SelwynDuke.com

Sex-selective Abortions and the Anti-choice People Who Oppose Them

By Selwyn Duke

It seems that all abortion is equal.

But some varieties are more equal than others.

In Britain, where even Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher was iron-hearted enough to vote for abortion, authorities have found a type of abortion they will not abide: that based on sex.

While such abortions have long been illegal in the U.K., an undercover investigation by the Daily Telegraph found abortionists willing to perform them at three of nine abortion mills investigated. Writes the paper, “Doctors at British clinics have been secretly filmed agreeing to terminate foetuses purely because they are either male or female. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such ‘sex-selection’ procedures.”

The paper cites two examples — more information will be released tomorrow — one involving a woman who didn’t want her girl for “social reasons” and another who wanted to kill her unborn boy because she “already had a son.” 

Read the rest here.

When Conservatives Wax Liberal: Is Sex a Qualification?

By Selwyn Duke

Is it a conservative position that only women are qualified to comment on abortion?  A writer named Leann Horrocks certainly seems to think so.

In an American Thinker piece titled, "Contraception, the New Useful Passion," Horrocks does make some good points about how the left could turn the birth-control issue to its advantage and expand contraception to include even abortion.  Yet she also makes this claim:

"As a woman, I am qualified to state the following very clearly: there is no issue less suited to public discussion than abortion.  Like it or not, it is a personal decision."

Are Conservatives with Ginsburg or the Founders on the Constitution?

By Selwyn Duke

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Egypt recently that she “would not look to the U.S. Constitution if [she] were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” it was no surprise.  In that the Constitution militates against a nanny state and preserves a status quo, it is by its very nature a conservative document.  This is why liberals hate it so.  And, as the power of the left grows via their control over the culture, their teeth and contempt for the Constitution are displayed ever more (see Obama, Barack et al.).  But what of conservatives?

Some may say that I need not ask; as reflected in the rise of the Tea Party and Ron Paul, constitutionalism is all the rage.  In truth, though, while conservatives generally mean well, most just play at constitutionalism.

The Link between the Contraception Issue and Islam

By Selwyn Duke

While I’m sure Barack Obama loves to stick it to traditional religious institutions any way he can, he certainly doesn’t want to stick it to himself in the process. This is why I’m fairly sure he and his advisors didn’t anticipate that his contraception mandate would result in a knock-down, drag-out fight with the most powerful religious institution in the world. I think they miscalculated, and the reason why brings me to a link between the contraception issue and Islam.

What is it? Simply this: The modern, secular-environment-weaned man is largely incapable of grasping the devoutly religious mindset.

This is especially true of the atheistic, as the relativistic man is incapable of grasping an absolutist mindset.

To the relativistic liberal, and please forgive the redundancy, situational values reign supreme; that is, until they’re deposed by the next week’s values. Everything is negotiable, and there is nothing worth dying for because there’s nothing larger than themselves, nothing more enduring than this life, nothing transcending taste. And a mentality that truly believes otherwise seems fantastical to them.

Read the rest here.

Samuel L. Jackson Drops the Act: Admits He Only Voted for Obama because of Race

By Selwyn Duke

Hey, Jackson, is it Samuel L. or Jesse?  Actually, it’s more likely that the actor was channeling Jeremiah Wright.

In a racial-epithet-laced interview with Ebony magazine, the Pulp Fiction star proved that his politics is a fiction and his head is filled with, well, you fill in the blank.  Jackson admitted that he only voted for Barack Obama because of the president’s skin color.  Said the actor, “I voted for Barack because he was black.  ‘Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people – because they look like them.  That’s American politics, pure and simple.  [Obama’s] message didn’t mean **** to me.”

How to Win the Marriage Debate: The Flaw in the Ninth Circuit’s (and Most Everyone Else’s) Reasoning

By Selwyn Duke

The big news on the culture-war front is a federal court’s striking down of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment protecting marriage.  In a two-to-one ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote, “The people may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry.”  

Now, I’m not sure why the judges mention a “disfavored group,” as if singling out a “favored” one for unequal treatment would be okay.  As far as I know, the 14^th Amendment, on which the court based its ruling, doesn’t offer equal protection to only those the current fashions deem “disfavored.”  Thus, I think this is an example of emotionalism influencing a ruling and its language, sort of as if a judge sentenced a defendant and, adding an adjective, announced him as “stupid” Mr. Smith.  Calling a group “disfavored” is similarly a subjective judgment.  This is not the only thing the judges were subjective about, however.

