The Bill of Rights is Vulnerable

Liberty lovers like to think that our Constitutional rights are written in stone; that the Bill of Rights may be interpreted literally; that the meaning is plain as day. But when one thinks about this it soon becomes apparent that our Constitutional rights are open to question; the Bill of Rights is vulnerable.

Consider the First Amendment: Congress and state legislators are forever making laws respecting establishments of religion and prohibiting the free exercise thereof. They’ve enshrined a government God in this nation – the God of the Holy Bible. They frequently pass laws prohibiting free exercise of religion, e.g. laws prohibiting polygamy. They routinely make “exceptions” to freedom of speech; incarcerate press reporters for doing their jobs, and, when it suits them, restricting the right of the people to peaceably assemble.

Consider the Second Amendment: If the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, period, how is it that the government can deny that right to some people, e.g. children; the mentally incompetent; felons, etc? Where does the government obtain the constitutional authority to ban brass knuckles; assault rifles; hand grenades and machine guns?

Consider the Third Amendment: The U.S. has been waging a war on terror and a war on drugs for decades now so that there exists no time of peace. Consequently, the government might get away with passing laws allowing soldiers to be quartered in your house. It’s possible.

Consider the Fourth Amendment: There is little doubt that today, in many instances, it is no longer the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure;Warrants based upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized are routinely ignored. This Amendment in the Bill of Rights has become a joke.

Consider the Fifth Amendment: Grand juries are not always employed to charge persons with capital or otherwise infamous crimes, especially at the state level. People are routinely compelled in criminal cases to be witnesses against themselves. And, it isn’t unusual at all when persons are deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; or their private property taken for public use, without just compensation.

Consider the Sixth Amendment: In some criminal prosecutions today, the accused languishes in jail for years without a speedy trial. Exceptions have been carved out of a defendant’s right to be confronted with the witnesses against him as well as the right to compulsory process of obtaining witnesses and assistance of counsel.

Consider the Seventh Amendment: Today, there is no right to a trial by jury in small claims courts, where the amount in controversy far exceeds $20, and judges are overruling fact findings by juries whenever it pleases them to do so.

Consider the Eighth Amendment: Judges, for the purpose of keeping the accused confined in prison before trial, routinely set bail much higher than what a defendant can pay. Whether a fine is “excessive” or not is up in the air. In many cases the government is torturing prisoners today and getting away with it.

Consider the Ninth Amendment: According to some SCOTUS justices, if the claimed right is not set forth verbatim in the Constitution, it doesn’t exist. It’s as though the Ninth Amendment in the Bill of Rights doesn’t exist.

Consider the Tenth Amendment: The United States Government – all three branches -- is constantly exercising powers not delegated to it by the Constitution; constantly ignoring states rights; and routinely encroaching upon the rights of the people. It’s all a matter of interpretation.

It’s a fact: The Bill of Rights is vulnerable.

Shotgun Judicial Wedding Texas Style

Some morons who acquire the privilege of donning a black robe and ascending the bench get it into their deluded minds that the powers invested in them to control other people’s lives go far beyond convention and the laws of the land. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen time and time again during my long legal career.  Power has a tendency to swell a judge’s head.

Smith County Texas Court Judge, Randall Rogers, actually thinks he has the power to force a criminal defendant trapped before him in his court to make the choice of either getting married or going to jail. He's literally presiding over shotgun judicial weddings Texas style.

Josten Bundy, 21, found this out the hard way. The poor sap had pled guilty and was standing before the judge for his sentencing hearing last month on a petty assault charge. He had apparently punched his girlfriend’s ex boyfriend for allegedly making insulting comments about her.

At this point the court had several options within his legitimate powers to deal with the defendant. He could impose a jail sentence; a fine; probation; or any combination thereof. He could impose a suspended sentence or no penalty at all – just a warning perhaps. But this judicial moron wasn’t satisfied with the legal options within his power. He thought he had the right to fashion his own brand of Christian justice.

He inquired of his prisoner whether she (his girlfriend) was worth fighting for. “Yes,” replied the sap. So the Texas judicial tyrant gave the boy this choice: either he submit to a sentence of probation requiring him to marry the lass within 30 days, together with attending counseling, and writing bible verses, or go directly to jail for 15 days.

