but yes, it's true. Evidently unbeknownst to themselves. Indeed, they somehow think they're thwarting the genocidal designs of the federal government by taking issue with the abortion funding in the 'healthcare' bill.
Chiu Chunling's initial comment to the previous entry reminded me of the email notification I received on Nov. 9 from CitizenLink directing subscribers to a 'victory' piece written by CitizenLink editor Kim Trobee. As I indicated in my reply to Chiu's comments, I had intended to do a short write-up about it but it had slipped my mind. Anyway, better late than never I suppose. Here are the last few sentences from the Trobee article:
Now, attention turns to the Senate, where lawmakers soon will consider their version of health-care reform. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said his bill will "look markedly different" from the House offering.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said pro-lifers must continue to contact their lawmakers.
"We will remain vigilant and shift our efforts to the Senate," she said, "to ensure that these same pro-life protections are added to the Senate bill."
Better still, try these sentences on for size:
Ashley Horne, federal policy analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said there were numerous troubling aspects of the bill in addition to the life concerns.
"Many of those fall outside our area of expertise," she said. "That's why Focus on the Family Action remained neutral on passage of the overall bill and focused our efforts on the important abortion funding issue."
Huh?! Educate thyself! Or otherwise get the hell out of the business of attempting to do that which you're ill-equipped and ill-prepared to do in the first place.
This kind of thing is precisely the reason the pro-life lobby is generally looked down on and distrusted by the larger, more well rounded conservative community. And rightfully so in my opinion. They're so obsessed with abortion that they're otherwise rendered ill-equipped and ineffective in protecting the God-given rights of all Americans, including the rights of the unborn. What in heaven's name do they think they're accomplishing with all of this misdirected and ultimately wasted effort? I guess they gotta do something to occupy their time. But is it really necessary for them to engage in counterproductive, counterinuitive behavior as a matter of occupying that time? I suppose so. But I can't see any good reason to just let it go unchallenged.
And "Neutrality"! Someone ought to remove that concept from the American vocabulary. It's about as illegitimate a concept as that associated with the term "amorality." "Neutral," "amoral" -- am I seeing a similarity here? But I digress...
Evidently they can't see that they cannot ultimately win this fight on these grounds. The problem with 'government healthcare' is, well, government healthcare. Not abortion funding, not services provided for illegal aliens, not 'death panels,' etc. Those are all problems, sure, but they're not THE problem. Nor do they combine to form THE problem.
The federal constitution provides no avenue by which the federal Congress may simply effect a hostile take-over of the healthcare industry, such as it is, in America. The only way it can legitimately be done is via the provisions of Article V and a legal transfer of that authority from the states and the People to the central government. Or, to paraphrase General Washington, "by a solemn and authentic act of the whole American People," anything short of which leaves the existing constitution as it always has been, "sacredly obligatory on all." End of story. (BTW, when was it exactly that Washington's Farewell Speech was removed from our political scriptures in America? I must have missed the memo on that.)
But here we have a lobbying group, supposedly "conservative," supposedly "pro-life" which has resigned itself to the idea that the central government is somehow authorized to run roughshod over the constitution at its will and pleasure (not their area of expertise, don't ya know), an idea which defies both its supposed conservatism and its pro-life claims. So instead of attacking the root of the problem as they should if they're going to attack it at all, they go after single provisions in the bill, incidental to THE problem. In this case abortion funding.
The problem here, as we see, is that they're willing to tacitly go along with the blatantly unconstitutional healthcare 'reform' package and the unconstitutional means Congress is using to effect it, so long as the feds make the empty promise, in return for their support (which they claim is a "neutral" position), that no abortion funding will be attached to the bill. That's being "neutral," eh? Could have fooled me. And when (not "if") the feds eventually add abortion funding back into the bill, before or after it becomes "law" -- it matters not -- what will the pro-life lobby do then? Ah, there'll be a bunch of handwringing; a lot of wailing and knashing of teeth issuing forth from these people. That is, until the new wears off or they otherwise tire of it and move on to begging their federal masters not to add additional provisions for the funding of late-term and partial-birth abortions. All the while remaining "neutral" on government-run healthcare, appealing, of course, to their lack of expertise on the subject of the whole enchilada.
Such are the actions of abject slaves, and/or, of would-be totalitarians, not of freemen. And I should like to know how any slave, or group of slaves (granting the pro-life lobby the benefit of the doubt here, only because I don't believe their intentions to be evil), can ever accomplish the goal of protecting the lives and liberties of the relatively strong and healthy among us, to say nothing of the most vulnerable in our society? Ans: They can't. Period.
Is life so dear or peace so sweet? Forbid it Almighty God!
If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
The CitizenLink article is posted in its entirety beneath the fold.
11-9-09
* Print This Article
* Forward to a Friend
Pro-Life Amendment to Health-Care Reform Passes in House
by Kim Trobee, editor
Representatives vote to prohibit federal funding of abortion.
An amendment prohibiting government funding of abortion in the House version of health-care reform passed on Saturday by a vote of 240-194.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment was the culmination of an effort by Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats to insert language similar to the Hyde Amendment.
The Hyde Amendment restricts abortion coverage under Medicaid.
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., said the coalition of pro-life lawmakers remained determined.
"We felt strongly about it," he said. "We were not going to vote or even let (health care) come to the floor for a vote with language that would fund abortions."
Many Democrats had maintained their plan would not include funding for abortions, but closer inspection revealed it would do just that.
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, said Democrat leaders spent months "misrepresenting" the plan.
"The bipartisan House vote is a sharp blow to the White House's pro-abortion smuggling operation," he said. "But, we know that the White House and pro-abortion congressional Democratic leaders will keep trying to enact government funding of abortion and will keep trying to conceal their true intentions, so there is a long battle ahead."
