The Dark Side of the Sebelius Legacy

By Jack Cashill

http://americanthinker.com/

April 14, 2014

Kathleen Sebelius

In the wake of Kathleen Sebelius’s ouster from her job as secretary of Health and Human Services, there has emerged a debate about what the Los Angeles Times calls “Obamacare and the Sebelius legacy.”

From a moral perspective, though, that is like debating whether Chairman Mao’s provision of free health care should overshadow the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

To be fair, the body count Sebelius left behind in Kansas does not nearly match that of Mao, but the body count is real.  During Sebelius’s six years as governor, women came from 48 states and points beyond to have late-term abortions in Kansas. 

They came not because Kansas had uniquely liberal abortion laws.  They came because Sebelius was uniquely hostile to the law’s enforcement.  The state’s most efficient practitioner of this dubious art, the late Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, boasted on his website of having “more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.”

What Tiller’s website did not say is that during the six years of Sebelius’s reign as governor, he ended the lives of thousands of healthy babies ready to be born, in full violation of state law.  Nor did the website tell how Sebelius personally intervened to let the carnage continue.  This was no small task.  To succeed, she had to destroy her Republican attorney general, Phill Kline, who was hot on Tiller’s trail.

The story could begin in any number of places, but a likely starting place is 2002, the year Sebelius ran for governor and Kline ran for attorney general.  As a state representative five years earlier, Kline had helped draft legislation to check the state’s then thriving late-term abortion business.  The new law allowed for a late-term abortion on a viable baby only “to preserve the life of the pregnant women” or to prevent her from suffering “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

The new law and the reporting requirement should have put an end to the late-term business of Dr. Tiller and a handful of others, but by this time Tiller had learned to game the system.  His first step was to use his influence to finesse a mental health exception.  But even Kline’s moderate Republican predecessor insisted that mental health problems had to be "permanent and substantial” to justify a late-term abortion.

Undaunted, Tiller made enough strategic donations to enough politicians to assure that no one enforced the law as written or even as interpreted.  When Kline chose to run in 2002, Tiller sensed trouble and responded accordingly.  Through a variety of PACs and cut-outs, he invested hundreds of thousands in Kline’s obscure Democrat opponent and turned a would-be landslide into a nail-biter.

Given that the numbers coming out of Tiller’s clinic had increased since the tougher law had been written, Kline began to review the required reports to see just how Tiller had been able to circumvent the law.  One thing that Kline quickly discovered was that of the 166 abortions performed on girls under fifteen in the years 2002 and 2003, Kansas abortion clinics reported only three cases to the state department of Social and Rehabilitation Services.  They should have reported all 166. 

Kline could also see that not a single doctor in Kansas had checked the “prevent patient’s death” box as a justification for the abortion.  All checked the “impairment” box.

Tiller, Kline saw, offered no medical diagnosis in his reports.  He simply reiterated the wording of the law – namely, “to avoid substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

How criminal was this enterprise?  Let’s consider the 2003 case of a confused little cowgirl who visited Tiller’s clinic in Wichita.  “Horses are my life and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing” – so explained the 15-year-old who hoped to abort the healthy, viable baby whom she had already carried for more than six months.
For the official state record, Tiller interpreted the sadness that might accompany the temporary loss of barrel racing as “substantial and irreversible.”  And so the baby was executed with the utmost privacy, and all for only about $6,000.

At Kline’s request, Dr. Paul McHugh of John Hopkins reviewed fifteen case files.  McHugh stated publicly that he “saw no file that justified abortion” according to the state’s late-term abortion laws.  He openly asked of Tiller’s practice if “any person [is] ever found to be not appropriate on psychological grounds for an abortion[.]”

Tiller spent millions keeping case record statements like “Horses are my life” out of the hands in prosecutors.  In the 2006 election alone, he invested close to $2 million.  He had to.  For the three previous years, Kline had plied an unsympathetic state judiciary to get access to Tiller’s case file, and he was finally poised to succeed. 