You see, this bible thumping judicial moron thinks that he has the legal and constitutional right to sentence defendants in his court to write bible verses and get married or be incarcerated; take your choice.

They got married 18 days after the sentencing. “He offered me fifteen days in jail,” said the sap later, “and that would have been fine and I asked if I could call my job [to let them know].... But “the judge told me ‘nope, that’s not how this works’… I just wonder what would have happened if Hannah said no, had we said, ‘you know judge, we would like to get married on our own terms.’”

Hannah, the 19-year-old girlfriend, admitted that the Judge embarrassed her with his offer. That “quicky” courthouse wedding before a justice of the peace wasn’t the one she dreamed about when she used to watch the TV reality show, “Say Yes to the Dress”  about a bridal salon.

“We weren’t going to be able to have the wedding we wanted,” she told reporters. “It was just going to be kind of pieced together. I didn’t even have a white dress… My face was so red, people behind me were laughing,” she said. “[The judge] made me stand up in court.”

Needless to say, the father of the hapless bride was outraged that a judge could order someone to get married. “I contacted a couple of lawyers but they told me someone was trying to pull my leg…that judges don't court order somebody to get married,” he told reporters.

The Associated Press tried to reach judge Rogers for questions about his authority to mete out such a sentence, but calls to his chambers went unanswered and calls to his home phone were met with recordings that he was not available.

Of course, this judicial moron had no such constitutional or legal authority to do what he did to his victims. No wonder he’s hiding out now. It was simply his lame brained idea of a shotgun judicial wedding Texas style.  

Demagoguery or Logic?

GOP presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, believes that a 10-year-old rape victim should, if impregnated as a consequence of the crime, be forced never-the-less by the state to carry the rapist’s seed to term. 

Every woman who becomes pregnant, regardless of the circumstances, whether by consent or not, should be forced by the state to endure the entire pregnancy to term – no exceptions allowed -- she must have no choice whatsoever in the matter, Huckabee maintains.

 “Creating one problem that is horrible — let nobody be misled, a 10-year-old girl being raped is horrible — but does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child?” Huckabee reasons. “And that’s really the issue… I just come down on the side that every life is precious. I don’t think we discount the intrinsic worth of any human being, and I don’t know where else to go with it.”

Mike Huckabee is a religious extremist. Of course, this is the position of every anti-abortion religious extremist. They reason that an unfertilized egg automatically becomes a “person” entitled to all the legal and constitutional rights enjoyed by you and me and every other “person.” A “person” comes into existence at the moment of conception, therefore all abortions are murder. Thus no abortions should be allowed by law, period.

As a libertarian I find this position appalling, extremely illogical, and profoundly anti-liberty. Yet when I point this out as a valid argument against the extreme anti-abortion position, my friend, Thomas Knapp, accuses me of demagoguery. “To put it more bluntly, the ‘rape and incest exception’ attack is demagoguery — a crass play on emotion rather than an appeal to fact. As a pro-choice argument, it’s an epic fail.”

I have enormous respect for the opinions of Tom Knapp. I agree with him probably 95% of the time. I would never question for a moment his libertarian credentials, but in this instance I could hardly disagree with him more.

Tom thinks that Huckabee’s position “flows inexorably from the logic of his larger pro-life stance, and is in fact a libertarian argument… A libertarian argument, not THE libertarian argument” he admits. “Libertarians differ among ourselves on abortion (no, I’m not going to tell you where I come down on it),” he says.

Why not, Tom? The positions are certainly not mutually exclusive, are they?

“Some of us are pro-choice. Some of us are pro-life. But all of us view the issue through the lens of the same principle: That it is impermissible to initiate force and that we may only use force defensively or to recover damages from someone who “threw the first punch,” observes Tom. “Pro-choice libertarians believe that a fertilized embryo or in utero fetus is not a person with rights, that the mother is fully entitled to control of her own body, and that forbidding her an abortion would be an initiation of force against her…Pro-life libertarians believe that at some point prior to birth (for some, that goes all the way back to conception), a fertilized embryo IS a person with rights — a person who has initiated force against no one and who therefore may not be permissibly killed.”