Ashley Horne, federal policy analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said there were numerous troubling aspects of the bill in addition to the life concerns.
"Many of those fall outside our area of expertise," she said. "That's why Focus on the Family Action remained neutral on passage of the overall bill and focused our efforts on the important abortion funding issue."
Now, attention turns to the Senate, where lawmakers soon will consider their version of health-care reform. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said his bill will "look markedly different" from the House offering.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said pro-lifers must continue to contact their lawmakers.
"We will remain vigilant and shift our efforts to the Senate," she said, "to ensure that these same pro-life protections are added to the Senate bill."
One final note: I don't doubt the sincerity or the 'good intentions' of the pro-life lobby in trying to protect the lives of the unborn by lobbying Congress to remove provisions from the 'healthcare bill' aimed at destroying life and the advancement of the 'culture of death.' The same may be said of those who concern themselves exclusively with the provisions granting services to illegal aliens, and so forth and so on. The point is simply that the efforts and resources of these various groups are horribly misused and misguided. Their interests and that of their followers (not to mention that of the unborn) would be a lot better served if they would direct them to the recommendation and advocacy of the passage of State level nullification laws and otherwise ignore the central government and its unconstitutional actions on health care and a variety of other issues. But we seem to be particularly adept at pursuing such misguided, miscalculated adventures in America. It isn't like the pro-lifers are the only ones doing it.
P.S. Is it just me, or does this whole hopelessly ineffective movement seem to be headed up by emotionally driven ... women? Que the attack dogs.
6 comments:
Funding for abortion won't find its way back into the healthcare bill. Coverage for 'socially undesirable pregnancies' will find its way out.
There are a couple of important dynamics here that ensure this. First off, the whole point of nationalizing health care is to be able to withhold care from the 'undeserving'. You know, in the interests of 'fairness' and 'efficiency'. As soon as the health care system is irretrievably dependent on government payments, they'll start announcing this and that group is using an unfair share of medicine or using it inefficiently.
Having a baby the government would rather you not have is one of those things that's not going to be covered anymore, along with old people who don't have individual political clout and children who won't make good workers in the future socialist paradise.
The other factor is that the abortion industry is...pretty shady. Yeah, they don't operate out of back alleys anymore, but the fundamental ethical divide between those who provide abortions as a career and all other doctors hasn't narrowed much, and all of that has been on the side of the medical profession as a whole compromising their core values. They don't even bother to pretend to administer the Hippocratic oath anymore, they haven't for years. A decade ago they were offering some drivel 'inspired by the spirit of medical ethics which traces its roots back over two millennia' or some crap like that.
Anyway, the thing is that abortionists like to run an all cash business with minimal paperwork that is actually going to be checked by anyone. They didn't push hard for having abortion in the bill for a very simple reason...because if those documents stating why, how, and when abortions are supposedly performed are attached to documents saying how much they cost the taxpayer, it's a lot more likely that people will look them over.
The 'abortion horror' stories you hear aren't gleaned from their meticulous record-keeping. Those are forms that are all filled out with very little regard to reality. These folks don't dump buckets of tiny babies in the regular garbage or flip live babies out onto the roof to die of exposure because that sort of thing is proper medical procedure, carefully noted with the appropriate paperwork.
They don't want to give people, particularly the IRS, extra reasons to look at those records because the paperwork is all so obviously fraudulent.
Besides, once the government cuts off coverage for a lot of lower-income child-birth, the abortionists regain some of their luster as heroic liberators of women from social oppression. "These women simply cannot bear the emotional or financial burden of a child. We're here to relieve their anguish."
Good point.
The bottom line, then, is that the pro-life lobby (good intentions notwithstanding) is simply wasting its time, its resources, and its breath.
See Auster's The Know-nothings of the Pro-life Movement, in which he quotes passages from this entry. But more specifically, look at the following excerpt from a quote posted at the end of the entry:
...If Democrats do not commit themselves to defeating the amendment [TM: the amendment removing abortion funding from the bill], then they will face an uncompromising effort by Democratic women to defeat them, regardless of the cost to the party's precious majority.
Auster added his own serious remarks following the passage. But the first thing that came to my mind on reading it was,
"Cat fight!"
You don't want to mess with them "pitbulls in lipstick," they'll bury ya.
Okay, okay, bad joke.
"It would appear that the pro-choice true believers are as little committed to leftism..." (italics added for emphasis). These same 'true believers' were eerily silent on the issue up till now.
They've done the math. The increase in elective abortion to be expected from mandating coverage for it pales in comparison with the increase to be gained by denying coverage for 'unqualified' pregnancies. Further, denial of birth procedure coverage punishes the groups they want to stop from reproducing.
Besides which...they're really that upset about the Democrats not being able to change the balance in their 'favor' this once, when they weren't even pushing it themselves? Please. This is pure maskirovka to keep the pro-life movement 'neutral' on the larger issues of socialized medicine.
The larger issues of socialized medicine?
You mean like ... the fact that Congress has no authority, beyond the craziest, wild-eyed contruction to date, i.e., some nutzo construction of the 'commerce clause', to involve itself in 'healthcare?'
Anyway, there's going to be hell to pay. End of story.
I've always felt that the commerce clause could only properly apply to the state governments themselves, not to the actions of private citizens and non-government organizations. The language is almost the same as that which grants the Supreme court original jurisdiction in cases where a government is involved as a defendant. If you interpret that the way people commonly try to interpret the commerce clause, then every case involving any citizen would go straight to the Supreme Court.
Hell will receive payment in full, have no fear.
Post a Comment