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Posts Tagged → overreach

My body, my….self…?

My sense is that abortion was the issue of this week’s mid-term election. After all, all of the digital online advertising I received about Fetterman, Shapiro, and Mastriano was about that one issue. And Democrat Party poll workers confirmed their own belief that abortion would galvanize their voters. It seems to have worked, and fended off what was touted as a “red wave” of conservative response to failed governance in Washington DC.

My mind wanders back to 1972 or 1973, when I was a young kid, but old enough to become self aware. My hippie parents had the Our Bodies, Our Selves book laying out in the living room. When no adults were around I would look at this book and marvel at the array of hairy women parading their naked bodies in it. At an early age, then, I determined that naked woman was good, hairy was not good. One idea that sticks in my mind (having long ago eradicated the book’s “natural” images from my memory banks) is the novel concept that a person’s body is their own.

I think freedom-loving Americans can emphatically agree on this, that a person’s body is their own and nobody else’s.  Where Americans diverge from one another is what is our body? Is it just the living, walking adult body, or does that also include young humans growing inside of it?

Reasonable people can and should debate this subject, and if pro-Life advocates want to make headway politically and culturally, then they have got to do a much better job explaining their perspective on when human life begins, why it is sacred, and how abortion-on-demand is not a my body, my self policy issue, but rather an “our bodies intertwined together” humanity issue. They must do a much better job, as this week’s election results demonstrate (assuming no election fraud occurred, which in some states is once again already obvious and in-your-face to the point of training voters to regularly accept it from one political party).

To be fair to the pro-Life anti-abortion voters, advocates, and candidates like Doug Mastriano, a lot of Americans felt like the two-year Covid1984 plandemic was one gigantic official assault on the idea of Our Bodies, Our Selves. A lot of voters this week showed up to vote against the unconstitutional government overreach, official lies, official illegalities, and government personnel self-enrichment that characterized the past two years of Covid1984. They thought other Americans felt the same.

Draconian lockdowns to the point of absurdity (lone sea kayakers being surrounded by heavily armed police boats and arrested for violating a “public health code,” sunbathers sitting totally alone on a beach, and married couples sitting alone in their car at scenic overlooks being similarly mistreated by aggressive police officers etc.), pointless and highly damaging school closures, useless mask requirements, and dangerous fake vaccine requirements that are now yielding an enormous number of vaccine-caused injuries and deaths, all and every aspect of the Covid1984 experience was one huge pile of Our Bodies, Our Selves books being symbolically burned by government staffers and leftist political activists in a joyous ceremony to mark the end of the idea that your body is yours and yours alone, and to emphasize that the government, their government, can do to you whatever it wants whenever it wants.

Conservative voters and candidates mistakenly thought that leftists would be consistent in their body sovereignty thinking, that everyone else felt the same (logically consistent) as conservatives about this disaster, and that they would vote accordingly.

And this is the confusing part of this my body, my self as a public policy issue and debate subject. On the one hand we have a lot of Americans who were and still are being severely damaged by the government’s purposefully bad handling of Covid1984, and they are pushing back. (Despite the Biden DOJ’s designation of them as “domestic terrorists” for merely speaking out in official taxpayer-funded venues.)

And on the other hand we have a lot of Americans who think that not only is the government’s brutal and useless Covid1984 overreach into your body and your body choices great public policy, but that the use of crushing government coercive force to implement it and force you to comply or be destroyed was just great, too. And yet a lot of these same people are the pro abortion Our Bodies, Our Selves believers who were animated enough to show up to vote this week.

This is confusing because it is inconsistent. Choice should be choice…right?

If you spend time reading this blog, then you already know I am not enamored of liberal/ leftist thinking, because I cannot make it make sense. And to be fair, most leftists and liberals I speak with about this are quite honest about it: They don’t care about logic, reason, or being consistent. They want their political issues the way they want them, and to hell with your criticisms.

In a democratic nation and in a Western Civilization based on logic, reason, debate, and persuasion, we have a conundrum here. Americans are talking right past each other, and not just about our bodies being sovereign from outside forces. Americans are failing to communicate with each other on a whole array of political and cultural topics. I am firmly on the side of reason, logic, and reasoned debate being at the center of our governance process, and so I stand firmly with the dreaded “conservatives.”

But I will say this to the conservatives, like governor candidate Doug Mastriano: If you are going to make the elimination or regulation of abortion your main public policy goal, then you had damned well better explain it to the public very carefully, frame it in context of the 2020-2022 Covid1984 government assault on Americans’ bodies, and you had better not do any interviews where snippets of your public statements can be used to paint you into a corner. At least half of America is not able or willing to discuss this subject, and to them only the axe-murdering abortion of a helpless and sacred child is their singular and joyous right; what the government does to their bodies the other 99% of the time is the business of the government and none of their own. They are not thinking clearly about this, and candidates must work hard to connect the abortion dot to the Covid1984 dot for future voters. Or don’t work on it, and shut the hell up about it.

