Knights of Columbus

End of A Horrible Week Ethics Warm-Up, 12/6/2019…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Ho Ho Ho Crap!

1. “Radical? What radical?” Stanford law professor Pam Karlan, who stood out as a neon beacon highlighting 2019 Democratic Party extremism when she turned her House testimony on impeachment into an unhinged, Trump-hate rant including a cheeap shot at Barron Trump’s name, was apparently too radical for Barack Obama, says Legal Insurrection. He appointed far more moderate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, despite Democrats then being in control of both Houses.

“Fast forward to 2019, and this radical Obama SCOTUS reject is a star witness for the Democrat impeachment circus,” the blog notes. “It’s surreal how completely the Democrats have removed themselves from any semblance of rational thought when it comes to their impeachment obsession.”

If we regard the public as the jury and the House Democrats as prosecutors, how can one explain putting such an angry, ugly, biased and partisan fanatic on the metaphorical stand as an “expert witness”? Isn’t that gross incompetence? What’s going on here? In fact, let’s poll it. Who knows, maybe it will draw almost as much interest as the Peloton commercial poll, the second most active in Ethics Alarms history (so far). (But then there were more Google searches on “Peleton” than “impeachment” last week, so we know what American priorities are…)

2. Polls suggest that public opposition to abortion is rising again. Gee, I wonder why?

“Can you believe this?” wrote one on Facebook. “Knights of Columbus Belleville  (all men) organized this absolutely shameful act ….and also posted it on their facebook page.” Erecting a the memorial is shameful. Got it.

Well, they were just warts and parasites, so she has a point.

The National Post reported that the coordinator of a protest over the memorial stone, Elissa Robertson, accused the Catholic charity of “attacking a women’s right to choose,” saying,

“It was designed to shame people. I think it was absolutely uncalled for and that money they put into this anti-abortion monument could have done a lot of good somewhere else. It ties into patriarchal values and this idea that women’s bodies are meant to be controlled by men. It’s a broader issue that ties into violence against women, it ties into health care, it ties into safety.”

It ties into climate change! It ties into racism! It ties into tooth decay!

If one has no regrets or shame about snuffing out nascent human lives, then how does the monument shame you? The abortion argument is very difficult to win on a factual or ethical basis, but advocates have learned that “How dare you!” and “Shut up!” are very effective.

Actress Jameela Jamil certainly isn’t ashamed. She’s refreshingly honest…and scary. In a November Harper’s Bazaar interview with Gloria Steinem, she said,

“I’m very outspoken about the fact that I, similarly to you, feel very passionately about a woman’s right to choose I’m someone who’s had an abortion, and I feel like I need to make sure that we prove it’s not always just emergencies. People have abortions, sometimes a woman just wants her liberty, and we have to normalize that it’s okay just to make that choice for yourself, because your life is as important as a newborn life that doesn’t even exist yet.”

Wait, if it’s not living, then why do you have to kill it? Is it really a fair  to compare your avoiding an inconvenient responsibility or life disruption with another human being losing its life? Challenged on this, the actress responded on social media, “I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID and you’re clueless if you think I’m going to take it back. My life is more important to me than an unborn fetus’s one. Suck on THAT!”

Wait: I thought you said no life was involved.

This is the approximate level of thought, sensitivity and ethical analysis we hear from almost all pro-abortion activists. Basic competence and responsibility rules: if you can’t discuss a topic more articulately and thoughtfully than this, leave the issue to others. Here’s another one of Jamil’s clever arguments:

Or better yet, why not just kill them too? Continue reading →

Religious Bigotry Ethics: Kamala Harris’s Attack On The Knights Of Columbus

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Sounds like monsters to me!

Here is another embarrassing story the mainstream media is shrugging off, presumably because it exposes one more ugly side of the preferred (by many in the media) candidate for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, California Senator Kamala Harris. In truth, journalists do Democrats no favors when they cover for them like this: it makes the Democrats being shielded careless, it makes them reckless, it makes them stupid and unable to disguise their extremism and  ruthlessness.

Yes, it makes them into Hillary Clinton.

In recent judicial nominee hearings, Harris teamed up with Sen. Mazie Hirono–she’s the Certified Silly Person who said that Democrats have a hard time connecting with voters because Democrats are too “smart” and “know so much,” you know, like Mazie—but she couldn’t be elected dog-catcher outside of Hawaii, so I’m not going to bother using this episode to further prove what is already proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Yes, she is an idiot. Harris, however, is supposed to be brilliant, plus she’s a lawyer, she’s black, and she’s woke.

Before Christmas, Harris, along with Hirono, attacked judicial nominee Brian Buesche for belonging to the Knights of Columbus, the venerable Catholic social and charitable organization founded in 1882. Senator Harris  demanded that Bunche, seeking confirmation for  a U.S. district court judgeship, end his membership in that organization and recuse himself from cases in which it has taken a position. In other words, being Catholic disqualifies individuals for federal judgeships. Strange, I thought we put this bigotry to bed when Jack Kennedy made a campaign speech promising that he wouldn’t take orders from the Pope.

The Knights, say the two Senators (but let’s concentrate on the Woman Who Would Be President, Harris), assert that the Knights have taken “extreme positions,” meaning that they follow the Catholic Church’s doctrinal opposition to abortion and gay marriage. I don’t see how anyone can interpret the Senators’ position as anything but anti-religion bigotry.  Writes Ramesh Ponnuru,

Support for the traditional definition of marriage is not an extreme position; it is held by roughly a third of all Americans. It was certainly not an “extreme position” at the time of Proposition 8: The initiative won 52 percent of the vote in one of the most liberal states in the country, the same day that state voted overwhelmingly to make Barack Obama president…If Harris and Hirono want to maintain that all judicial nominees must support abortion, beyond just saying that they will respect existing law, then they should just say that there are scores of millions of Christians they would never allow on the federal bench on account of their beliefs.

In 2017, Senator Diane Feinstein hinted of rising Democratic anti-religious hostility, or perhaps more transparent hostility, when she seemed to look askance at Judge Amy Coney Barrett membership in the Catholic Church, observing darkly, “the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern.” Continue reading →