In another somewhat encouraging (but probably too late) sign, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets to protest the recent passage of a bill that would legalize abortion on demand for up to 14 weeks into the pregnancy.  This is a huge move for Spain – a country that formerly allowed abortion only in restricted circumstances.  The thousands protesting the decision is encouraging, but the law is not (read the whole story here).  It seems to me that this kind of hyper-active, unrepresentative government is becoming increasingly common in the Western world.  It can be seen in the advance of gay marriage in the U.S. and in strange pro-abortion and animal rights legislation in Europe.  Elected officials throughout the West appear ambivalent to prevailing public opinion and eager to appease activist groups.

Finally, on a more depressing note, the average person in the world today appears to view internet access as a fundamental human right.  A survey (find it here) of 27,000 adults in 26 countries produced some depressing results.  Nearly 79% of adults believe that internet access should be a fundamental human right.  This instance shows how low our understanding of rights has become.  Human rights are core and few.  They should be rooted in our very natures – not dependent on outside circumstances or the development of technology.

This new understanding of rights largely stems from a progressive viewpoint that believes human nature is fundamentally defined by human progress or evolution.  Progressives view man as ever evolving, ever improving towards some kind of perfection.  A constantly-changing human nature naturally lends itself to a constantly evolving definition of human rights.  But this view of rights loses its connection to a transcendent morality rooted in absolutes, and without absolutes the very concept of human dignity and justice is undermined.  Who knows what new rights we might gain or which rights some of us may lose in our constant “evolution”?  The progressive mentality opens the doors wide for abortion, euthanasia, human abuses, and a constant redefinition of human institutions.

Moreover, progressives ignore the flawed nature of man.  They put their trust in a flawed, destructive creature.  We need but look at human history to see the constant failings that flow so readily from self-centered mankind.  Men are not angels, and we must remember this fact if we are to preserve any sound conception of human dignity, duties, and rights.

Excerpt:

Even more troubling, animal-rights activists have succeeded in confusing the
public about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. The
latter is a noble cause supported by the vast majority of Americans who want to
protect animals from cruelty, even though they do not consider animals their
moral equals — a caveat that runs counter to animal-rights ideology. Despite
this distinction, “animal rights” has “become the catchall term for virtually
any effort to protect animals,” Smith says, and the resulting confusion has
allowed the animal-rights movement to gain legitimacy it does not deserve.

That legitimacy threatens universal human rights, which are grounded in the
principle that all humans are equal simply because we are human. If we reject
that principle and argue that our rights are based on something other than our
shared human nature — that it is a creature’s apparent rationality or
self-awareness, for instance, that entitles it to rights — we can wind up
elevating the rights of chimps and pigs above those of profoundly disabled or
demented humans. Indeed, some animal-rights advocates have done just that.

You can ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you that few things enrage me more than animal abuse.  I’d happily subject the cretins who run dog-fighting rings to the same barbaric treatment they impose on the victims of their amusement.  So, I was glad to see that Campbell took the opportunity to distinguish between those of us with an appreciation of our human duty of stewardship and those of us willing to kill our own kind in defense of a house fly or a silk worm.

Consumers in Illinois who lose their jobs and have no other option but to buy their own health insurance will get socked this year with premium increases of up to 60 percent, according to state records.

That group of consumers has been growing, as the recession has created more uninsured Americans looking for ways to protect themselves and their families.  Now, Illinois consumers will get a glimpse into just how wide-ranging rate increases among individual health plans can be.  The data, obtained by the Tribune, also provide a window into the overall trend of premium increases at large and small employers.

For the state’s more than half-million consumers in individual health plans, base rates will go up from 8.5 percent to more than 60 percent, according to state data.  Base rates do not take into consideration health status, gender, age, place of residence and length of a policy — all factors that could raise premiums further.

This is a major problem in the current health care system.  A move to individual choice and freedom will not work until the insurance industry finds a way to eliminate the wide disparity between individual and group policies.  I’ve recently had a lot of experience exploring individual and group plans.  The advantages of the latter are unbelievable.  Portability, coverage of preexisting conditions, maternity coverage, and reasonable rates are just a few of the many benefits of having a group plan (even if that group is as small as two people!).

Early in the 20th century, many insurance groups began as nonprofits.  They were essentially “safety nets” mixed with an element of charity.  The healthy paid the same (or similar) rates to the unhealthy.  They were all protected against catastrophe, and the healthy were willing to pay a bit more for the benefit of all.  Sadly, our hyper-individualistic society seems to have lost this idea completely. We’re all out for the cheapest possible cost to us – whether we’re the consumer or the insurance company.  Plus we now assume insurers will act as everyone’s safety net – not churches, families, charities, or local communities.  This puts the unhealthy in a terribly difficult position: It’s harder and more expensive to get insurance, but everyone assumes you have it, so good luck getting help if you have a medical catastrophe and don’t have insurance!

