Morality

Here in NH, the Executive Council refused to fund a $1.8 Million contract with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England on a 3-2 vote – Ray Burton and Chris Sunnunu decided to vote to give the money to the abortion providers. Indiana has also voted to follow suit; the complaints are already beginning to pour in: how dare you refuse to make me responsible for myself?  A court battle (seemingly similar to that levied by ACORN when the Feds cut off their funding – they lost) has been filed by PP and the Obama Administration and the sob stories are starting to be put out:

Nicole Robbins, a 31-year-old single mother who has been a Planned Parenthood client for six years, said she had intended to visit a Planned Parenthood clinic in Indianapolis on Tuesday to pick up a 2-month supply of birth control pills. Then, the Medicaid recipient learned that the more than $100,000 in private donations the group had raised since May 10 had dried up.

The Ivy Tech Community College student from Indianapolis who is pursuing a physical therapy degree said she’s not sure how she’ll pay for her birth control.

“There are a lot of people who don’t have jobs, who don’t have income, and Medicaid is their only source of income as far as health insurance,” she said. “I feel like I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

I do not know if she was married or not.  If the former, I do not know if her husband left her or the other way around.  But the point that sticks out quickly is that she believes that others should be responsible for her sexuality, that any consequences from her personal behavior is not hers to bear.  Yes, I’m old school…

Read more

My response to Lee Matos’ Letter to the Editor:

Mr. Matos makes what I consider an immoral plea at the beginning of his Letter, send tax money to my employer, but for a moral good: charitable works.  Helping people is always a moral good but should ask: is forcing people to do so a moral act itself?  For the charity’s good intentions, I twice am made out to be immoral: first for apparently being a skinflint (being a member of that committee) and not wishing to help people and secondarily, taken to woodshed for NOT doing what I consider an immoral act.

In a larger sense, I must act immorally by giving my assent to the taking of more of someone else’s private property (their money) than otherwise necessary (in supporting Lee Matos’s charity). For doing this on a street corner, this forceful taking (often called stealing), I would be correctly labeled a thief.  As a politician doing so, (or even as a voter) I am called a "good man".  Dichotomy, anyone?

This really is not about charitable giving (by definition, as paying a tax bill is not a charitable act) but is all about my respect for the property of others.  How can I, in good conscience, recommend that property taxes be raised beyond what is absolutely necessary, and over which good folks in Gilford would have no recourse, to send money to a charity to which they otherwise might not give?  How is that morally correct, to take that which is not mine to give? 

Or is it a case of "the ends justifies the means"? 

When all of the arguments for and against such actions are cleared away like leaves on a fall day…

Read more

(H/T: RightWingNews)

Many on the Left, the Progressives and the Socialists, wish to do away with capitalism.  Always, they run down the excesses of the capitalistic system and that it does not treat all people fairly.  They lie.

Their goal is to get YOU to believe as they do: that our capitalistic economic system is the same as a moral system.  They decry inequity in that some seem to benefit more than others.  They decry and infer that Capitalists only benefit by screwing over the poor.  Thus, they say that capitalism is a failed moral system because of this and MUST be thrown away and be replaced by one that is guided by technocrats that dispassionately decide what needs to be done by who and how much to have an ‘efficient society’.  And this is different from fascism (another name for state corporatism) – how? 

Failed moral system?  The whole premise is wrong from the get go – they just don’t want you to question it.  They want you to believe that…

Read more

"…We are entering the Third Stage of Liberalism – freedom from responsibility…"

I gotta hand it to him, he keeps on trying.  Not sure he succeeded – certainly not with me – he decided to go almost full frontal Libertarian, problem is, I’m not a Libertarian.  While I wrote a reaction already, let me switch to fisking mode here:

Skip, bad decisions that harm no one but oneself should not land someone in jail. Why should (example) cocaine or heroin be illegal when you can get a legal prescription for oxycotton?

Let’s try the fact that we are back to the Rule of Law no longer applies here?  This is often why Libertarians just don’t get elected to anything – it is just too far outside the norm for most that this question just gets the rolled eye looks.

Why should we be putting pot users in jail for something that grows freely in the wild? Nor should I have to foot the bill for it either. This is a conservative pro-liberty group right?

You don’t want to pay for the jail time for dope smokers?  Simple – instead of merely pouting – do the hard work and change the law.  Simple.

As a libertarian, I don’t believe in democracy. This country was founded as a Constitutionally-limited Republic and people were recognized as having inalienable rights – that which they don’t have to ask permission of the state to exercise. A democracy is 50% plus 1 voting to deny said rights to those in the minority. I referred the 9th Amendment to you and you must have totally overlooked it. One’s right to privacy, drug use or any other harmless, voluntary act is covered there by default.

