I’m not at all comfortable with this. Doctors and nurses who are morally against abortion should not have to worry about their job security, something President Bush understood well.
President Barack Obama wants to rescind a Bush administration rule that strengthened job protections for doctors and nurses who refuse for moral reasons to perform abortions.
[. . .]
Federal law has long forbidden discrimination against health care professionals who refuse to perform abortions or provide referrals for them on religious or moral grounds. The Obama administration supports those laws, said the HHS official.
The Bush administration’s rule adds a requirement that institutions that get federal money certify their compliance with laws protecting the rights of moral objectors. It was intended to block the flow of federal funds to hospitals and other institutions that ignore those rights.
I don’t see the problem with denying federal funds to institutions that refuse to honor the rights of moral objectors. Of course, pro-abortion groups immediately conjure up Atwood-worthy imagery of women being refused birth control in a Christian theocracy that actually resembles an Islamic state under shari’a law. The details aren’t important, as long as that old hyperbolic fear is present.
Isn’t it amusing when someone who seemingly can’t be bothered to grasp simple English wants to make a half-hearted “argument from authority” … which doesn’t really even touch on what he seems to imaging he’s arguing about … with himself as The Authority?
“Let it rest” is advise given to people who wander into things they may know little about. It is intended to help them avoid harm. It is meant kindly.
There are two possibilities from reading through the Chesterton quote. One is that he is an arrogant intellectual who speaks at length about something he has only cursory knowledge of, making conjectures that are in no way supported by the reality.
The other possibilty is that he makes the statement not as a comment on “madmen” so much as a comment on the sane. In that case, he really never intended anyone to take the so-called insight into mental illness as literal.
Sadness has to do with the normal human response to suffering witnessed. In this case it stems from perceiveing the reality of the human condition when mental illness alters a loved one.
I see this problem very clearly without the crap insight of Chesterton.
I will not comment on this item again. If you want to comment further, I will leave it for you to leave the last word.
Ah, yes, “let it rest” … the eternal command of those who do not wish to see more clearly, and of those who wish to … hmmm, deny (in contrast to dispute, properly understood) but not be answered.
“Sadness” of the condition conflicts with what Chesterton said?
I know something of madmen, both from clinical experience and from a more personal relationship. It is a very sad condition. Chesterton would appear to know little about it.
Let it rest.
If Gentle Reader is put off by the length of the quote, at least read and understand the last two sentences.
Penn & Teller! As I said, don’t you have to be (or almost be) certifiably insane to be a libertarian? … Penn & Teller.
I don’t watch TV (though I did buy one so I could watch ‘Lost’), but I read Stossel’s articles, and I read O’Rourke’s when I encounter them.
Mark: “At first blush, Crystal Meth vending machines and allowing people to buy Howitzers for their own personal use sound like crazy ideas, but once you start to dig a little deeper, it actually DOES make sense.”
Who lead you to believe that insanity cannot “make sense,” that it cannot be logically consistent, that is cannot sound convincing in isolation?
Allowing crystal meth vending machines sounds like a crazy idea because it is a crazy idea. That allowing crystal meth vending machines logically and inescapably follows from a consistent application of the axioms and principles of libertarianism ought to tell us something about libertarianism.
Look, I happen to be one of the strongest advocates of reason and unflinching logic that you’re likely to encounter on the internet (which causes persons of a certain mindset to hate me; I’m not at all “nice” about popping illogical fantasies), but I do not fetishize or worship reason and logic: logical consistency is a necessary, but far from sufficient, precondition for finding truth.
Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, The Maniac, expresses far better than I can hope to do some important things we all ought to understand about logic and reason, the heart of it is this: “And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners. When I was engaged in a controversy with the Clarion on the matter of free will, that able writer Mr. R. B. Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic’s, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. But my purpose is to point out something more practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about free will. But it was certainly remarkable that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about lunatics. Mr. Suthers evidently did not know anything about lunatics. The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.“
@Ilion
No, not really. At first blush, Crystal Meth vending machines and allowing people to buy Howitzers for their own personal use sound like crazy ideas, but once you start to dig a little deeper, it actually DOES make sense.
In all seriousness, if your introduction to libertarian ideas was through the work of Ayn Rand, reading some P.J. O’Rourke, or watching Penn & Teller’s Bullsh@t on Showtime or John Stossell on ABC might change your perspective.