Newtown and abortion clinics - connected?

Amazingly, Gregory Kane has managed to take the Newtown killings and use them as a basis for a column about abortion. His column in yesterday's Washington Examiner was entitled “Culprit is society that devalues human life” and among the ridiculous analogies he made (addressed to President Obama, if you need to know who the “you” was supposed to mean) was:

On Friday, a gunman walked into the Connecticut elementary school and methodically, fatally shot 20 children and six adults.

He has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who apparently killed himself after the shootings. Now imagine the following hypothetical situation:

Lanza isn't 20, but a 30-something surgeon who, five to 10 years ago, sucked those same 20 children down a tube while they were still in the womb.

Would we be talking about the slaughter of 20 innocent children? Or would Lanza receive praises from you and others like you for being an avid supporter of women's reproductive rights?

How anyone can consider the little bit of tissue inside a uterus of a pregnant woman — which, I concede, has the potential of becoming a human being — as the equivalent of a real living 6-year-old boy or girl is beyond my comprehension. People get over a miscarriage, which is, after all, the death of just such a bit of tissue in a uterus, in a way the parents of the Newtown children will never get over their children's deaths.

But Kane has to make such stupid analogies as an excuse for his anti-abortionism.

Angus Jones, Gregory Kane, and "values"

Before getting into the main point of this post, let me say that, although I used to watch a good deal of television, and mostly situation comedies, I do not have time to devote to watching the “tube,” and have never seen a single episode of “Two and a Half Men,” so this is not a comment on whether that show is “filth” or not, as its teen-aged co-star, Angus Jones, recently claimed. This post is not about the show, but addresses both Jones' comments and the column, appearing in yesterday's Washington Examiner, in which columnist Gregory Kane strongly defended Jones.

First of all, I have no problem with either Jones or Kane's right to express their opinions. But in Jones' case, it seems to me that if he really thinks as he says he does, and feels that the show, which has been the cause of his earning millions of dollars, is such “filth,” he should take all that money and (assuming the producers are not going to accept its return) donate it to charity, so he can live the life of a typical boy of his age. But he seems happy to keep his money.

In Kane's case, my point is somewhat different. It seems that Kane thinks Jones was unfairly criticized because he stood up for his religious values. Well, just as Kane has the right of freedom of speech, under our First Amendment, so do the more secular, and even atheistic, people he denounces. Kane seems to feel that in this country, people who favor “Christian values” (or “religious values” in general, as he manages to include Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan among those he singles out for praise) are being silenced in this country, while those advocating their contrary are given open free rein. I just see that everyone is able to speak out on both sides. Kane asked why Jones had to apologize — I think Jones' apology, as hypocritical as it might be, was because he realized he might be out a lot of money, not because secular forces were exerting pressure on him! (Kane also takes the media to task for not proofreading their headlines. That's the sort of thing I admit I might do, as I am a compulsive corrector of spelling/grammatical errors. But I've seen errors in the Examiner, too, so that is not really fair of him.)

So to recapitulate, I condemn neither Jones nor Kane for expressing themselves. But I think they both need to acknowledge the opposite side's right to express itself as well, and Jones, in particular, is ill-poised to condemn the people who have given him an amount of money that most teenagers (or even adults) would find beyond their dreams.

One difference between Republicans and Democrats

Gregory Kane is a columnist whose column I read in the Washington Examiner a couple of times a week. as you might know, sometimes I agree with his columns, and sometimes I disagree strongly. But a column of his that appeared in yesterday's paper pointed out one important point. Most of the column was talking about Congressman Todd Akin's comment on abortion. And while you can read the whole column, I'm not going to quote anything but the one part I want to emphasize, the end of his column:

Finally, Mr. President, although you tried to lump all Republicans into the Todd Akin bin, I feel compelled to remind you that there are pro-choice Republicans. One of them is former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who heads Mitt Romney's campaign in that state.

Mr. President, can you name one prominent pro-life Democrat?

The point is that the Republican Party still has room for a lot of different opinions. The Democratic Party seems not to.

An[other] infuriating column by Cal Thomas

Yesterday I read a column in the Washington Examiner written by Cal Thomas, and as usual, Mr. Thomas' positions I find infuriating. Now in this column, he is actually advocating a position I share — that Obama should be opposed — but I think for all the wrong reasons. Thomas begins his column (named “The Gospel According to Obama”) with the paragraph:

It is one thing to talk about “fairness” when it comes to allowing gays and lesbians to marry; it is quite another to claim biblical authority for such relationships.