“Coming from the pro-life libertarian position, Tom argues, "both the 10-year-old pregnant girl and her unborn child in this story are victims of an aggressor (the rapist whose actions resulted in the pregnancy). Abortion violates the rights of the unborn child, who is not an aggressor, and is therefore morally impermissible (unless, of course, it becomes a matter of self-defense, i.e. carrying the baby to term would kill or gravely harm the mother).

“The problem with the “rape and incest exception” position is that it doesn’t address the questions raised above, he concludes “If abortion is a right, it’s a right whether rape or incest are involved or not. If abortion is not a right, rape and incest don’t make it into a right.”

First of all, it is not factually logical to hold that both the 10-year-old girl AND the unborn fetus are victims of the rapist aggressor. There is only one victim and one aggressor. The rapist forced his penis inside that little girl. He forced her to take his bodily fluids into her vagina. He forced his seed into her uterus. That seed is HIM. The chromosomes are HIM. The DNA is HIM. So it is HE who penetrated her egg without her consent. So her egg that HE fertilized his HIM – at least 50% HIM. The fertilized egg is not a victim. At least 50% of it was the aggressor. It is NOT precious. It is certainly not precious to that little girl; the victim.

That little girl had a right to cast HIM out of her body right there and then as a matter of self defense – indeed, choice, if you will -- from the time he forced himself upon her and beyond before it comes to term. It was unwanted from the start. That pregnancy is going to take a toll upon that little girl’s body. That pregnancy is going to take a psychological toll upon her for the rest of her life and even worse for her if it goes to term and the rapist’s offspring is born.

Secondly, that rapist’s bodily fluids; his sperm cells; his seed had no rights. It clearly isn’t precious by any definition of that term. How does the rapist’s seed factually and logically acquire the right to continue in existence simply by forcing its way into that little girl’s egg. That rapist’s seed is not innocent; far from it. It’s guilty, albeit perhaps, unconsciously so, because it is HIM. It his part of how HE perpetrated HIS crime upon her. HE did it to her.

Had HE not penetrated  her egg by force, that egg would have been naturally discarded in the normal course of the little girl’s menstrual cycle. In short, that egg was destined to rightfully be destroyed.  It wasn’t precious. That egg had no right to live by any definition of fact or logic.

Finally, the belief that a fertilized egg is a “person” from the moment of conception is both factually and logically is absurd. At the core it is a religious belief and a relatively recent religious belief at that.

One won’t, for example, find that concept anywhere in the Holy Bible, the Koran, or anywhere else in the recorded history of civilizations right up until the last few decades. The origin of the idea of fetal “personhood” came with the fervent anti-abortion movement, which has always been anti-liberty, and is unrelenting in its quest to deny reproductive liberty to women. But neither God nor Jesus Christ ever said that a fetus is a “person.”

We’ve all heard the old adage: “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, right? Think about that. There is logic and wisdom in those words. It’s true for human beings too. No civilization in the history of this planet has ever counted the unborn as people, much less people with rights, and there are plenty of good reasons for that. Not every fertilized egg comes to term. And, for that matter, no fertilized egg or unborn fetus is equipped to exercise rights.

We count human beings as people who have acquired the rights of persons when they are born. It has always been that way; in ancient history; in Biblical times, right up until now. A new person today gets a birth certificate – not a conception certificate. We celebrate a person’s birthday – not their moment of conception. We count a person’s age from the date of birth – not the moment of conception. And, on and on; these are the facts.

Consider the Fourteenth Amendment that I discussed in my last post regarding how anchor babies acquire their citizenship. They acquire their citizenship when they are BORN here – not if and when they are conceived here. So if an undocumented immigrant gets pregnant in the US and is deported back to Mexico before she gives birth, her child is not a citizen of the United States. It’s a simple as that.  The “fetal personhood” position is wholly without factual and logical merit.

This is not demagoguery; it’s logic. 

Born in the USA

Born in the USA; I was… born in the USA. That’s how I acquired my legal status as a citizen of the United States of America. I was born here. That’s how most Americans acquire their US citizenship status. It’s the law.