The old charity-oriented form of health insurance now only exists in the bastardized form of an employer group insurance plan, where the employer cuts a deal with an insurance company to get a set of basic rates to provide a broad range of coverage to his or her employees.

Can we get back to a private charity-oriented plan that increases freedom and individual ownership without leaving the unhealthy out in the cold?  I don’t know, but no one involved in the current debate seems to think much of this idea.

There is no excuse for my behavior; it was shameful, and I knew it.  I knew that I was better than that, and I knew that I would forever be known in that man’s mind as a rude, careless, jerk.  Whether I will ever see him again doesn’t matter.  I’ll always feel a twinge of regret and remorse when I think back to what I did knowing that my behavior on that night was not indicative of my true character.

Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon.com discusses “sexual shame” in her new column.  Noting the recent trend of self-proclaimed feminists publicly expressing shame and regret over their sexual promiscuity and embracing a more traditional view of love, courtship, and domesticity, she suggests that this is not a signal of a “backlash” against the hookup culture:

As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar — and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups. Like Klausner and Anderson, we can now acknowledge regret over a one-night stand, without being considered, or seeing ourselves as, forever ruined women; if there’s been a recent change in my generation’s relationship to casual sex, I suspect it’s that we’re relaxing our defensive posturing.

That Christina Aguilera has settled down doesn’t seem like an about-face to me, so much as the happy ending so many women expect to come from all their youthful flirtation, dating and hookups. And, despite all of Carrie Bradshaw’s sex in the city, it was never a secret that she wanted to ultimately find lasting love — that was kind of the whole point. Maybe instead of signaling a backlash, these are actually signs that we’re slowly inching toward a world where a woman isn’t either good or bad, a wife or whore, a virgin or slut. And maybe Gottlieb has been met with such intense anger because implicit in her argument is the suggestion that women’s sexuality and romantic life is an either-or equation.

As if we haven’t invented enough ways to embrace and promote moral ambiguity.  Don’t worry ladies, your post-coitus feelings of shame, regret, and emptiness are not nature’s (or, gasp, God’s) way of letting you know that you’ve dishonored your body and slandered your dignity.  No no, these feelings merely indicate that you are one step closer to total emancipation from artificially constructed gender-based sexual stereotypes.  You’ve already established that you can play the field like a man, now you are free to respond to the morning after guilt like a woman!  You should assert your right to promiscuity while demanding the option of claiming the security and comfort of matrimony at any time you choose.  In fact, it would seem that the former is a necessary prerequisite to the latter.  Would Big have ever married Carrie after all those years if Carrie had refrained from bedding dozens of men (and breaking at least one heart) in the interim?  Could Christina Aguilera truly appreciate the blessings of wife-and-motherhood if she’d not first explored her “naughty” side?

Generally, when you express regret, shame, or guilt, it means you know you did something you shouldn’t have, and wish you could take it back.  Why anyone would twist this into a positive sign of women’s arrival at true sexual liberation is perplexing.

And Heaven-forbid that a man might actually choose to reject the Christina Aguileras and the Carrie Bradshaws of this world in favor of the Taylor Swifts.  Only a total chauvinist would prefer a virgin to a whore.

As Mitt Romney sets out this week to promote his new book, “No Apology,’’ he is also auditioning for a rapidly disappearing role in American politics: a politician who is speaking out against the “temptations of populism.’’

“The populism I’m referring to is, if you will, demonizing certain members of society: going after businesspeople, going after Wall Street, going after people who are highly educated, people who are CEOs,’’ Romney said in an interview. “That kind of ‘All of our problems are due to that group’ is something that is unproductive.’’

This brings up two questions in my mind: First, is this strong anti-populism a good thing?  I’m generally suspicious of populism, especially when it springs forth as a rapid political movement rooted in passion.  That said, I don’t think all forms of populism are inherently wrong.  I also agree that demonizing people groups is wrong, but substantive criticism is sometimes mislabeled as “demonizing” by people who don’t want to deal with that criticism.

Second, will this work for Romney?  He’s essentially criticizing the populism that elected Barack Obama and shunning the populism of the Tea Party movement.  He is obviously betting all of his chips that the voices of those groups are much louder than their numbers merit.  He is relying on a “silent majority” of centrist party-line voters who are put off by the current political debates.  I’m not sure he can win this way.

John Albert Gardner III, 30, was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday in San Diego.

The Lake Elsinore man pleaded guilty in May 2000 to molesting a 13-year-old female neighbor and served five years of a six-year prison term. . . .  Gardner “never expressed one scintilla of remorse for his attack upon the victim” despite overwhelming evidence, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.  He had faced a maximum of nearly 11 years in prison under terms of a plea agreement but prosecutors urged six years.  A psychiatrist who interviewed Gardner, Dr. Matthew Carroll, wanted a stiffer punishment, saying in court documents that he was a “continued danger to underage girls in the community.”