Tiller and his political patrons, chief among them Sebelius, resisted at every step.  To block Kline, Sebelius persuaded  popular Republican district attorney Paul Morrison to switch parties and run against Kline on her ticket.  The Democrats, Tiller’s paid proxies, and the media then launched a vicious campaign to portray “Snoop Dog Kline” as a “panty-sniffer” with no greater interest than invading the privacy of Kansas women.

So relentless were The Kansas City Star’s attacks on the “anti-choice extremist” Kline that he lost the election, and the Star won Planned Parenthood’s top media honor, the “Maggie Award,” named for its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

Three months after Kline was forced out, Sebelius hosted an elegant but extremely discreet soirée at Cedar Crest, the governor’s mansion, for Tiller and his staff.  What made this event newsworthy was that just a few months earlier, Kline had filed 30 counts against Tiller for performing illegal late-term abortions.

Among the more revealing of the photos taken at the event was one of Sebelius holding a t-shirt presented to her by Tiller, which reads “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.”  In the photo, Sebelius points at Tiller as if to acknowledge his contribution to that victory.

A month later, Sebelius joined the “conga line around the concert hall” at a big Kansas Planned Parenthood bash celebrating her birthday.  At the time, its abortion clinic was also the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.  The partiers “sure know how to have fun!” enthused the Planned Parenthood newsletter.

I cannot imagine that Ms. Sebelius is having much fun this week, but if she is known going forward only for the humiliation of ObamaCare, she will have a better legacy than she deserves.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/the_dark_side_of_the_sebelius_legacy.html at April 14, 2014 - 06:41:02 AM CDT

Where is the feminist anger at Brandeis?

Women should support Ayaan Hirsi Ali for exposing terrible abuses in many Muslim cultures

By Jeff Jacoby

http://www.bostonglobe.com/

April 11, 2014

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

‘HONOR DIARIES” might not be coming to a theater near you, at least not if CAIR gets its way. The award-winningdocumentary about “honor” violence against girls and women in much of the Muslim world was released last month in honor of International Women’s Day, and it didn’t take long for the Council on American Islamic Relations to slap its all-purpose “Islamophobic” label on it. The film has been shown in dozens of venues, but CAIR has raised enough of a stink to get screenings cancelled on several college campuses, including the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois.

CAIR — a front group for Islamist extremism that masquerades as a civil rights organization (its first executive director, Nihad Awad, was an open supporter of Hamas) — is good at raising stinks. Last week Brandeis University caved in to demands that it rescind its offer of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a heroic defender of women’s rights in the Islamic world. With a life story that reads like a screenplay, Ali has personally experienced many of the evils she fights, including genital mutilation, forced marriage, and savage “honor” crimes. Her remarkable accomplishments should easily merit the honor of any university that upholds reason and intellectual diversity. But Brandeis apparently has different priorities now, like giving CAIR and the Islamophobia-phobes a veto over honorary degrees.

Ali was involved in making “Honor Diaries,” which goes out of its way to convey respect for moderate Islam. It spotlights nine eloquent women with roots in the Islamic world, several of whom are devout Muslims — “Islam is my spiritual journey,” says one — and all of whom are passionate about exposing the terrible abuses women and girls in many Muslim cultures suffer in the name of family honor. None thinks such horrors should be excused or neglected out of a misplaced cultural sensitivity or political correctness.

But it happens routinely. People prepared to label opposition to employer-paid contraceptives a “war on women” are generally much less willing to channel their outrage at the savagery of honor killings or child marriages in non-Western societies. “They fear treading on cultural toes,” says Jasvinder Sanghera, one of the film’s featured advocates. “We’re constantly having to remind them that cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable.”

For Sanghera, who fled a forced marriage as a young teen, this is no abstract theory. She is haunted by the memory of her sister, Ravina, who committed suicide rather than “dishonor” her family by leaving the husband she was forced to marry. Also highlighted in the film is Raquel Saraswati, who embraces Islam as a source of strength and peace in her life, yet feels “afraid all the time” of the backlash against those who challenge “honor-based” violence against women.