The US Constitution, Amendment XIV, Section 1 specifies:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States 

GOP presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is right about a lot of things he says. I appreciate his candor. But when he says that so-called “anchor babies,” i.e. children born in the USA of undocumented immigrant mothers, are not US citizens, he’s flat out wrong according to the 14^th Amendment. They acquire their citizenship status the same way I did and rightfully so.

If Mr. Trump and others want to change that fact, there is, in my opinion, only one way to accomplish it – ratify a Constitutional Amendment. He’ll have to change the Constitution. Good luck with that, Donald. Its radical positions like that which substantially diminishes his chances of becoming the GOP nominee, much less President of the United States.

Trump also says that if elected President he would deport every single undocumented immigrant in the nation – all 14 million of them. They all have to go, says The Donald. After they’re deported he would expedite a process to allow the “good” ones back in so that they could acquire some kind of unspecified legal status short of citizenship.

Again, good luck with that, Donald. Even if it were theoretically possible to accomplish such a monumental task, the costs in terms of both money, logistics and man hours would be astronomical – hundreds of billions, if not, trillions of dollars.

And under our present laws, each of those 14 million people would be entitled to constitutional due process of law – that means they’re entitled to notice, hearing, and the right to an attorney, a trial and an appeal.

In short, Trump is advocating an immigration solution which would, if implemented, bankrupt the United States treasury and hopelessly bog down the federal judicial system. That’s not going to happen, Donald.

I agree with Trump, however, that our immigration system is broken and requires a reasonable solution. Something must be done about the millions of people who have come here without permission, and something must be done to prevent others from doing so.

I think President Trump could build his border wall and, like he’s promised, have the Mexicans pay for it. That’s feasible. A protocol of enhanced border security is feasible and doable. If anyone can do it, he can.

But deporting 14 million people en mass is simply not feasible. It’s not practical. It’s not wise. It’s not even desirable. That’s because the overwhelming majority of those 14 million people are beneficial to us. They’re beneficial to our economy. They contribute their share. We have to find a way for them to stay and to acquire some form of legal status.

Instead of deporting them we might better give them a realistic chance of staying in the country as long as each individual meets reasonable criteria. We should declare a moratorium during which each individual would be called upon to register their identity and whereabouts with the government just like all the rest of us who have legally acquired our status.  I was legally registered by birth. Others have been legally registered by naturalization. That’s the law.

Those who choose to voluntarily register and can demonstrate reasonable and necessary qualifications to stay (no criminal record, for example) should be allowed to stay upon certain specified terms which would require them to maintain such qualifications. Those who qualify under the law should acquire legal status – not automatic citizenship – just a form of legal status which allows them to stay.

Those who do not choose to register, are not qualified, or who enter the country without permission after the moratorium has ended, should be subject to immediate deportation and denied any opportunity to return legally; they should be blacklisted. So anyone who refuses to register, qualify, and thus acquire some form of legal status should be deported for good.

I suspect that all of the “good” ones out of the 14 million – the ones who should be allowed to stay -- would register and take their chances with the law, while the rest of them, the “bad apples,” if you will, wouldn’t. Those are the only ones we should seek to deport.

The anchor babies must be allowed to stay in any case because they are citizens; -- they were born in the USA.

That Good Old Government God Guy

That good old government God guy showed up once again as predicted at the recent GOP presidential primary debates.

You know; the invisible man who lives in the sky; the man that created the cosmos, the entire universe of existence, all the galaxies, the stars, our solar system, planet Earth and all its myriad forms of life – that man in the heavens who created humans to look, think and act just like him – the guy in the sky who wants to govern everything and everyone all the time through His Earthly representatives in the Republican party.

That’s right. Most of the GOP 2016 presidential hopefuls fervently embrace that good old government God guy. They believe everything they read in the Bible literally. If they had their way that Bible would be added to the federal statute books as well as the laws of all the fifty states. They want an American government God. That concept scares the daylights out of the average American voter, me included.

Consider Dr. Ben Carson, for example. He wants to be President of the United States. He declared to the nation his sincere belief that Americans should be taxed just like God taxed His chosen people in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible:

“What I agree with is that we need a significantly changed taxation system. And the one that I’ve advocated is based on tithing, because I think God is a pretty fair guy… And he said, you know, if you give me a tithe, it doesn’t matter how much you make. If you’ve had a bumper crop, you don’t owe me triple tithes. And if you’ve had no crops at all, you don’t owe me no tithes. So there must be something inherently fair about that.”

