CB: (Warning- a little long) I took no offense at your mention of my being a lawyer, I merely felt it was irrelevant to discussion and so stated. I see your point of course but I also am not a lawyer 24 hours a day (especially when I'm trying to figure out the new math with my 13 year old son) and in these types of discussions may not always proceed as if trying a case. I find the culture of death and the baby killing business which has been spawned by Roe v. Wade most disturbing and denigrating to the general exaltation of life and ideal of keeping the gift of life sacred which I think any healthy society must possess. I am sorry this does not seem self evident to you. As I have stated before I have a great deal of ambivalence about government regulation in this area but I am concerned that the issue of abortion is really even an issue except in VERY extreme cases such as rape, incest and life of the mother.
I find your analogies to the holocaust and jim crow interesting but not directly on point to revert to "lawyerese" for a moment. The response of the great democracies to Hilter's oppression and attempted extermination of the Jews as well as his attempt at global hegemony is evidence to the contrary of your assertion. Life was sacred then and the free world responded with unbelievable determination and sacrifice to snuff out the 100 Year Reich and the other Axis powers. Likewise, while the cause of civil rights has advanced, the excesses of feel good governmental programs such as welfare, etc. have doomed generations of those same minorities formerly under the thumb of jim crow to squalid existence in filthy, dangerous slums with no real hope for any chance to make a meaningful contribution to society and no real chance to gain any sort of pursuit of happiness. The welfare state has spawned a culture of dependence when it should be independence we seek to create. So to revert to lawyerese again, while procedurally minority rights are now the equal of the majority, substantively in terms of quality of life for too many, they are no better off and maybe worse. I have long thought although it sounds strange that the greatest freedom we have is the freedom to engineer our own failure (or success). Our system denies many the opportunity to even get into the race in the name of "helping" them.
With respect to gratuitous sex & violence in media, as the parent of two children, I find it increasingly difficult to filter out the messages I find repugnant to make sure my children are instilled with the values I find important such as duty, honor, honesty, personal accountability, commitment and understanding. The media, not just TV has become a veritable open sewer pipe bathing and bombarding children with a constant stream of inappropriate material. Radio, TV, movies, print media and even the internet must all be closely monitored. I have no problem accepting the responsibility, I just wish the job wasn't damn near full time.
As to the good old USA, you are "speaking" to an individual who has served proudly and who has traveled widely overseas. I can say without hesitation there is no other place on earth I would rather live and I have visited all five continents and been in some places that you could not pay me enough to return to. On the other hand, that is not to say there are some aspects of our culture and society which can be justly criticized and which should be. That's what a lot of us have served proudly to insure. So while I recognize and criticize what I see (IMO) as real problems in our culture and society, that doesn't mean I love my country any less nor does it mean I want to scrap the whole Constitutional experiment and create a "theocracy" so feared by many pro-abortion advocates.
And in closing, I thank you for the reasonable discussion concerning a very tough issue. JLA |