Efforts by CAIR and its ilk to squelch honest discussion of such grave human-rights issues — and to demonize as “haters” and “Islamophobes” those who do — encapsulate the very perversity “Honor Diaries” seeks to expose: valuing the honor of a community more than a woman’s life or voice. But does CAIR’s shrill protest reflect what average citizens in Muslim countries think of such a documentary? Or does the “Honor Diaries” Arabic Facebook page, with 95,000 “likes” — and climbing?

Why aren’t more progressives passionate about these issues?

I put that question to Nazie Eftekhari, an immigrant from Iran and another of the women “Honor Diaries” focuses on. A successful Minnesota health care entrepreneur, Eftekhari unhesitatingly describes herself as a “bleeding-heart liberal” and a longtime Democratic Party voter, loyalist, and fund-raiser. She is as mystified as I am.

“The biggest human-rights crisis of our generation is the treatment of women in Muslim-majority countries, and we’ve applied a gag order to ourselves,” she replies with unmistakable distress. “We won’t talk about it. Where are my fellow liberals? Where are the feminists?”

In theocratic Iran today, Eftekhari says, the legal age of marriage for girls has beenlowered to 9. Fathers can legally marry their adopted daughters. “How can President Obama, who has two young daughters, not be making a huge issue of this?” she wants to know. “It’s not marriage, it’s statutory rape.”

Eftekhari can’t understand why so many progressive voices fall silent on an issue she thinks they should be raising the loudest. She has only contempt for anyone who thinks it progressive to snub those — like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — who so bravely speak out: “Ali needs no degree or honor from Brandeis; she is a guiding light for the women who respect and honor her. But where will Brandeis go to get its respect and honor back?”

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby.

Film Review: 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier'

Maybe the most grown-up Avengers movie yet

By Ann Hornaday, Published: April 3 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Crash, boom, bang.

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” brings back one of the most mild-mannered superheroes of the Marvel Avengers franchise, the clean-cut, square-jawed Steve Rogers, whose quiet determination and commitment to decency — oh, and preternatural speed and strength — allow him to speak softly and carry a big shield.

But in this, the second installment featuring Rogers and his titular alter ego, Steve is forced into all manner of chaotic, cacophonous action. A baggy, at times brutal conglomeration of surprisingly deep character development and aggressively percussive action, “The Winter Soldier” is a comic-book movie only in its provenance. (The character was created by Marvel back in 1941.) In its relentless violence and dark political subtext, this might be the most grown-up Avengers episode yet.

“The Winter Soldier” finds Rogers — now fully defrosted after being cryogenically preserved during World War II — jogging around the Mall; it’s been two years since the near- destruction of New York City (the climactic set piece of shared-universe lollapalooza “The Avengers”), and he’s still trying to get up to speed on such late-20th-century developments as grunge music and Thai food. After striking up a friendly conversation with fellow runner and war veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Steve is picked up by Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson): They’ve got a job to do, this time involving nonchalantly saving a ship and the lives of the S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives who have been taken hostage on it.

Just another day’s work for the savior of the Western World, but straight-arrow Steve suspects that something’s up when Natasha seems more concerned with saving the ship’s computer data to her flash drive than fighting the Algerian terrorists swarming the boat. It turns out Steve has reason for suspicion, as “The Winter Soldier” proves that, even back at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters in what seems to be Northern Virginia’s coolest — if vaguely fascistic — office complex, no one can be trusted.

One of the great strengths of the Avengers mega-franchise has been its canny casting, and “The Winter Soldier” is no exception: Chris Evans once again brings a clean-cut, straight-shooting air of simplicity to Steve’s principled paragon, even evincing a whiff or two of prissy self-righteousness along the way. Happily, directors Joe and Anthony Russo, working from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have decided to make “The Winter Soldier” something of a two-hander between Steve and Natasha, who as portrayed by Johansson continually threatens to steal the entire movie with her slinky martial arts moves and sultry, smoky-voiced one-liners. (If Hollywood was waiting for proof that the Black Widow was ready for her own installment, here it is. Get cracking, fellas.)