Mind you; this is the famous neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson talking; the scientist; the man who successfully separated Siamese twins conjoined at the head. Yet his political thinking is mired in a superstitious religious culture of 4000 years ago. He actually thinks that his God is a guy – a pretty fair guy. That boggles my mind.

Look at Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. He’s a nice fellow, but a diehard GOP evangelical religious extremist. He wants a federal constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage and another one banning abortions. These are just two of his extreme policy positions that scare the crap out of most reasonable people.

“I’ve actually taken the position that’s bolder than that,” said Gov. Huckabee. “A lot of people are talking about defunding Planned Parenthood, as if that’s a huge game changer. I think it’s time to do something even more bold. I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.”

“And, this notion that we just continue to ignore the personhood of the individual is a violation of that unborn child’s Fifth and 14th Amendment rights for due process and equal protection under the law,” concludes Huckabee. “It’s time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and we change the policy to be pro-life and protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they’re parts to a Buick.”

How about that? According to Mike, every fertilized egg should have all the same constitutional protections and legal rights as the woman whose womb it has been planted within, whether intentionally or not. Every fertilized egg is the government’s business, says Huckabee.

Yes, the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being.  Oh, no! That good old government God guy in the sky is the man who decides. That’s why, if the GOP nominates someone like Carson or Huckabee, they’re going to lose big in 2016.

It’s that good old government God guy's fault.

The Bret Baier Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace Variety Show

“Look at us!” “See how smart and clever we are!” “This is our show,” Bret Baier was no doubt thinking to himself when he started off the GOP Fox News debate with the first bullshit question of the evening:

“Gentlemen, we know how much you love hand-raising questions. So we promise this is the only one tonight: the only one. Is there anyone on stage, and can I see hands, who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican party and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person... Again, we’re looking for you to raise your hand now — raise your hand now if you won’t make that pledge tonight.”

Of course, this wasn’t a debate question at all; far from it. The entire charade wasn’t even a debate. It was a show. It was the Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace variety show. The candidates were expected to debate – not with each other – but with them. 

And that very first “question” was directed at only one candidate – Donald Trump. It was asked solely for the purpose cheekily forcing Trump’s hand. It was Baier bait. The other nine candidates were merely used as stage props.

Trump took the bait. What else could he do? He had to be honest. So he raised his hand. Of course, he was the only one to raise his hand.  That was the plan.

“Mr. Trump,” Baier scoffed, along with considerable booing from the audience. “Mr. Trump to be clear, you’re standing on a Republican primary debate stage.”

TRUMP: “I fully understand.”

BAIER: “The place where the RNC will give the nominee the nod.”

TRUMP: “I fully understand.”

BAIER: “And that experts say an independent run would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton... You can’t say tonight that you can make that pledge?”

TRUMP: “I cannot say...”

Of course, this gave a little mouse in the corner, Rand Paul, an opportunity to call out Trump as hedging his bet: “Hey, look, look! Paul squeaked, “He’s already hedging his bet on the Clintons, OK? So if he doesn’t run as a Republican, maybe he supports Clinton, or maybe he runs as an independent… I mean, this is what’s wrong. He buys and sells politicians of all stripes…”

TRUMP: “Well, I’ve given him plenty of money.”

That’s how the “debate” started and that’s how it (the show) continued for the next two hours. The so-called moderators, Baier, Kelly and Wallace, were more like interrogators – inquisitors – than moderators. They were the one’s doing the debating and the candidates were expected to respond to them with answers to one confrontational question after another.

“You are a successful neurosurgeon,” Kelly told Dr. Carson, “but you admit that you have had to study up on foreign policy, saying there’s a lot to learn... Your critics say that your inexperience shows. You’ve suggested that the Baltic States are not a part of NATO, just months ago you were unfamiliar with the major political parties and government in Israel, and domestically, you thought Alan Greenspan had been treasury secretary instead of federal reserve chair... Aren’t these basic mistakes, and don’t they raise legitimate questions about whether you are ready to be president?”