What is wrong with this picture?  What is wrong with our justice system that we allow these monsters to go free?  It seems to me that there are some crimes that are so reprehensible, so heinous and depraved, that the possibility of repeat offenses cannot be allowed.  The “rehabilitation” of a criminal must be weighed against the threat to society if that person were to re-offend.  That being said, a pedophile’s “right” to serve their time and walk free has to be considered in the broader context of the threat they pose to innocent children.  Our judges think they are so enlightened with their pained, nuanced application of the law, when sometimes all you need is plain common sense to see that a sick, monstrous abuser of innocents has a much higher burden of proof to regain his freedom.  Our judges and lawyers get so caught up in their own egos that they forget who they are there to serve and protect.  They are meant to apply the law to help maintain an ordered liberty in society, in which case the rights of innocents to go about their lives free from the risk of sexual abuse and murder trumps the rights of a sex offender to have a second chance.

I realize that in our vanity we have decided that no one is incapable of being “rehabilitated” if we can just apply the right system of therapy or the right psychological theory, but sometimes a human soul is so twisted that they only salvation they can hope for must come from seeking God’s forgiveness and accepting the atoning work of Jesus Christ. . . This is the kind of “rehabilitation” that can easily be achieved from the confines of a jail cell.

However, I can’t help but wonder whether a top-down (i.e. big government) approach to solving the problem of failing schools and failing kids is a remedy that will work, no matter how well-intended or committed to accountability.  At the end of the day, no matter how good a child’s teacher or how cutting-edge the classroom resources, if a child doesn’t have a supportive home environment, he’s much more likely to fail in school.  If a child doesn’t feel loved and cared for, if he doesn’t have an example of discipline, responsibility, and commitment demonstrated by those he looks to first for guidance, then what are his odds of success in the classroom?

Regardless of your position on the constitutionality of public schooling, it’s clear that the government cannot bear full responsibility for the academic success of our nation’s young people.  They can never substitute for the role that family must play.  Obviously, volumes and volumes have been written and will continue to be written about the problem of broken families in our society.  As divorce becomes more and more the norm and the role of fathers becomes more and more downplayed, it’s difficult to imagine how our government can save failing students without first calling attention to our failing culture.

People need to get themselves out of the “insurance companies are evil and must be punished” mindset and look into how and why we’ve gotten to the point we are today with health care.  As with the housing collapse, if you look closely, behind the visage of greedy mortgage brokers and Wall Street wheeler-dealers, you will find Big Brother grubby fingerprints all over the mess.  Their attempts to “help the little guy” own a home led to a distortion of the market, which helped foment the conditions for collapse and bankruptcy.  Health insurance is no different.

It’s easy to fall prey to the argument that “the system is broken, something must be done, and the federal government is the only entity big enough and powerful enough to do it.”  No, no, no.

Action for action’s sake is not a wise course of action, particularly when it’s virtually guaranteed that the involvement of big government is GUARANTEED to make things exponentially worse.

In fact, House minority leader Boehner said as much:

“This so-called summit is a charade,” Boehner said. “The Democrats want us to boycott so they can say Republicans walked away and they have no choice but to plow ahead with their health care takeover. They want us to boycott so we won’t be a thorn in their sides on issues like jobs and abortion. We shouldn’t let the White House have a six-hour taxpayer-funded infomercial on Obama Care.”

In preparation for these final efforts of the Democrats, Reuters put together a nice, concise health care reform timeline dating back to 1993 (click here to see the whole thing).  The thing that jumps out at me is that the efforts today look very similar to the efforts put forward by the Clinton administration in 1993.

At the end of the day, I think U.S. citizens are the losers in this battle.  No matter what happens now, the system isn’t going to change much for the good.  In fact, it’s likely to get worse.  This form of federal involvement is messy and largely futile.  We would have been much better off with reform efforts made at the local and state levels and in the private sphere.

In our discussion, both of us came to the conclusion that this “broken” government is actually a net good.  Our system was set up by the Founders to have a series of checks and balances.  It was designed precisely to prevent quick, powerful federal action.  The Founders generally believed that most political action should be left to the states, so they made every effort to ensure that the federal government had built-in roadblocks to any hasty or overreaching programs.

George Will has an excellent, excellent response to this accusation (in this case, he was asked about Senator Bayh’s accusation that Congress was a mess):

I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible – the government’s broken.”

Will is spot-on here.  I would further state that the higher the level of government, the less efficient I want it to be.  A system that guarantees freedom will be a system that localizes power.  It’s a system that makes political action easier at the county level than at the state level and easier at the state level than at the federal level.  In our desire to “make things happen NOW,” we must not forget that centralized power inevitably restricts freedom.  Our government was built on the idea that proper politics was messy and slow.  After all, the most efficient and fast-acting executive power on a national level is a dictator.