President Obama cited the Golden Rule about treating others as you would like to be treated. In doing so, he ignored the totality of Scripture and the notion that the Lord alone sets the rules for human behavior.

Now, Mr. Thomas seems to think that he alone is an expert on Scripture; or, more likely (since, if I recall correctly, he is a Roman Catholic) that all of the world is bound by what the Pope has said, and Mr. Thomas' deference to Papal infallibility should be shared by all. Now, whatever I may think about President Obama, I believe that he, as much as Cal Thomas, has an equal right to interpret the Scriptural meaning — and, in fact, I claim this right for myself as well. And in particular, since there are churches that are willing to solemnize gay marriages (even if his own is not), Mr. Thomas is in addition imposing a religious test contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Article VI, paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

So Mr. Thomas is way off base. And later in the same column, he says:

I recently wrote that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people who believe the Bible is God's Word to impose their beliefs on those who disagree with them. But it is something altogether different for those who disagree with them to claim the Bible doesn't say what it actually says. Obama apparently hopes there are sufficient numbers of biblical illiterates — and he could be right about this — who either don't notice his sleight of hand, or don't care.

Again, Cal Thomas knows “what [the Bible] actually says,” while Barack Obama does not. But then he slips into a different argument:

Thousands of years of human history have sustained marriage between one man and one woman.

In other words, “this is how it's always been.” But of course, until the 1860s, “how it's always been” included slavery; and one can name all sorts of things that once upon a time could be described as “how it's always been.” That does not mean they were right. But then, Thomas goes back to the Bible, and fires off a number of biblical quotations, but fails to note that the Bible also says he should not eat pork, that a widow should marry her late husband's brother, etc., etc. So why do these quotes carry more weight? After these quotations, Mr. Thomas goes on:

Liberal theologians have tried to modify, or even change, what is contained in the Bible, and there are those in our time who are following their example with the issue of same-sex marriage. People are free to accept or reject what Scripture says, but not to claim it says something it does not. In modern times, that's called spin. In an earlier time, it was called heresy.

What “liberal theologians” say deserves as much credibility as Mr. Thomas, who is offering only one interpretation of what Scripture says, an interpretation which he certainly has a right to hold to, but not to bind anyone else to. Now, Mr. Thomas does say one thing which I actually find to make some sense:

As he seeks to justify his position on same-sex marriage and other issues with at best a questionable use of and at worst a denial of Scripture, President Obama might be said to be preaching another gospel. This could possibly lead to a fissure in his solid support among African-Americans, costing the president votes in November. It will also likely galvanize the culture warriors. Minorities mostly vote for Democrats, but they don't like their faith denied. That could cause some of them to stay home on Election Day, or even vote for Mitt Romney.

While I might challenge Mr. Thomas' characterization of President Obama's position as “at best a questionable use of and at worst a denial of Scripture,” I can certainly agree that there are African-Americans who might weaken their support for him, or possibly even vote for Mitt Romney, as a result of this; not many, because they seem so proud of having one of their number. But in the same issue of the Examiner, for example, columnist Gregory Kane, an African-American conservative who never did support Obama, mentions that his mother's support for Obama has been lost as a result of this stance.

In a sense, I should not gloat over someone casting a vote for Romney for a reason which I think should not govern a voter's decision. I shudder to think of the fact that I have people like Cal Thomas on “my team.” But I reason this way: Obama may lose some votes for the wrong reason. But if he does, I can't really shed any tears. Any reason that someone votes for Mitt Romney against Barack Obama helps remedy the terrible wrong that resulted from the 2008 election.

My take on some recent columns

Regular readers of this blog know that many of my posts are prompted by columns I read in the Washington Examiner, which is, for me, a local paper. The Examiner is a conservative paper, and its columnists all hew to that line to one or another degree (although not always agreeing with everything that each other says). In this way the Examiner differs from the Washington Post, which often prints columns by Charles Krauthammer, probably the columnist in all the papers I see with whom I most agree. But getting back to the Examiner: two columns that appeared earlier this week particularly caught my eye.