Other beloved S.H.I.E.L.D. figures are on hand here as well, including Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), and viewers might want to brace themselves for a loss that rivals the death of Maria’s old work buddy, Clark Gregg’s still-lamented Phil Coulson. But it’s the newcomers who make the biggest impact in “The Winter Soldier,” especially Robert Redford, who plays Fury’s longtime colleague and World Security Council leader Alexander Pierce with cagey charm and cool reticence; and Mackie, who convincingly introduces a new character, the Falcon, with appealing, unforced charisma and the grace of a titanium Icarus.

For a script that presumably has been in development for more than a few years, “The Winter Soldier” uncannily taps into anxieties having to do not only with post-9/11 arguments about security and freedom, but also Obama-era drone strikes and Snowden-era privacy. Indeed, there are moments that, in their taut writing and ingenious staging, recall the icy-hot paranoid thrillers that Redford himself made back in the 1970s.

But lest audiences think that “The Winter Soldier” will fall into the trap of taking itself too seriously, the filmmakers make sure that for every serious motif there’s at least one joke (a scene set in a bunker full of ’70s-era computer equipment is particularly piquant, as is a terrifically legit-looking Air and Space Museum exhibition devoted to Steve’s career) and one-and-a-half scenes of pulverizing, knuckle-splitting action. At a running time of over two hours, “The Winter Soldier” easily could have trimmed its long-winded action set pieces, extravaganzas of promiscuous gunplay, all-engulfing fireballs and loud lashings of shattered glass that begin to feel repetitive by the film’s Big Finish, a fight that plays out with over-the-top violence that’s both cartoonish and repellently brutalizing.

For all of its overstatement, though, “The Winter Soldier” is superbly made and well-acted, neatly setting up the next few installments with just the right enticing sense of ongoing mystery. As ever, perhaps the biggest lingering question has to do with whether S.H.I.E.L.D.’s sharp-elbowed superheroes will work together as a functional team or go their own idiosyncratic ways. As “The Winter Soldier” proves, often with a punishing vengeance, just because you share a universe doesn’t necessarily mean you play well with others.

★ ★ ★ PG-13. At area theaters. Contains intense sequences of violence, gunplay and action throughout. 136 minutes.

Degrees of Separation

by Mark Steyn
Steyn on Culture

http://www.steynonline.com/April 9, 2014

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Today, Brandeis University announced that it was reversing its decision to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, following complaints from faculty, an online petition, and pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents nobody but is flush with Saudi cash. The biases of the academy are well known: Robert Spencer is in no danger of getting an honorary degree any time soon, nor Douglas Murray. Nevertheless, in this instance, Brandeis University is stiffing someone who's a black feminist atheist from Somalia. Which makes their decision the most explicit recognition yet that, in the hierarchy of identity-group politics, Islam trumps everything, including race, gender and secularism.

Brandeis said they had changed their mind about Ms Hirsi Ali's degree because "we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University's core values". Presumably, Tony Kushner's statement that the state of Israel shouldn't exist is entirely consistent with Brandeis University's core values, because no one bothered rescinding his honorary degree.

I wrote about Ayaan a couple of years ago in Maclean's:

She lives under armed guard and was forced to abandon the Netherlands because quite a lot of people want to kill her. And not in the desultory behead-the-enemies-of-Islam you-will-die-infidel pro forma death-threats-R-us way that many of us have perforce gotten used to in recent years: her great friend and professional collaborator was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam by a man who shot him eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then drove into his chest two knives, pinning to what was left of him a five-page note pledging to do the same to her. 

What would you do in those circumstances? Ayaan and I had repaired to that third-rate bar after a day-long conference on Islam, jihad, free speech and whatnot. That's usually where I run into her, whether in Malibu or at the Carlton Club in London or at a less illustrious venue. Would you be doing that with a price on your head? Or would you duck out of sight, lie low, change your name, move to New Zealand, and hope one day to get your life back? After the threats against the Comedy Central show South Park the other week, Ms. Hirsi Ali turned up on CNN to say that the best defence against Islamic intimidation is for us all to stand together and thereby "share the risk." But, around the world, every single translator of her books has insisted on total anonymity. When push comes to shove, very few are willing to share the risk.

