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Let's Talk About Arrogance & the Heavy Hand of the State

by: William Tucker

Fri Sep 23, 2011 at 16:40:41 PM EDT

When the Executive Council refused to renew a contract with Planned Parenthood to provide family planning services for low-income New Hampshire families, the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in and awarded a replacement grant.

Councilors Raymond Wieczorek and David Wheeler, who voted to reject the Planned Parenthood contract, expressed outrage over the federal government's "heavy hand" and arrogance in overriding the Council's position. The Valley News takes them to task:

Let's talk about arrogance. Three councilors voted to deny a respected nonprofit the grant money on which it relies to provide free and subsidized health services, including contraception, cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
By opposing not only the state contract with Planned Parenthood but also the federal role in providing assistance for family planning, the executive councilors betray their real intent. They seek to prevent women from having abortions, and they are trying to hobble one of the country's leading abortion providers. ...

Executive councilors ... think they know what's best for women, whose legal right to an abortion is being threatened all over the country.

Talk about the heavy hand of the state.
William Tucker :: Let's Talk About Arrogance & the Heavy Hand of the State
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Let's Talk About Arrogance & the Heavy Hand of the State | 2 comments
The Executive Councilors (4.00 / 3)
were quick to criticize the federal Government for awarding federal funds directly.

But the Councilors themselves overruled the duly elected NH Legislature when they refused to spend the funds already allocated in the state budget.

No conflict there.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. --Marcus Aurelius, courtesy of Paul Berch

Once more. (0.00 / 0)
The abortion of fertilized embryos is a spontaneous organic process which occurs in response to the majority of the resulting cell clusters, either before or shortly after implantation, because the organism detects some fatal flaw. Flaws which might be fatal to the organism itself seem to receive somewhat less notice, perhaps because throughout all of nature, the reproduction of the next generation rather routinely involves the demise of the parent. Live births and dead mothers are not an unusual combination in humans, either. Which leaves us with the indisputable conclusion that what we refer to as pregnancy is an inherently hazardous condition. To coerce a person to undergo such a condition and/or to deprive her of appropriate medical assistance is a crime.
Crime, in essence, is a deprivation of rights. That we have a long history of depriving humans of their rights under cover of law does not change the fact that it's a crime.  Legal crime is still crime.  
Considering that the deprivation of speech by members of the military (DADT) was declared legal as recently as 1993, we can only conclude that the impulse to use the law as an instrument of deprivation persist. If one right can't be deprived with impunity, another is targeted.

Subordinating a living person's right to life to a bundle of parasitic cells is actually quite consistent with the historical predilection for subordinating persons to things. Subordinating a woman to a bundle of her own cells is rather clever.  Nevertheless, a fetus is not a person until it breathes air. An inseminating male may claim a property right and the law may even recognize it. But, coercion is still a crime, a deprivation of liberty.

To repeat, subordinating human rights to property rights is not new, but it is still wrong. Males do not have a right to reproduce because they lack the capacity -- a lack which also relieves them of the attendant risk.

Let's Talk About Arrogance & the Heavy Hand of the State | 2 comments

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