Most of the time, it seems Gregory Kane's columns prompt my disapproval. This time was a rare exception. He wrote the column Sunday, and it appeared in Monday's paper under the title: “Rush Fluke apology came too late” I will not quote the whole column in detail, but only the first paragraph; I do recommend that you read it all on the Examiner's site:

If indeed, as some media reports have indicated, Republicans are now “on the defensive” in the contraception controversy, they have one Rush Limbaugh to thank for putting them there.

The main point was that, by using such offensive language, Limbaugh (if anything) attracted support to the woman he criticized. There was a good case to be made — based on religious freedom and the First Amendment — to oppose President Obama's contraception mandate. But Limbaugh's way — to insult the woman who spoke in favor of the mandate — poisoned the air. Mr. Kane, this time you and I agree.

The second column I want to write about came from a columnist with whom I more usually find myself in agreement: Noemie Emery. And while my agreement with Gregory Kane is out of the usual, the fact that Ms. Emery's column agrees with my thought is more typical. Her column appeared in Wednesday's paper under the title “Back to the what, Mr. Will?” and in it, she takes George Will to task. Again, I will not quote the whole column but advise you to read it all on the Examiner's site. But the one thing she said that particularly caught my eye was this piece:

Romney is poised exactly at the midpoint of the Republican Party, strong with those to the right or the left of this center, very strong with the "somewhat conservative," while being conservative enough not to enrage or discourage the base.

This is the best reason why Mitt Romney should be the 2012 GOP nominee, and I like the way she put it.

Gregory Kane, gay marriage, and religious freedom

A column appeared by Gregory Kane in today's Washington Examiner entitled “No reason to trust Maryland liberals on marriage.” In it, Kane seems to think that even though Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley has promised clergymen who would not preside over same-sex weddings that they would not have to, they will have to in the end. He says:

I have the sneaking suspicion that the forces hankering to legalize same-sex marriage won't rest until pastors like Hickman and Coates are compelled, by law, to perform same-sex marriages in their churches. Here's the plan I see developing.

The CMPA passes. Within a year, maybe two, maybe three, a same-sex couple or couples challenges that portion of the law that lets pastors like Hickman and Coates decide if they want to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies or not. That part of the law will be challenged because it's "unconstitutional."

The lawsuit winds its way through Maryland's courts, where it would take only one activist judge to rule for the plaintiffs, nullify the clause protecting churches that choose not to perform same-sex marriages and thus compel them to do so.

And yes, call me a cynic, but I do believe that the same-sex couple or couples who will make the challenge have already been selected.

But Kane is having unnecessary nightmares. There are clergymen now, this very day, who will not conduct certain kinds of marriages sanctioned by law: rabbis who will not conduct a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew, Catholic priests who will not officiate at a marriage where one of the parties involved is divorced, etc. And if Kane has one example he can demonstrate that a clergyman has been forced by a court to conduct a marriage that he will not sanction for religious reasons, I will accept his argument. But I believe I am safe in saying that this has never happened — in Maryland or any other State. So why is Gregory Kane worried?

What is right, is right, even if Obama does it

Ever since Barack Obama became President, I've been saying that whenever he does something right, I'll accept it. I can't condemn something just because Obama does it. And so, I have to differ with Gregory Kane, who wrote a column that appeared in Wednesday's Washington Examiner entitled “Obama becomes 'Silent Cal' on Libya, sharia.”

President Obama has been backing (I think not forcefully enough!) the rebels who deposed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. And now that they have won, they want to put forth a constitution that recognizes Sharia (Islamic law) as the “basic source of Libyan legislation.” Now, there are certain aspects of Sharia that I don't like — cutting off the hand of a thief, for example. But Libya is a majority-Moslem country, and if the majority wants their laws to be compatible with Sharia, that is only democracy. The question is, will the rights of non-Moslems be respected? So far, we don't know. Until we do, we cannot condemn Libya, or Obama's support for the Libyan rebels.

This stance is particularly galling coming from Gregory Kane. He has sometimes written things that seem, in my eyes, to favor a Christian theocracy in this country. Certainly, he wants to make the Catholic Church's teachings on abortion into law. And he ridicules the concept of separation of church and state regularly. Apparently, it's ok for the majority religion to impose its views on the minority if that group is Christian, but not if it is Moslem. As a member of a non-Christian, non-Moslem religious group, I can say that neither is anything different from the other. Both Christians and Moslems have, at different times, had horrible human rights records regarding nonmembers of their own religious groups.