In London, the historian Andrew Roberts calls her "the bravest woman I know". I agree. There's nothing hypothetical about the danger she lives with. She and Theo van Gogh made a movie called Submission: He's dead, and the fellows who did it would like to kill her, too. But some tenured navel-gazing hacks and the prissy little trusty-fundy twerps they pretend to teach think she's the threat?

As for Brandeis president Frederick Lawrence and the others who took this decision, nobody's asking them to be as brave as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They will never know what it's like to have their associates murdered and to be forced into living under armed guard. They will never have to "share the risk" that Ms Hirsi Ali faces every day of her life. All that was required of President Lawrence & Co was that they not be total craven, jelly-spined squishes who fold like a cheap Bedouin tent at the first hint of pressure.

But Lawrence couldn't even do that. Ayaan Hirsi Ali campaigns against female genital mutilation - that's to say, the barbarous practice by which Muslim men deny women sexual pleasure by having their clitorises cut off. Lawrence and the other fellows who run Brandeis are in no danger of any equivalent procedure since it seems clear they've nothing down there to chop off anyway. The eunuchs of the American academy are the beneficiaries of western liberty, of the spirit of openness and inquiry that is the principal difference between us and the intellectually stagnant Muslim world. But they will not lift a finger to defend that tradition.

So getting an honorary degree at Brandeis, like serving on the board at Mozilla, is open only to those who make sure they never cross the Conformity Enforcers. And apostates to Islam, as Ayaan is regarded, must accept that they are apostates to American campus conformity, too, and be prepared to lead a life without the consolations of honorary degrees. Accepting the loss of A-list commencement gigs doesn't take a lot of courage, but it still takes more than Frederick Lawrence has displayed. And ultimately, as I said re Brandon Eich, such a land will be bloody boring - and a society in decline.

~Miss Hirsi Ali's response to Brandeis is here. You can read more on the strange alliance between Islam and the multiculti left in my free-speech book Lights Out, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from SteynOnline. Profits go to fund my legal campaign against serial litigant Michael E Mann.

Our Year of No Sugar: One Family’s Grand Adventure

By Eve O. Schaub, Special to Everyday Health

http://www.everydayhealth.com/

April 1, 2014

Once upon a time, I was healthy; at least I thought I was.

Sure, I lacked enough energy to get me through the day, but with all the commercials on TV touting energy drinks for America’s tired masses, I always assumed I wasn’t the only one suffering. And sure, everyone in my family dreaded the coming cold and flu season, but again, I thought come January everyone develops some degree of germophobia.

At least, that’s what I thought until I heard some disturbing new information about the effects of sugar. According to several experts, sugar is the thing that is making so many Americans fat and sick. The more I thought about it the more this made sense to me — a lot of sense. One in seven Americans has metabolic syndrome. One in three Americans is obese. The rate of diabetes is skyrocketing and cardiovascular disease is America’s number one killer.

According to this theory, all of these maladies and more can be traced back to one large toxic presence in our diet… sugar.

A Bright Idea

I took all of this newfound knowledge and formulated an idea. I wanted to see how hard it would be to have our family — me, my husband, and our two children (ages 6 and 11) — spend an entire year eating foods that contained no added sugar. We’d cut out anything with an added sweetener, be it table sugar, honey, molasses, maple syrup, agave or fruit juice. We also excluded anything made with fake sugar or sugar alcohols. Unless the sweetness was attached to its original source (e.g., a piece of fruit), we didn’t eat it.

Once we started looking we found sugar in the most amazing places: tortillas, sausages, chicken broth, salad dressing, cold cuts, crackers, mayonnaise, bacon, bread, and even baby food. Why add all of this sugar? To make these items more palatable, add shelf life, and make packaged food production ever cheaper.

Call me crazy, but avoiding added sugar for a year struck me as a grand adventure. I was curious as to what would happen. I wanted to know how hard it would be, what interesting things could happen, how my cooking and shopping would change. After continuing my research, I was convinced removing sugar would make us all healthier. What I didn’t expect was how not eating sugar would make me feel better in a very real and tangible way.

