House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries recently tweeted out “Reproductive freedom is not negotiable.”
There are a few problems with his tweet, not the least of
which is that it is inaccurate and disingenuous. Jeffries uses the phrase “reproductive
freedom” but he really means “abortion.”
Further, abortion rights and limitations on it ARE negotiable, and as a
society, we mostly arrived at an uncomfortable negotiated settlement—first
trimester abortions were ok; no public funds to be used to finance them.
But, as usual, the Radical Left couldn’t stick to a deal and
they pushed abortion to the moment of birth (and maybe a little after if the
baby survived) and pushed to reverse the Hyde Amendment which barred the use of
public funds for abortions. The Dobbs
decision solidified the notion that this issue IS negotiable as it kicked it to
the states.
But if we’re going to talk about non-negotiables, I have a
list of my own. As I discussed in my
last post, Majorie Taylor Greene caused quite a kerfuffle when she publicly
asked for a national divorce, with some even calling her treasonous. But if Jeffries is going to issue edicts that
are nonnegotiable, here are some non-negotiables if we are to stay together as
a nation. Otherwise, I believe that we
do stand a good chance of fracturing.
Sovereignty
We are a nation state with territorial integrity. This means no open border, no Chinese spy
balloons floating across our territory unharassed, and no handing decisions
over the freedoms of our peoples to foreign bodies like the WHO. Absolutely not. Full stop.
The notion that anyone can walk into this country and stay
in violation of our laws—and get state benefits for doing so must cease. We can have a discussion over how many
immigrants are allowed to enter, but the notion that our immigration laws will
not be enforced, and worse, that certain jurisdictions can declare themselves
“sanctuary cities” harkens back to nullification, and we know where that went.
Moreover, while we from time to time need to enter into
treaties with other nations, we must do so while preserving our own
sovereignty. This notion that the U.S.
will hand over its response to a pandemic to the WHO (which misled during the
entire COVID pandemic) is utterly abhorrent.
Treaties are treaties and approval must conform to the approval set
forth in the Constitution--- not by executive fiat.
Restoring our full sovereignty is nonnegotiable and is a
priority of first order if we are to stay together as a republic.
Roll back and De-weaponize the Administrative State.
The Administrative State makes law, prosecutes and adjudicates, all without
consent of the sovereign. Its power was
on full display during COVID lockdowns, inflicting massive pain on businesses
and families. The CDC even took a meat
cleaver to fundamental concepts of private property by permitting tenants to
refrain from paying rent without any recourse from landlords. This resulted in disfigured and warped
situations where some landlords were living in their cars while tenants were
warm and comfy in their homes and not paying rent. The Founders never envisioned that unelected
bodies would have this kind of power.
The most egregious symptom of administrative state overreach
has been the weaponization of the enforcement agencies for political
purposes. With limited exceptions, for
most of our nation’s history, we counted on the enforcement agencies such as
the FBI and IRS to play it straight.
Since the Obama years, this is no longer the case and is a real danger
to the Republic. It started in earnest
with Lois Lerner at the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, dragging its feet in
granting exemptions. It then got very
ugly with the FBI, as it falsified documents for the FISA Court, harassed
pro-life conservatives, raided Trump’s Mar-A-Lago residence, paid social media
to censor conservative viewpoints, and holding on to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
We cannot have enforcement agencies turn into the Stasi to
punish political enemies, target certain groups or surveil American citizens
with an end around the 4th Amendment. Weaponizing these agencies is
non-negotiable.
Election Integrity
Election denier has now become a thing.
Beginning with the 2000 election of Bush v. Gore, we have begun to
challenge election results. But just as
important as determining a winner, our system has to persuade the loser that the
results were accurate and fairly determined.
COVID, mail-in ballots, and rule changes blew that out of the
water.
The midterms evidenced worse defects. In Pennsylvania, 70% of the ballots were
received before the debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman clearly showed
Fetterman’s mental deficiencies. In
Arizona, substantial numbers of voters in key districts were likely
disenfranchised because of glitches with the voting machines enabling Katie
Hobbs to snatch the election from Kari Lake.
