In this, the sixth of an eight-part weekly point/counterpoint-style debate, Theo Warner and Brock Lawley continue by considering death and abortion from their respective positions. Secondly, Theo and Brock also respond to each other’s articles from last. Next week, the debate continues with an article entitled “The Person and the Family.” Next week will also include a response and rebuttal to this week’s articles. Your comments are appreciated.
This week, I will discuss (I) abortion (II) euthanasia, and (III) the death penalty.
(I) Abortion. There are three points in pregnancy which interest us: (1) moments after conception, (2) some arbitrary point between conception and birth and (3) moments before birth. Liberals and Conservatives agree and are confident that moments before birth, a full-term fetus is viable and should be protected. Any attempt to illegalize abortion outright, however, presumes as much certainty about the status of a zygote, moments after conception. Such certainty typically emerges from religion. It can respected in private morality, but not by government in its laws. And failing any other basis to establish personhood and the ensuing rights of a fetus in the moments after conception, abortion is an option and choice of the woman. Liberals, therefore, defer to an arbitrary point between conception and birth, thus establishing the only way to protect the clear rights of a full-term fetus and the clear rights of women.
No basis of establishing the personhood of a fetus or asserting its rights has been offered, but were it, it would need to be compelling because the interests women have in preserving their right to have an abortion are also compelling. The arguments here are several and I will simply enumerate them and leave their full expounding for another occasion: (1) diseases can be detected and then prevented by abortion (2) legalized abortion makes abortion safe; illegalized abortion makes abortion unsafe and results in the deaths of thousands of women each year (3) unwanted pregnancies increase crime because (a) poor woman are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies and are less able to care for a child and (b) unwanted babies are more likely to become criminals and (4) abortion allows women to accomplish a biological equality with men.
(II) Euthanasia. Liberty insists that the dignity of human autonomy extends to ending suffering by ending life. Indeed, it is repugnant to liberty to suggest that in a moment of such importance, the moment we approach our own death, in which our character is most tested, government should be the defining authority of what we cannot do. Liberalism is opposed to government interference in private lives.
(III) The death penalty. Today, the death penalty is a racist and biased policy and, for that reason alone, should be placed on a moratorium until its inequalities can be addressed by legislatures. Despite this happenstance, however, the philosophical issue continues to divide Conservatives and Liberals. Criminals, of course, forfeit their liberties but we know that not all liberties can be forfeited. Criminals cannot forfeit their freedom from torture, not can society justly demand it. The absurdity that emerges from a system which cannot torture but can kill a criminal suggests that the death penalty cannot exist in a free society. Likewise, it emerges from a primitive, backward-looking, and retributive ethic.But, we know that our desire to exact the same crime on those who hurt us leads to what Dr. King called “a descending spiral.” The death penalty asks us to ignore our responsibility to the humanity of the guilty and listen only to our lesser instincts.
ROE V. WADE has always been a house built upon shifting sand as far as constitutional law is concerned. Judge Bork best articulated this when he said “there is no basis in the constitution for the privacy right” which has become the false foundational basis for the right to abort life for over thirty years. Bork correctly argued that because the constitution is silent on the issue of privacy, so should the Supreme Court. When the courts begin creating concepts what they are really doing is rewriting the constitution.
The issue of abortion should have never been decided by a bunch of lawyers. The issue should be decided democratically, by the state legislatures. In fact the American people have long been hijacked by the issue of abortion. This explains the deep seated feelings of animosity that surround Roe v. Wade. The overwhelming majority of Americans are not in favor of unlimited abortions. This is exactly why pro abortion advocates deeply fear a democratic solution to the issue. They know that if put to a vote, the American people will not adhere to their death agenda.
I steer clear of using the word pro-choice for I too am pro-choice. I think the choice should always be life. How dare someone tell a woman what she can and can’t do with her own body, right? This is the classic and most persuasive argument for Roe .v Wade, but is it a sound argument? Can a woman choose to use her body to steal without legal consequence? Can she legally use her body to do drugs? Can she even legally use her body to prostitute for money? The truth is there is already standing legal precedent governing what women can and can not do with her body. So what about the other feeble arguments defending Roe v. Wade? According to the now disgraced planed parenthood, only three percent of all abortion cases have anything to do with a women’s heath. Only another three percent are the consequence of the baby having health problems. Less than one percent is a result of rape of any kind. So what about the other 93 percent? We all know the truth is that they’re the result of millions of people escaping the consequences of careless and reckless sexual behavior.
Life begins at conception. It has never been proven otherwise. If the fetus is human life, that trumps any argument you can make about the individual freedom of the mother. If that is the truth, and make no mistake life does begin at conception, then what we are dealing with in this country is complete and total genocide every year. It is our basic human responsibility to preserve the life of the unborn. Not to do so is appalling.