So don't trash Obama for this position. This time he is right. Getting rid of Qaddafi was a service to the world.

Another unreasonable Gregory Kane column

Gregory Kane, the columnist at the Washington Examiner, who has been the cause of some previous posts on this blog, did it again today. He wrote a column excoriating fellow conservative Ann Coulter because of some favorable remarks she wrote about the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in her new book, "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America." Now, it is fair game for conservative Kane to say, as he does, that current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is closer to his ideas of what a Justice should be. But Coulter makes some valid points in comparing Marshall to Martin Luther King.

My bone to pick with Kane is where he says:

Coulter's thesis is that mob action is inimical, even dangerous, to a republic and that throughout history it's primarily the Democratic Party that has supported, encouraged or even benefitted from what Coulter derisively calls "the mob."

In Coulter's eyes, the street demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. led to end segregation were mob actions. Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the civil rights era, was anti-mob. Here are some passages where Coulter talks about Marshall, King or both.

"[John] Locke was concerned with property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law — as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized — rather than have each man be his own judge.

"One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way — by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court.

"Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King's methods, calling him an 'opportunist' and 'first-rate rabble-rouser.' Indeed, when asked about King's suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was 'a boy on a man's errand.'

"Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law.

"If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we'd be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day."

My dear Ms. Coulter, I'd much rather celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Even if I agreed with your assessment of the relative worth of King and Marshall, the fact remains that, as Supreme Court justice, Marshall damaged the nation in ways King and his "mobs" never did.

It's as if Coulter never heard of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Marshall was one of the seven justices who voted to overturn every state anti-abortion law in the nation. And he was one of the seven who presumed to tell a nation of then nearly 200 million people exactly when life does or does not begin.

It definitely does not begin in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy, this less-than-magnificent seven concluded, kind of does in the second and definitely does in the third. I have grandkids that can cobble together a better definition of when life begins than that.

And Marshall was one of the justices who voted to overturn, temporarily, every death penalty statute in the land. One result of the noble intentions of Marshall and his cohorts was that a man named Kenneth McDuff, then on death row in Texas for multiple murders, was eventually paroled. McDuff went on yet another killing spree before he was convicted a second time and eventually executed.

A Thurgood Marshall Day? I'm sure the murderers of the country would love that one.

Of course, his first objection to Marshall is his support for Roe v. Wade which he, like many conservatives, thinks is a terrible decision; I think it a good one, because in "overturn[ing] every state anti-abortion law in the nation," he made it possible to save some real human lives. Kane, of course, agrees with the Roman Catholic Church in defining human life as beginning at conception; I've posted a few reasons why I think that is ridiculous.

But even someone who agrees with Kane on the Roe and McDuff decisions can hardly believe that King would have taken the opposite side. And we're not talking about comparing Marshall with Clarence Thomas here; we're talking about Marshall compared with Martin Luther King.

I think Ann Coulter is right on target in the comparison she makes. And let us remember King's near-treasonous stand on the War in Vietnam.

No, I've always considered Marshall a better representative of African Americans than King, and I applaud Coulter's comments which so appall Kane.

Gregory Kane and the Kennedys

I have on several occasions referred to columns I have read in the Washington Examiner, a local edition around here of a national paper. They are a rather conservative paper, and most of their columnists are well to my right, so I sometimes find myself in agreement, and sometimes in disagreement, with the columns in the Examiner. But today I saw a column where my disagreement stemmed, not from the Examiner columnist's being too far right, but from his praise of a liberal Democrat for whom I have little but scorn.

I suppose it is a conscious decision by the Examiner, but I don't know for sure: it features a number of African-American, but well to the right of center, columnists, perhaps to show that you don't need to be liberal if you are an African-American. And one of those African-American conservative columnists, Gregory Kane, has been the author of columns I have criticized in the past as far more conservative than I consider sensible. But today's column by Gregory Kane errs in the opposite direction, as I said above. Today's Gregory Kane column was entitled, "Six heroes to visit on the Fourth." Apparently there are six people whom he considers heroes to such degree that he visits their graves, and theirs only, each Memorial Day and Independence Day. And while nobody would challenge his selection of Medgar Evers as his #1, highest ranking hero, I certainly have some qualms about some of the others.

I'm not quite sure what qualifies boxer Joe Louis as his #5 choice, or actor Lee Marvin as his #6. His other actor selection — #2 Audie Murphy — makes sense, as Murphy was, in Kane's words, "America's most decorated soldier in World War II."