We have tossed illegals into the mix, early voting, ballot
harvesting and some states now permit ballots to arrive long after election day
with no signature verification. All
these things conspire to through into question the results of elections. And if we can’t determine policy choices at
the ballot box, they will eventually be made through mob rule and violent
action.
Restoring election integrity, with severe limitations placed
on mail-in ballots and early voting is non-negotiable if we are to stay
together.
Protections for Women and Children
A society that doesn’t provide special protections for women and
children is doomed. Over the past five
years, the Woke movement has destroyed them.
Women’s sports has been ruined by the transgender movement as women are
now forced to compete with biological males in all sports—including swimming,
powerlifting, hockey and MMA. The
absurdity of it all reached an apogee with Lia Thomas cleaning up the Ivy
League while all of the other women stood looking dispirited and dumbfounded. Not only are they forced to give back all the
gains that Title IX afforded women, but their privacy rights are being invaded
in the name of “inclusivity” as their
locker rooms and showers are invaded by wagging penises. California prisons now permit men that
identify as women to be placed in women’s prisons. And we know where that goes. The media is on board with this charade, using
the words “persons with a uterus” and “chestfeeding” to further denigrate
women’s role in a healthy society. Even
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stumbled over the question, “What
is a woman?” deferring that she “was not a biologist. It’s a question most of us could answer that
by 1st grade without biological training. Discussion of putting women in front line
combat roles deserves its own essay, and I will refrain from commenting here.
Most maddening is the assault on the minds of children. It started with drag queen story hour through
the library system, aimed at 3-8 year old children, and has now graduated to
“gender affirmation” hormone treatments and disfiguring surgery, as well
documented by Abigail Shrier in her book Irreversible Damage. I won’t repeat her arguments here, but the
fact that the transgender activists have captured the American Medical Association
and American Psychological Association as well as many school systems is deeply
disturbing. Psychiatrists can only
“affirm” a child’s self-diagnosis that they are another gender, taking away a
primary role of the profession—to diagnose.
And school systems and libraries are exposing children as young as
kindergarten to genderism with explicit materials in school libraries. Objections to age appropriate materials are
met with howls and shrieking “Book Burners.”
Of course, this is nothing of the sort.
Nobody sought to ban drag queens or explicit materials until they
started dragging our kids into it. As
pedophiles desperately tried to latch on to the LGBT movement, they attempted
to change the designation to “minor attracted persons” and California has
changed its laws to loosen criminal penalties and make prosecutions much harder
for such offenses.
A healthy nation provides special protections for women and
children. It is a nonstarter at keeping
this nation together. They are our
future. It is a hill to die on.
DEI, CRT and
Reparations
This has to go. Now. These are very,
very bad and corrosive ideas, tearing at the fabric of our society. We can stipulate that slavery and Jim Crow
were terrible and that they had long term effects. But we don’t hold the grandchildren of the
Nazis accountable for what their grandfathers did. DEI, CRT and reparations have to be torn out
root and branch. DEI and CRT have
largely accomplished three things—none of them good. They have destroyed merit in business and
academia. They have created a class of
college education make work workers- DEI officers. And, along with the thought of reparations,
are creating a lot of resentment with a threat of a real backlash.
The emphasis on diversity and inclusion must be replaced by
an emphasis on social cohesion and merit.
In a multi-race, multi-ethnic nation, social cohesion is a greater
virtue than any attempt to remediate past wrongs. Our nation is fundamentally a forward
looking one, not backwards looking. Attempts
to do so will only be counterproductive.
We need to go back to the MLK precepts
of judging people by the content of their character. To do otherwise runs the risk of devolving
into Rwanda, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, or South Africa. The track record is very clear.
So, Mr. Jeffries, this is MY list of non-negotiables. Majorie Taylor Greene might be viewed as a
right wing zealot, but if we cannot restore these four points, I do not wish to
share a polity with those that would deny them.
That they are even up for discussion is patently revolting to me and they
must be put back in their proper place—and soon or a national divorce (and I prefer
not to have one) is in order. But we
simply cannot go on like this.