While I will admit that there are a lot of freedoms that have been curtailed, he just destroys his own argument by invoking Godwin’s Law with the start of his following paragraph.  There is just so much with this paragraph that is just plain awful:

Regarding this being a nation of laws: Nazi Germany was a nation of laws so was it ok to…

Read more

Like I said, there was a response – that the Republicans have social costs too:

Skip,

GOP social issues cost me money too you know… Like the drug war for instance. 1st I have to pay to incarcerate people with personal problems which diverts money from policing real crimes, then they have records which prevent them from getting good jobs when they get out for the rest of their lives – causing lots of recidivism. Then, I have to pay again for them violating probation/parole and/or finance them on welfare and other state programs like healthcare. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’m sure the GOP social issues are pretty steep. I say this as a BA in criminal justice and private investigator. Are we still the live free or die state? It’s not fiscally conservative in the least to blow money left and right on the drug war – which has been the biggest failure in recent history. Let’s put the 9th Amendment in perspective and legalize all drugs – thus driving down the price of said drugs so users wouldn’t have to steal and break into cars to pay the highly inflated prices. The economics of the drug war tells the big picture. Oh, and Jesus said that he who is w/o sin may cast the 1st stone. If you agree with these sentiments, then I have nothing further to say.

Read that again, and see if you picked up what I did; the reasons why Progressives spend other people’s money is FAR different than what the Republicans do – and what he was decrying.  

I decided to enlighten the fellow – especially on the Biblical reference:

The "Live Free or Die" State motto pretty much depends on a couple of things:

• people acting responsibly, and when they don’t,
• THEY solely bear the consequences.

I no longer believe that the population percentage of the first and the actions of the State in the second, allow this to be a truism.  Proof?  Look at the budget – not even legislators are responsible enough with other people’s money.

Here’s the problem –

Read more

People haven’t learned that I am usually, along with Rush Limbaugh (heh!), just a loveable little fuzzball.  Sure, I love to discuss candidates and issues and policies with vigor, but when someone crosses the line and decides to make it personal, well, I generally don’t much take kindly to that, and he did:

Well Skip, I hope to God that you never have a kid that makes a mistake by getting involved with drugs, then goes to jail and has a record that follows him for life. It’s pretty cold that you’re so pompous as to endorse putting people in jail that have problems and not allowing them to sort themselves out. Likely, you’re ignorant of what it’s like to get yourself of drugs and surely you must know that jail won’t help.. In jail, people brush elbows with violent people and thus they aren’t rehabilitated for the outside. They just become worse. Jesus had love and compassion for problematic people and he wouldn’t throw them to the wolves like you apparently…

Sigh….you can imagine the response:

• You sound like Obama: "I don’t want my daughters punished with a baby" if they were to make a conscious decision to have unprotected sex.  Decisions have consequences.
• You sound like a Liberal who believes that bad decisions should not have consequences – breaking that natural feedback that teaches people "don’t do that". Decisions have consequences.
• You sound like an anarchist who does not believe in one of the Pillars of Democracy – The Rule of Law. Decisions have consequences.

Actions and decisions have consequences whether you like it or not – sometimes, 

Read more

Yet another email thread where I spent time discussing / emailing instead of blogging. The context started off talking about the "Bathroom Bill" that the Democrats tried to steamroll through here in NH as a sop to the LGBT (er, what initials did I deliberately forget this time – I’m JUST so un-PC  <smirk>) haters (hey, they use the word for just about anyone that says the slightest thing in disagreement with their social agenda; I refuse to cede the use of that word to them anymore).  Rightfully so, that bill was critized highly for being a social issue instead of addressing the main NH issue – the fiscal black hole that the Dems were casting the State into. And being a Conservative, fiscal and social issues concern me and I believe that this subset of an email thread shows how a concentration on a purely Fiscal Issue theme to lower spending can actually be self-defeating.  Plus, I have no intentions of allowing the Progressives sole purview of setting the Public Morality, without a fight, that they will force me to change my private morality.  They’ve been doing it for decades (if not for a century) drip by drip; it’s time to plug that hole.

It starts with this (Tell me what you think, will ya?):

Sometimes there is a lot of heat about bills that don’t matter (like the ‘bathroom’ bill) and now the budget looms.  The NHGOP should have been talking about the budget since day 1.

and someone else agreed:

I would have to agree with <redacted>. Not that I have my finger on the pulse in a big way or anything, but it seemed like a lot of the talk seemed to focus on the bathroom bill and gay marriage and not as much on the budget as I would have liked.

Of course, I could not help myself and decided to wade in – but also tried to turn the discussion to what really matters:

Read more

Guest post by Andy Sanborn – small business owner and candidate for NH Senate, District 7, and has been endorsed by GraniteGrok because of stances such as this:

Governor Lynch says stealing is OK, just don’t take a lot, but if you do steal and get caught, don’t worry, the State will take care of you…  As a business owner, employer and someone who believes we should maintain a rational moral code, I can’t wrap my arms around this latest law enacted by our Governor and the legislature in Concord.  For anyone who wonders if our current crop of leaders in Concord is out of touch, maybe this is the hand in the cookie jar, so to speak.

This is just another perfect example of how twisted the perception of right and wrong is in Concord, and why so many of us want to see a change in this disappointing leadership.

Last week, the Governor signed Bill HB1168 into law, effective September 6, which will force business owners to reward employees caught stealing.  The law, filed under RSA 282-A: 35 states that an employee only commits “Gross Misconduct” if they steal more than $500 from their employer.  So, under this new law, if an employer fires an employee for stealing, the State will allow that employee to collect unemployment checks, of which that money comes from a tax assessment of all business owners in the State.

And, it’s not just if an employee steals from the boss, same thing if an employee is caught stealing from a customer, another employee or the cancer donation jar on the counter.

Until now…

Read more