And I will also say this to the liberals/ leftists: Your apparent worshiping of abortion as an act, to the point of killing the living, viable child at birth, makes you look like a primitive bloodthirsty death cult. This is not civilized behavior by people who advocate for myriad other intrusive government policies “if it saves just one child.” So long as you inhabit this childish shadowland of disconnected and strongly contrasting public policies, your fellow Americans will understandably deride you as foolish children who actually hate children.

Does this book also apply to the victims of bad government policies on Covid? If not, then there is no body sovereignty for anyone

 

What Would MLK Say?

Today is a national holiday honoring and remembering a great American leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like great leaders across human history, King captured a moment in time, crystalized it, and put a flame in it that later generations of people can touch and be inspired.

Below is the famous I Have a Dream speech that King gave in Washington, DC, probably the last great speech given in that swampy town.

However, before we get teary-eyed and inspired by Dr. King’s honest speech and honest goals, let’s ask a simple question.

Today, the word “racism” and “racist” have become immediate responses for just about anyone who disagrees with liberal ideas. Any ideas, not just the subject of skin color.

This includes debates about the role and place of Islam in a democracy and republic. Islam is not a race, it is a bunch of ideas. Race has nothing to do with it, unless you are looking at the skin color caste system in most Muslim countries, or how Arab slavers started the African slave trade and continue it to this very day. Those things aside, race is not a component of Islam.

And yet proponents of American security, freedom, and Judeo-Christian culture are called racists if they do not accede to demands for unlimited Muslim immigration with zero acculturation and assimilation.

Accusing people of being racist even now takes off from completely unrelated subjects, as in “You said you follow the Bible, and it is not pro-gay. That is almost like racism. In fact, it is just like racism. It is like being racist. You are a racist.”

Don’t laugh, I have seen it happen in person and in writing.

So that “racism” becomes the standard synonym or fill-in for any kind of discrimination or bigotry or even self-selective behavior based on thousands of years of human history, at best. At worst, it becomes an empty accusation that as soon as it is uttered is seen for what it is, fake.

And let’s not even delve into the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, or even the Congressional Black Caucus, where members accuse someone of “racism” if they merely sneeze, and where brutally racist statements are made nearly daily. The NAACP has become one of the most racist organizations in America, and it is enabled by the outrageously bigoted Southern Poverty Law Center. Which is funded and run by white liberals. Ditto for BLM.

When one of these groups says “You are a racist until we say you are not,” it is meaningless, because they have misused, abused, and failed on this claim for decades. By making it partisan, where racists in one party are excused because they are from “the correct” political party, and members of the other political party are always shamed and accused and never excused, these self-appointed arbiters of right and wrong are exposed as hypocrites. Their credibility plummets as a result.

If you are having trouble following this, try this: What results from the misuse of accusations of racism is a watering down of the word and idea.

If racism becomes subjective, and not quantifiable, then those wrongly accused of being racist will burn out and lose their yearning for fairness. After all, they themselves are being treated unfairly, accused unfairly.

Hijacking the word can only boomerang back. People stop listening. Oh, they care, but they no longer ascribe credibility to the NAACP, BLM, SPLC, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the other fakers who have long overreached and overplayed that hand.

Yes, it is true that there are many things worse than racism, but if we are going to value a racism-free America (a good thing), then we must reserve that word and its connotations for when it really applies. We must not misappropriate it, nor may we engage in racist behavior and then accuse the subjects of our abuse themselves of being “racist.” Especially when there are simply legitimate disagreements on policy and law.

“Racist!” cannot be a crutch. That will only undermine everything MLK fought for, and what he got the vast number of Americans to buy into: The idea that we are all meant to be free, we are all meant to be equal, we all deserve to have equal opportunity and no artificial barriers between us and our dreams and goals. An America devoid of discrimination is an America full of its greatest promise.

So what would MLK say about today’s misuse and watering down of the white-hot word that used to galvanize tens of millions of Americans to do the right thing?

What would MLK say about how the Left has turned nearly every American institution into a force of discrimination and persecution against those with whom the Left merely disagrees, politically?

What would MLK say about the fake accusations of ‘racism’ to cover up the internecine mass murders among young black men occurring daily in nearly every single American city… That is done to obscure and excuse the utter and complete failure of nearly all of America’s black leadership, so that fifty-four years later, the American black community is in some ways in much worse condition than when Dr. King had his dream?