A Sugar-Free Year Later

It was subtle, but noticeable; the longer I went on eating without added sugar, the better and more energetic I felt. If I doubted the connection, something happened next which would prove it to me: my husband’s birthday.

During our year of no sugar, one of the rules was that, as a family, we could have one actual sugar-containing dessert per month; if it was your birthday, you got to choose the dessert. By the time September rolled around we noticed our palates starting to change, and slowly, we began enjoying our monthly “treat” less and less.

But when we ate the decadent multi-layered banana cream pie my husband had requested for his birthday celebration, I knew something new was happening. Not only did I not enjoy my slice of pie, I couldn’t even finish it. It tasted sickly sweet to my now sensitive palate. It actually made my teeth hurt. My head began to pound and my heart began to race; I felt awful.

It took a good hour lying on the couch holding my head before I began to recover. “Geez,” I thought, “has sugar always made me feel bad, but because it was everywhere, I just never noticed it before?”

After our year of no sugar ended, I went back and counted the absences my kids had in school and compared them to those of previous years. The difference was dramatic. My older daughter, Greta, went from missing 15 days the year before to missing only two.

Now that our year of no sugar is over, we’ll occasionally indulge, but the way we eat it is very different. We appreciate sugar in drastically smaller amounts, avoid it in everyday foods (that it shouldn’t be in in the first place), and save dessert for truly special occasions. My body seems to be thanking me for it. I don’t worry about running out of energy. And when flu season comes around I somehow no longer feel the urge to go and hide with my children under the bed. But if we  do come down with something, our bodies are better equipped to fight it. We get sick less and get well faster. Much to my surprise, after our no-sugar life, we all feel healthier and stronger. And that is nothing to sneeze at.

Eve O. Schaub is the author of Year of No Sugar: A Memoir. She holds a BA and a BFA from Cornell University, and a MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her personal essays have been featured many times on the Albany, New York, NPR station WAMC. You can join Schaub’s family and take your own Day of No Sugar Challenge on April 9, 2014.

Stephen Halbrook’s Masterful History of Nazi Gun Control Measures

By Clayton E. Cramer

http://pjmedia.com/

April 11, 2014

Over the last twenty years, Stephen P. Halbrook’s scholarly work on gun control has become more polished, nuanced, and methodical. His latest book, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,” ^[1] is an astonishing piece of scholarship: complete, careful, and thoughtful.

For a very long time, Americans opposed to gun control have used the example of Nazi Germany’s gun control laws as a warning of what might happen here. Regrettably, not everyone has been careful enough. There is a quote purportedly from Hitler about gun control that starts out “1935 will go down in history” that used to float around the Internet; it does not appear so often anymore because a number of people, including me, demonstrated its falsity.

Part of what allowed bogus quotes like this to survive was that few historians had bothered to research the real history of the Nazis and gun control. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership did a nice job of obtaining and translating the 1928 and 1931 Weimar Republic gun control laws and the 1938 Nazi gun control law ^[2] some years ago. But as useful as those translations are, they simply do not compare to what Halbrook has done with his new book.

Halbrook traces the development of German gun control law from the collapse of the Kaiser’s government in 1918 through the post-war chaos, the Weimar Republic’s efforts to prevent the violence of the Nazis and the Communists in the 1920s and early 1930s, and then the ways in which the Nazis used those laws to disarm anyone who they regarded as “enemies of the state” (which of course included all Jews).

In doing so, Halbrook makes use of an astonishing set of sources. His secondary sources are impressive: scholarly histories of the period, such as The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic; specialized works that you might not even expect to exist, such as Der Weg des Sports in die nationalsozialistische Diktatur (The Way of Sport in the National Socialist Dictatorship). Halbrook goes far beyond that, however, with an impressive collection of primary sources, including diaries by people who lived through the time, surviving police records, internal government memos, and court decisions.

