Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

see "Sex Ed for Kindergarteners 'Right Thing to Do,' Says Obama" (ABC News, 7/18/07)
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/07/sex-ed-for-kind.html

Much has been made in recent hours about Senator Barack Obama’s call for sex education for kindergarteners which he made at a Planned Parenthood event on Tuesday. But of the several notable position statements made by Obama during his presentation, that was probably the least objectionable.

Obama qualified his support for sex education by calling for it to be “age appropriate” which for 6-year old children might be as simple as pointing out that there is such thing as “inappropriate touching” or that “babies do not come from the stork”. While I would make every effort to ensure that such life lessons reach my children via good parenting rather than Big Nanny schooling and while the suggestion for this sort of education represents yet another example of Democrats’ belief that it takes a village rather than it takes a parent, it is at least not patently unconstitutional or dangerous to our Republic’s foundation as a nation of laws.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Obama’s two other deep thoughts on Tuesday were in fact unconstitutional and dangerous.

First, Obama called for universal health care including government-funded abortion (after Elizabeth Edwards, speaking for her husband, initiated that suggestion in front of the audience.) Obama simply called it “reproductive-health services”, but, according to the Chicago Tribune, a spokesman for Obama said that included abortion.

Let me be very clear here, particularly for people who do not read my writing on a regular basis: I am not a social conservative and I am pro-choice. But the idea of government-funded abortion is perilously close to aborting our constitution…and a very messy late-term abortion at that.

There is no constitutional right to health care, nor any federal authority to provide health care. I am not naïve; I realize that most of what the federal government does it does not have authority to do. But most of what it does also does not have a better than 50% chance of actually bankrupting the government. For those of you not paying close attention, the already existing item which will bankrupt the government if massive changes are not made is Medicare (which makes Social Security’s problems look miniscule.) So the government’s initial foray into health care which is theoretically only for a fraction of the population is already going to destroy our nation’s finances if it is not cut back tremendously. President Bush’s unconscionable prescription drug benefit only made the problem worse; it created the single largest unfunded mandate in our history.

I often think that Democrat elites are truly out of touch with the American people, though I may just be projecting since they are clearly out of touch with me. But do they truly believe that the majority of Americans want socialized medicine? Just a couple small statistics which should be enough to convince even the “rationally ignorant” electorate that we don’t need to import British medical policy: For a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, the chance of dying from the disease is more than twice as high in England as in the US. Similar statistics exist for most cancers and other major diseases. Tens of thousands of medical procedures are cancelled annually in England because by the time the patient is able to get the procedure, he or she has gotten too sick to be able to risk the surgery or to be helped by it. And doctors in England report very low levels of job satisfaction, to the surprise of no American doctor but apparently to the surprise of every Democratic candidate for President. How much do you yearn to be treated by a doctor who hates his job?

Including government-funded abortion as a campaign plank is a travesty. Although I do not believe abortion is murder, a substantial percentage of Americans do. It is simply unacceptable to force so many to pay for something they consider to be a sin. Furthermore, government-funded abortion is unnecessary, and particularly from the federal government. States, or more preferably private charities, are more than capable of funding such activities for those who truly can not afford it themselves. And if an anti-abortion person lives in a state which uses tax dollars to fund abortion, it is much easier for him or her to move to another state than it is to move to another country.

The other frightening statement made by Obama was on the subject of Supreme Court justice nominations. According to a Reuters story, “Obama said he would look into the heart of a potential Supreme Court nominee. ‘We need somebody who's got the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teen-aged mom,’ he said.”

Let me get this straight: Obama wants to appoint to what is conceivably the most important political/judicial body in the world someone whose primary qualifications must include being able to think like an ignorant, reckless, irresponsible, and possibly accident-prone person who is not old enough to drive or to vote. Hmmmm….imagine the quality of majority opinion written by that person. Well, we might not have to imagine too hard since we do have Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer for whom “empathy” seems to trump both logic and the rule of law. They could be like the big sister and big brother of the 15-year-old-intellectual-equivalent Obama selection. Like the wise 17-year old, full of life experience, telling the younger sibling how not to get caught drinking daddy’s beer in the back seat of the car steaming up the windows. There is a reason neither of these characters is given adult responsibilities, much less thought of as a role model for the Supreme Court of the United States.

I suppose it is not surprising that a man who repeatedly demonstrates a complete and utter lack of the meaning and importance of the Constitution does not care about appointing Supreme Court justices capable of honoring their (and Obama’s) oaths to protect and defend that Constitution. What will be surprising if Americans are politically stupid and economically suicidal enough to elect someone as fundamentally anti-American (due to his obvious ignorance of all that America truly is) as Barack Obama.