Obama, Contraception, and Freedom of Association: Constitutional Guys Finish Last

By Selwyn Duke

It’s ironic that it is Barack Obama now ramming a contraception policy down Catholics’ and other Americans’ throats. Little more than a month ago, former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos spent 10 minutes in a Republican debate grilling presidential contenders Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney on, of all things, contraception.

What inspired the bizarre questions? First, Santorum is a practicing Catholic who doesn’t believe in the use of artificial birth control. Second, responding to a query from ABC’s Jake Tapper about a week prior to the debate, Santorum reiterated a constitutional fact: States have a right to ban contraception should they so choose.

To place the matter in further perspective for Tapper, Santorum gave the example of the Texas sodomy law overturned by the Supreme Court. Santorum said that he personally wouldn’t support the law, but nonetheless, states have a right to pass such legislation. He then criticized the judicial activism that overturns these laws and pointed out that, if the people find such a law unjust, the proper way to seek redress is through their state legislatures. This, my friends, is Constitutionalism 101.

For having the temerity to grasp and explain the supreme law of our land, Santorum was portrayed as the second coming of Tomás de Torquemada.

Read the rest here.

High-school Shocker: Lesson Sheet Elevates Communism over “Capitalism”

By Selwyn Duke

When parent Jeff Travis saw a lesson sheet his son received in social studies class, he was shocked. Using propaganda that could have been disgorged by the KGB, the flier seemed to elevate communism over “capitalism.”

Distributed in Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, the lesson sheet includes a cartoon (portion shown below) that purports to illustrate the differences between the two systems. In the left panel are two unhappy-looking workers with balls and chains tied to their ankles who toil away on one side of a machine while all the profit spills out the other side into a bag held by a smiling, stogie-smoking, portly business owner in a hat. It is labeled “Capitalism — In theory.” In the right panel, communism is presented “in theory” with two smiling workers standing relaxed at the same machine while all the profit comes back their way.

Moreover, the poorly written, error-riddled worksheet relates the following (mis)information to the students:

Read the rest here.

A Beating and Racial Slurs – but No Hate-crime Charges

By Selwyn Duke

Ah, the left-wing capacity for rationalization knows no bounds.  While we’re told that even substantive criticism of Barack Obama is driven by the hatefulness the left has dubbed “racism,” a racial attack by three black teenagers on two white men in Philadelphia a couple of Mondays ago is , somehow, not.

Consider the scenario, and then tell me why we even have “hate-crime” laws.  Wrote Stephanie Farr at Philly.com:

About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.

The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said.

The cab driver, Brian Goldman, then exited his vehicle, perhaps to lend assistance, at which point the passenger ran off and the thugs turned their racial wrath on the cabbie.  Despite the three-on-one odds and having suffered some physical injuries, Goldman was able to retrieve a tire iron from his trunk, at which point the brave lads ran off.  They were later apprehended by the police.

Obama the Polarizer: The Most Divisive President Ever?

By Selwyn Duke

President G.W. Bush might very well have been sincere when he proclaimed, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” but it nevertheless was boilerplate political rhetoric. Barack Obama, too, campaigned on the idea of uniting our nation. It’s an interesting fantasy.

But the reality is quite different. Recent polls show that if we’re to measure a President’s unitive capacity based on how divided opinion on him is, Obama is the most polarizing Commander-in-Chief in history. Writes The Washington Post, “For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever.” The President also registered the highest partisan gaps on record for his first and second years in office, 65 and 68 percent, respectively.

Adding perspective, however, the Post points out how this simply hews to recent divided-electorate trends, with seven of the 10 years with the largest presidential approval gaps having occurred since 2004. Writes the paper, “Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.”

Of course, it should be noted that Bush and Obama weren’t operating on the same playing field. You’re going to seem a lot more divisive when the whole of the mainstream media — from which liberals generally draw their (mis)information — agitates against you 24/7/365, as was Bush’s fate. As for Obama, his definition of unity may be a bit different from everyone else’s. This is the man who said that middle-American voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment…,” who thumbed his nose at the Senate and made recess appointments when that body wasn’t actually in recess, who used underhanded tactics to buy passage of unconstitutional ObamaCare and who appointed avowed communists to office. He also essentially said that Latinos should view other Americans as enemies and imprudently took the side of black college professor Henry Louis Gates against white Cambridge police officers. In the same vein, when he could have stood up and shown that he really was President of all the people and enjoyed a political win-win situation in the process, he instead dropped a voting-rights case against Black Panthers who were brazenly intimidating white Philadelphia voters in 2008.

Read the rest here.