Part of what makes a book like this possible is part of what made it so easy to convict Nazis war criminals: the German penchant for documenting everything, and the difficulty in making those documents disappear when it became apparent that the war was lost.

There are many parallels between the laws passed in the Weimar Republic and by the Nazis, and current gun control laws and proposals. For example: the nature and duration of the records that gun manufacturers and dealers were required to keep (p. 135); issuance of gun carry licenses “only to persons considered reliable and only if a need is proven” (p. 107); the use of relatively rare incidents to justify widespread disarmament of “enemies of the state” (p. 155); and the prohibition of firearms with features not generally used “for hunting or sporting purposes” (p. 134).

This is not to say that gun control advocates in America today are planning a police state, concentration camps, and mass extermination. As Halbrook points out, when the Weimar Republic pursued its campaign of strict licensing and registration, they were genuinely trying to deal with a serious violence problem. They picked a solution that did not work, as some police officials of the time pointed out, causing some German states to refuse to go along with the Weimar Republic’s mandatory registration regulations in 1931 (pp. 34-38).

The problem was that, as some pointed out when mandatory registration was under discussion in 1931, “in chaotic times, the lists of firearms owners would fall into the wrong hands, allowing unauthorized persons to seize arms and use them to commit unlawful acts” (p. 29). The lists did fall into the wrong hands — the Nazi government, after the 1933 elections. And they did use them to seize arms, especially from Jews and other “enemies of the state.”

A common argument of gun control advocates against the insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment is that there was no practical way for opponents of the Nazi government to overturn it ^[3]. What value could rifles and pistols have in Nazi Germany?

It is indeed possible that an armed German population in 1934 or 1935 would not have made that much of a difference. Hitler was very popular with most Germans, and even German Jews regarded the continual legal disabilities and extralegal injuries imposed on them as insults, best accepted because the alternative was worse. Still, when the time came that German Jews started to be loaded up on railroad cars and shipped to concentration camps, the writing was on the wall, and more than a few knew that they had little chance of getting out of this alive. But by that point, the Nazi government had used the registration lists dating from the Weimar Republic to disarm most German Jews.

Perhaps rifles and pistols in the hands of Germany’s Jews would not have seriously delayed the Holocaust, but the example of the Warsaw Ghetto, where Polish Jews with ten rifles and a few dozen pistols ^[4] delayed the German Army for six weeks, suggests otherwise.

How could Germany’s Jews being armed for resistance have made anything worse?

---

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/nazi-gun-control/

URLs in this post:

[1] Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,”: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598131621/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1598131621&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

[2] 1938 Nazi gun control law: http://jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/NaziLawEnglish.htm

[3] was no practical way for opponents of the Nazi government to overturn it: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/dump-second-amendment-privacy-amendment/2014/02/03

[4] Warsaw Ghetto, where Polish Jews with ten rifles and a few dozen pistols: http://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Warsaw-Uprising-Israel-Gutman/dp/0395901308/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391827943&sr=1-1&keywords=Resistance+Warsaw

Did Jesus Have a Wife? No.

James Martin, SJ

http://americamagazine.org/

April 10, 2014

A fragment of papyrus, known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” has been analyzed by professors at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembled other ancient papyri. CreditKaren L. King/Harvard University, via Reuters

Reports today of the authenticity of a fragment of the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which was originally unveiled in 2012 by the Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King, are sure to cause a rash of news stories and opinion pieces on whether Jesus was married.  So here’s my answer: No.

Before I talk about the reasons why almost every New Testament scholar believes that Jesus was unmarried, let me say that my faith does not rise or fall on whether Jesus was married.  The Christian faith is not based on Jesus’s celibacy, but on the Incarnation and the Resurrection.  In short, a married man healing the sick, stilling storms and raising the dead is just as impressive as an unmarried man doing so.  More to the point, if a married man himself rises from the dead after being in a tomb for three days, I would be following him. Married or unmarried, Jesus is still the Son of God.

