I & I Editorial BoardIf you want a good indication that conservatives are, at long last, scoring a few actual victories these days, look at the apoplexy it’s causing those on the left.
A prime example is a piece written by Jill Lawrence, a former editor at USA Today, which posted on July 4 on MSNBC and carried the scary title: “Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July.” It is a remarkable display of fearmongering, incoherence, and illogic.
“The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms,” Lawrence writes. “The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have. The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing.”
Ok. So, how about some examples?
Well, the “marquee setback,” according to Lawrence, was the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
But wait, that ruling actually restored a right — the right of the people to decide through democratic means how the lives of unborn children should be treated. It also upheld several of the founding principles Lawrence claims are being attacked, such as the “right to life,” and “equal protection” — unless, of course, you assume that the unborn have no such rights.
Never mind that. To Lawrence, abortion is “a right so significant it was until recently a constitutional right.”
Really? This right is “so significant” that it wasn’t discovered (or, more accurately, invented) until 186 years after the Constitution was ratified?
Lawrence cites other examples of threats to what she describes as “America’s most sacred promises”:
- The Supreme Court’s ruling that a web designer can’t be forced to create products that violate the basic tenets of her faith.
- The Court’s decision banning the use of race in college admissions.
- The fact that some states are restricting puberty blockers and sterilization procedures for gender-confused children, removing pornography from public school libraries, and forbidding teachers from “transitioning” children behind their parents’ backs.
And here we thought that religious liberty, equal protection, and parental rights were among America’s “most sacred promises.”
To make her case even less coherent, Lawrence also complains that the Supreme Court is doing too much to protect a constitutional right that actually is written into the document — the right to keep and bear arms — and that “states are racing to loosen gun laws.”
Nationwide gun bans are needed, she says, because “lives should not be more expendable in one state or region of these United States than in another.” (Never mind that gun ownership and murder rates don’t correlate, or that 27 of the 30 cities in the U.S. with the highest per-capita murder rates are run by liberal Democrats.)
What really upsets Lawrence and her ilk isn’t that conservatives are taking away rights. It’s that they are restoring rights. That’s why their solution to all these supposed problems is more centralized control of our lives. They want the federal government to legalize abortion, ban guns, run state elections, and jettison the Electoral College.
In fact, Lawrence and company would love nothing more than to do away with the sovereignty of states altogether because, as she puts it, “we should stop pretending that we are 50 walled-off states.”
Upending the entire U.S. constitutional order to impose a leftist vision on America? Now that is truly frightening. And if this totalitarian vision ever did come about, there would be no reason to celebrate the Fourth of July ever again.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
abortion is nothing more than a Child sacrifice to a false pagan god.
Right. The God of “self actualization”.
I would like to address the idea that a web designer cannot be forced to design a website that goes against his/her personal religious beliefs.
The easiest way for me to do this would be to ask several questions in the direction of Ms Lawrence. Since I can’t address her directly (I don’t even know who she is), I will post them here.
1 If you are informed by a potential hire that they are morally opposed to a message you want then to assist you in presenting to the world at-large, why would you want to hire them for your project?
2 Many people would prefer to not fund those who hold ideas different than they do. Are you one of the rare people in the world who accepts the positions of their opponents on political issues such that you want to keep them in business?
3 You complained about people who have different views than you now being granted additional rights that you don’t have. But you still have the freedom of choice to hire anyone you want to do work for you. Since such hiring depends upon both an offer and an acceptance, are you being forced to choose to hire someone you don’t want, even if they have the right to refuse to work for you?
It is obvious that my vision of what “rights” are is different from Ms Lawrence. But I am not preventing her from making the choices that she wants for herself. I am concerned she doesn’t understand the difference between rights and privileges.
I’ve read the decision. In summary: the web designer has worked, and will work, for all ‘communities’ (radical exceptions noted and rare). The decision states that she is NOT COMPELLED to create CONTENT (not the site, but CONTENT) that conflicts with personal religious beliefs.
This is a good piece. I just love the screeching of liberals in the morning, and liberal outrage is indeed a good metric for conservative progress.
The biden administration is weak and incompetent thus unable to successfully stand up for Americans’ rights in the face of foreign pressures and influences, which is how we end up hearing about the WHO and similar entities wanting to tell us how to live. This is what happens when NGO’S and other back-door ‘playas’ install senile senior citizens into our highest national office. This is what the global billionaires want…a weak bankrupt United States, beset from all sides and not long for this earth…and governed by the UN.
What this writer is upset about is that Americans are suddenly “done with peeing wherever the left points.” Conservatives have tolerated their antics with eye rolls, but no action until now. But their prolonged tolerance has made these crazies think they are entitled to be obeyed. Budweiser is just the first ripple in the coming tsunami of Americans rising in mass to choke the woke to the ground and put a stop to the alphabet people demanding the absurd. It’s been a long time coming, but this writer needs to buckle her seatbelt…she “ain’t seen nothing yet.”
I&I’s observation is that liberal apoplexy is due to conservative resurgence. However, I always thought (at least since the late 2020s) liberal apoplexy was due to the unmasking of the farce called “Russian Collusion”, the lockdowns, the masks and, of course, the COVID Vax.
All these were shown to be, not only “fake news”, but also “preposterous assertions.”
Citizens are now seeing that most-not all- of the big time media are nothing but flaccid, lying gasbags. They are also beginning to see that not paying attention to what is going on in this Administration and in this country can actually lead to the end of America for them, their lives, their children and their friends and relatives.
In my opinion, assuming History keeps on being recorded, this holocaust of the unborn, in the future (even though slavery-and its constituents-was outlawed by the 13,14 and 15the Amendments to the Constitution) will be called the resurgence of African-American slavery. And the doctors who perform them will be condemned as being integral in this new slave trade. However, it will be deemed as more barbaric and more ironic than the original slavery.
” More barbaric because the newborn cannot even defend themselves from being mutilated and killed. “Ironic” because many in the North defend it-and many in the South oppose it.
I read Ms. Lawrence’s MSNBC piece and had the same reaction. She was an editor? Her article did not pass the red-face test and was an embarrassment of illogic and shallow attack partisanship.
“Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity” covers Jill Lawrence’s rationalizations completely. “…one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him.” “Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”
I’m old enough to remember when some restauranteurs and some hoteliers proclaimed that serving blacks was against their personal religious beliefs.
Good Lord, a principle is a tenet. A tenant is a renter of housing.