But it's his third and fourth choices that give me a pain. #3 was Robert F. Kennedy, and #4 his brother John. He puts Robert above John because "it was Robert Kennedy who got on board with civil rights long before his older brother did." But he concedes that

In the early 1960s, neither Robert Kennedy nor his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was very adept at handling the nation's civil rights problems.

They completely botched the crisis at Ole Miss when rioters protested James Meredith's admission to the law school. They even acquiesced to the resegregation of an integrated military police unit in an attempt to appease racists.

So why do they deserve such heroic ratings from Kane? Of course, I have particularly bad feelings about Robert; John was a mediocre President who failed to accomplish much on his own, but got much of his program enacted into law through the skills of President Lyndon Johnson. But Robert was positively bad. First of all, it was the Robert Kennedy Attorney General's Office that sponsored more illegal wiretaps than any other administration in history, and people who criticized President Richard Nixon for illegal wiretaps usually fail to have the same animus toward RFK — because they're liberals? because RFK was the victim of an assassin's bullet, like his brother 4½ years earlier?

My biggest gripe about RFK was his coming into New York State to take a Senate seat from the man I feel represented me best of all the Senators and Representatives who have represented me in my life — Kenneth Keating. RFK had no connection with New York State (except for having spent a short time in school there) and yet, because the Constitution does not specify a minimum length of time as a resident of a State, RFK was allowed to move to Long Island in New York State a few months before the election. (This provided a precedent, decades later, for Hillary Clinton, but she actually did a reasonable job of representing New York State in the Senate!)

The reference to RFK's (and JFK's) graves at Arlington Cemetery reminds me of something that happened quite a few years ago. Two or three friends of mine from New York came down here, and wanted to go to Arlington to see the two Kennedy graves. I stayed away from those two graves, because I felt that one should show a certain amount of respect for a grave, which, in the case of the two Kennedys, I could not honestly do. So I stayed some distance away, out of sight of the graves, but one of my friends, on the way back to join me, spotted another headstone, which he called my attention to, and which did merit my respect — the name on the stone was Kenneth Barnard Keating! Oddly, Keating's and RFK's graves are not far apart.

The cure is worse than the disease, but then, he doesn't believe there is a disease.

Gregory Kane is a columnist whose column appears in (among others) the Washington Examiner, a newspaper I regularly read. He's one of those rare individuals who is African-American, but politically conservative, and he recently wrote a column that made me gag — not the first I've seen out of him, but one of the worst.

The column is also on the Web, under the title "Worried gays should check out the Pink Pistols." It starts off making a number of anti-gay-rights comments, not horribly surprising since Kane usually agrees with "social conservatives" on the issues where I differ strongly with them, such as gay rights, separation of church and state, etc. (He particularly does not like the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," thinking it's going to lead to lascivious behavior of gay servicemen towards other servicemen, rather a predictable attitude, as ridiculous as that seems.)

But then comes the kicker: He transitions from his anti-gay rhetoric to the following:

What's needed is ... more Pink Pistols chapters nationwide. The Pink Pistols are, far and away, my favorite LGBT organization.

Pink Pistols members don't wait for presidential proclamations or congressional statutes for their protection. Their goal is to protect themselves.

In short, they carry firearms for "self-defense." Just what we need — more gun-toting people who feel they are at risk (sarcasm intentional). I don't know about you, but I don't want to see anyone carrying a gun around (other than a policeman or a military person who needs it to do his/her job) — but anyone who might feel they aren't gaining enough respect? He/she might shoot because of a perceived slight that wasn't real, and aim poorly, and I might be hit just because I'm passing by, even if I have nothing to do with what's going on.

But Kane doesn't think of such things. He just wants the NRA's version of the Second Amendment to apply (his post, on the Web, is even tagged "nra"!) And he doesn't care about danger from guns — he just thinks that as little as he likes gay people, if they can help him make a case for an armed society, he'll use them. To him, guns aren't dangerous. To me, they are. And even though he doesn't seem to care about the discrimination that inheres in "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" he thinks that anti-gay discrimination is just another thing that will go away if people are free to shoot other people on the slightest provocation.

Sorry, Mr. Kane, but this column is a poster case of ideas that meet with my disapproval up and down the line: you're wrong on gay rights, wrong on guns, WRONG!