KELLY: “Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women... You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals... Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?”

WALLACE: “Senator Cruz, your colleague, Senator Paul, right there next to you, said a few months ago he agrees with you on a number of issues, but he says you do nothing to grow the party. He says you feed red meat to the base, but you don’t reach out to minorities. You have a toxic relationship with GOP leaders in Congress. You even called the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell a liar recently... How can you win in 2016 when you’re such a divisive figure?”

BAIER: “Governor Christie, you’re not exactly the darling of conservatives. You tout your record as a Republican governor in a blue state. On Facebook, the most people talking about you, not surprisingly, come from your state of New Jersey, and one of the top issues they are talking about is the economy... This — this may be why. Under your watch, New Jersey has undergone nine credit rating downgrades. The state’s 44th in private sector growth. You face an employee pension crisis and the Garden State has the third highest foreclosure rate in the country. So why should voters believe that your management of the country’s finances would be any different?”

And, on and on; you get the picture. The only genuine debate between two candidates occurred during a precious few seconds when Chris Christie and Rand Paul got into a heated exchange over the role of NSA’s bulk collection of phone records. Oh yeah, and when Christie and Huckabee debated to some extent about reforming Social Security.

Aside from that this first “debate” was simply the Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace variety show.

Presidential Parenthood Politics

Many of the current GOP presidential candidates are falling all over themselves while pandering to their ultra-right-wing evangelical Christian bases who insist that no woman has a right to liberty as concerns of her own reproduction and parenthood choices. Their committed agenda is to ban all abortions no matter what the circumstances.

They think that agenda is the responsibility of the President of the United States. So the anti-abortion forces sent out a goon squad of imposters seeking to gather as much dirt as possible on women’s reproductive rights advocates, specifically the not-for-profit organization, Planned Parenthood, in an effort to persuade the general public to agree with their antiabortion agenda.

Officials and employees of Planned Parenthood were secretly videotaped by anti-abortion operatives pretending to represent scientific entities that perform research with human embryonic and fetal tissue specimens.

In the course of these secretly taped interviews the imposters captured some of the Planned Parenthood representatives talking rather casually about the use of certain surgical techniques available to better preserve intact the fetal specimens so as to make them more useful for scientific research purposes.

They also talked casually about the monetary value of such specimens. Taken out of context, these snippets of discussion about the use of human embryonic and fetal specimens was designed to seem like a gruesome conspiracy of vicious body snatching criminals to murder little babies and then sell their body parts on the open meat market for fun and profit.

Presidential candidates, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and several others have since been screaming in outrage, demanding that the federal government immediately defund Planned Parenthood. Candidate Carly Fiorina started babbling exaggerated antiabortion nonsense about how this is just more evidence that women’s reproductive rights advocates believe that any baby is fair game for murder right up until the time it leaves the hospital.  

Make no mistake about it; these candidates think that it’s their solemn job as President of the United States to end abortion as we know it in America, and they’re more than willing to employ any means possible to accomplish that agenda. Its pure presidential parenthood politics founded upon their evangelical religious beliefs, and one of the big reasons why the average American is afraid to vote for any GOP presidential candidate.

The reality of the matter is that in the United States of America women enjoy a constitutional right to seek and undergo an abortion. The abortion procedures that Planned Parenthood provide to women are legal. The disposition of embryonic and fetal tissue from such procedures to scientific entities on a not for profit basis is entirely legal. 

The tissue can be either discarded entirely in a waste bin or provided legally to accredited scientific entities for medical research purposes. There is no meat market for the sale of human body parts for fun and profit provided by Planned Parenthood.  

In short, while the secretly taped Planned Parenthood representatives in these instances may have been speaking distastefully or disrespectfully or both about such activities from the perspective of a lay person, they were committing no crime; they are guilty of no wrongdoing. Yes, such discussions sound gruesome to me too, but so would a discussion about proctology examinations and surgery.

All of the outrage manifested on the part of the GOP presidential candidates is manufactured for the sole purpose of advancing their antiabortion agenda and pandering to the religious right voters in their political base.

It’s pure presidential parenthood politics.