Monday, August 24, 2009

What is a Human?

I recently read a disturbing statistic in National Review. In the United States, 90% of unborn children with Down syndrome are aborted in America.

I work with several people who have mental disabilities of some kind or another. There is no doubt that people who are disabled are greatly challenging. They are distinctly different than "normal" people and present their own unique difficulties to their coworkers and families. But I have found that they are some of the hardest working, most delightful people in the world.

To say that people who are disabled would be better off not to have lived at all is never to have seriously dealt with disabled people. They love, suffer, laugh, and live just as any of us do. I have personally never met the disabled person who would rather be dead than alive in a somewhat restricted state.

Choosing to abort a child on discovering that they are disabled may seem like the compassionate, enlightened thing to do. In reality, it is nothing more than paternalistic, hubris ladened eugenics. As National Review noted, what happens if they discover a gene for homosexuality? What if parents would simply choose not to "deal" with the unique challenge that a son or daughter with same sex attraction presents? Parents ought to make the truly compassionate, courageous decision to deal with the difficulties and joys that are inevitable with any child. We are all created in God's image and deserve a chance to live.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Health Care Fireball

I'm quite happy to say that it appears that the recent health care battle has been a victory for conservatives. Our fearless leader invested much of his political capital in this battle, and I am all too glad to see that he is losing. Seeing passionate people show up in droves to the health care town hall meetings has encouraged me greatly.

The town hall attendees see the problems with government run health care well. No matter how our fearless leader champions his war against the evil insurance companies, the people (or at least enough of them) have learned their lessons from the British and the Canadians. The fact of the matter is that the presence of a subsidized government-run option will cause many companies to choose to cover their workers under the public option, forcing these workers out of plans which they are at least satisfied. The public option will naturally set the prices which they will pay to doctors, which will be low in order to cut costs. All the while the government will be passing regulations on private health care companies, further reducing their ability to compete against the subsidized public option. The low prices they set will cause doctors to choose not to provide certain services (or at least provide them less frequently) at those low prices. The low prices will result in lower doctor salaries (along with endless rolls of red tape for them to deal with) and will decrease the number of students entering medical school, reducing the number of doctors, and further reducing the amount of care available to individuals. Abortions will become funded through our tax dollars. After all, what is an abortion but a simple medical procedure to cure a medical condition in a woman's body? Abortion has been declared a Constitutionally protected right under some vaguely defined "penumbra" of the fourteenth amendment, and it no doubt will be covered by the public option. And of course, all this will be funded by trillions of dollars. Our dollars.

The choice is clear. Higher taxes, fewer doctors, care rationing, and the murder of thousands of children. Let's choose something else. Anything else.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Gay Marriage

Many questions are asked regarding gay marriage. "Should gay marriage be legal?" "Why shouldn't two adults who love each other be allowed to be married?" Unfortunately these are the wrong questions to ask when considering the merits of each side of the argument.

I believe that engaging in homosexual sex is a sin. However, it is no greater than the sin that a heterosexual couple commit when they have sex outside of marriage. God's ethic of sex is that it ought to be reserved within the bounds of a monogamous life partnership between a man and his wife. Any other sexual desire pursued outside of these bounds are perversions of God's perfect design for our sexual lives.

Marriage has been perverted beyond belief. Advocates for traditional marriage frequently make claims that preventing homosexuals from marrying each other would be an action in defense of marriage. These well-meaning people unfortunately are attacking the symptoms of a disease rather than assaulting its cause. Far more damage has been done to marriage by heterosexuals than homosexuals could ever do. Marriage has become about "love", in the "feeling" sense of the word. Indeed, good marriages are typically full of good feelings. Feelings, however, are about all of the significance a non-Christian could derive from marriage. Christian marriage, however, is quite different. To give a rough, extremely basic, but workable, definition, Christian marriage is "a life-long covenantal imitation of Christ's relationship to his church entered into by a man and a woman, in which the husband provides servile, loving, leadership while his wife submits herself to that leadership." I am willing to add to that definition, but am convinced that the elements of the definition are biblically accurate and will at least serve as a roughly usable definition for the purposes of this essay.

I do not have any problem with saying that the state should not recognize homosexual marriages. However, I also do not think that the state ought to recognize any marriages. The state has no business requiring citizens to report their marital status or to pay for marriage licenses, or any other absurd marital restrictions which they place on us, most likely for the reason that it allows them to have yet more control over the most intimate details of our lives. Further, these licenses and requirements are likely an assault on first amendment guaranteed protection of free exercise of religion. The Church is responsible to recognize marriages. Whether they are Christian marriages or not is between the couple and God. Homosexuals ought to be legally allowed to live with one another in a cruel mockery of marriage in which many heterosexual couples now find themselves. I suppose they may feel free to call this arrangement anything they want, excepting Christian marriage, for which they cannot qualify. Any marriage which does not place God at the center of it cannot qualify as a Christian marriage. And the state ought to stay out of all of our business.