What if tomorrow the courts made it legal to kill any infant under the age of 90 days? What if a few Judges in ceremonial dress arbitrarily declared that life didn’t begin until the first human word was spoken? What if until that utterance you could legally kill. There would be rightful revolt the next day. Our collective conscience has been numbed! Roe v. Wade is beyond bad law; it is the battle for the right to kill.
Below, Brock Lawley and Theo Warner offer their responses to last week’s article: “The American Classroom.”
Not a great round for me, I admit.
I was hoping to direct the conversation towards Conservative anti-intellectualism, one of the most troubling features of both this debate and the obnoxious movement of Conservatives today which seem to be in rebellion against the Republican institution. Instead, we talked about vouchers, a topic which really doesn’t interest me.
Nevertheless, there seemed to be several questions that we considered this week. (1) Are schools really so bad? (2) Will vouchers really result in competition? (3) If they did, is it really good? (4) Can a voucher system possibly be fair? (5) Can government abdicate its responsibility to educate?
(1) The condition of schools in America today is difficult to assess. In part, I’m convinced that those who point to low test scores don’t fully appreciate the purpose of education, which is not to produce high test scores. It is not even to educate children well. Children, of course, have the choice to be educated poorly and many make that choice freely. And, the precise nature of a children’s education (vocational schools, for example) also make test scores a relatively poor measure of the nation’s educational system. I will concede that America’s schools are in need of improvements, but Brock depicts schools as meat unfit for a dog. There\’s something unrealistic in that appraisal.
(2) Vouchers will not result in competition. A competition could only exist if students were equally desirable. Private schools certainly do not desire students equally. And government cannot compel that equality without destroying private schools.
(3) Competition is generally good. We don’t incentivize everything, though. Would a private police force be better for us than a public police force? Or a private fire-fighting force? Or private libraries and hospitals? These experiments have always failed us in the past. We understand that while competition is good for sports teams or good in business, collaboration is also good. Between libraries, collaboration is better than competition. Hospitals that share expensive equipment serve more people than those who compete. If we create a system in which schools compete, can we accept that it will therefore be good that some schools will fail?
(4) Vouchers will almost certainly result in religious schools being funded at taxpayer expense.
(5) Finally, a voucher system asks government to abdicate its responsibility to educate. As much as private schools are the right of the wealthy to create and sustain, it is only public schools that counter to economic exclusivity of private schools; the danger is that education could become a property of the aristocracy — government has an interest in preventing this. And it cannot abdicate that interest or its responsibility.
The last essay from my challenger showed more skill in the art of the dodge than one might expect from a heavyweight prize fighter. I do not blame him for falling back on heel or shifting focus. Liberalism has left him nothing but whitewashed tombs to defend in the area of education. After exposing his empty arsenal, he elected to accuse conservatives of being anti-intellectual. “What has entered the Conservative movement is an anti-intellectualism. “And, because we are discussing education, I accuse Conservatives of the ilk described above as being fundamentally disinterested in improving American education.” This is ducking, bobbing, and weaving that would make Mike Tyson proud.
My opponent claims “here in this Conservatism, we find the first political philosophy that openly rejects academia and the tools of modern science.” This is pure nonsense. He hopes this will simply nod the head of the average liberal drone bee, leaving his words never to be pollinated. Theo is representative of so many on the left with such a statement. They’ve become so accustom to adorning a self-appointed intellectual crown they fail to ask if they even have a kingdom.
Karl Marx shared Theo’s elitism. He called it “the blaze of ideas” that would set whole nations on fire and consume whole generations. Consume them they did! Theo’s rhetoric is undoubtably referring to the conservative failure to bow at the feet of those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas. Whether such ideas or their creators have made those around them better or worse is a question the left never asks. To do so would leave them challenged to find a bloodthirsty tyrant of the 20th century not supported, aided and beloved by the leading “intellectuals” of the time. This would prove true when looking not only at the “intellectuals” in the despots own country but in faraway democracies where “intellectuals” were free to speak ill of such horrors.
The worth of such “Intellectuals” in a free society is needed but greatly exaggerated by Theo and the Left. Their intangible ideas are judged in soundness only by other intellectuals; such intellectual inbreeding is the reason we so often hear the echos of clear historical failure leaving their lips.
The vast majority of scientific, economic and societal achievements of the 20th century were not the achievement of “intellectuals” in the way my challenger would certainly define them.
The Wright brothers in no way resembled the upper-east-side variety that would undoubtably cause my opponent to blush. Neither were the conquers of polio, or the creators of the electronic revolution we now navigate. No, these people were the producers of the real, the tangible, the product or service. Such men and women were measured by what produced results. A ruler by which modern “intellectuals” will not dare allow themselves to be measured. Such a measurement of guided and useful intellect embodies the conservative spirit of entrepreneurship, ingenuity and handwork. Let the Left have Marx.
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