Also, before I talk about the reasons scholars believe that he was almost certainly single, I should point out that the manuscript in question was written long after the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) were written.  The fragment is most likely from the fourth to the eighth century.   By contrast, the earliest Gospel, Mark, was written in AD 75, only 40 years after Jesus’s time on earth.  The fragment in question, at its earliest, was written three hundred years after the canonical Gospels.  In general, it’s better to rely on sources closer to the actual events, particularly, as in the case of Mark, when there were people still alive who had known Jesus, and could presumably have corrected any inaccuracies in Mark's text.  Three hundred years later, people take many more liberties with he story.

Overall, it’s more likely that Jesus was unmarried.  How do we know this?  Here’s what I say in my new book, Jesus: A Pilgrimage

Now, it is almost certain that Jesus was celibate.  How do we know this?  For one thing, the Gospels talk about Jesus’s mother and “brothers and sisters” several times, so if he had a wife it would be odd not to mention her.  In his magisterial book A Marginal Jew, John Meier, a professor of New Testament at Notre Dame, and scholar of the “historical Jesus,” suggests that being unmarried was seen as undesirable for most rabbis of the time, and even though Jesus is not technically a rabbi, it would have been strange for the Gospel writers to concoct a story that he was celibate if he was in fact married. The Gospels’ silence about a wife and children likely means that Jesus had neither. 

What are some possible reasons for Jesus’s remaining unmarried?  He may have intuited that once he started his ministry it would be short or even meet a disastrous end. As a Jew, knew the fate of other prophets.  Jesus may have foreseen the difficulty of caring for a family while being an itinerant preacher.  Or perhaps his celibacy was another manifestation of his single-hearted commitment to God.  After sifting through the facts, Meier lands on the last reason: “The position that Jesus remained celibate on religious grounds [is] the more probable hypothesis.”

Other theories, where Mary Magdalene is proposed as Jesus’s wife, are also rather far-fetched.  Most women and women disciples in the New Testament are referred to, by the convention of their time, as “the wife of” or “the mother of.” In a patriarchal world, they were most often identified through their associations with either a husband or a son (or sons).  So we read of women like “Mary, the wife of Clopas” and “Joanna, the wife of Chusa.” Consequently, it is more likely that if Mary Magdalene were married to Jesus she would be called not "Mary of Magdala," but “Mary, the wife of Jesus.”

Also, in terms of the Passion narratives, which Christians will read during Holy Week, the Gospels place several important women at the scene of Jesus's death, at foot of the Cross.  The Gospel of John, written in roughly AD 100, reports the following women as present at the Crucifixion: “his [Jesus's] mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene.”  An even earlier Gospel, Matthew, written around AD 85, says that there were “many women,” and then lists those the Gospel writer considers important: “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.”  Were Jesus married, not mentioning “the wife of Jesus" in either the stories of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection would be odd indeed.

Nearly every scholar believes that Jesus was unmarried.  So do I.  As I said, my faith does not rest on his being unmarried--but my reason tells me that he was.

Here's What I Would Have Said at Brandeis

We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

http://online.wsj.com/

April 11, 2014

On Tuesday, after protests by students, faculty and outside groups, Brandeis University revoked its invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree at its commencement ceremonies in May. The protesters accused Ms. Hirsi Ali, an advocate for the rights of women and girls, of being "Islamophobic." Here is an abridged version of the remarks she planned to deliver.

One year ago, the city and suburbs of Boston were still in mourning. Families who only weeks earlier had children and siblings to hug were left with only photographs and memories. Still others were hovering over bedsides, watching as young men, women, and children endured painful surgeries and permanent disfiguration. All because two brothers, radicalized by jihadist websites, decided to place homemade bombs in backpacks near the finish line of one of the most prominent events in American sports, the Boston Marathon.

All of you in the Class of 2014 will never forget that day and the days that followed. You will never forget when you heard the news, where you were, or what you were doing. And when you return here, 10, 15 or 25 years from now, you will be reminded of it. The bombs exploded just 10 miles from this campus.

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Associate books editor Bari Weiss on Brandeis University's decision to withdraw its offer of an honorary degree to women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Photo credit: Associated Press.

I read an article recently that said many adults don't remember much from before the age of 8. That means some of your earliest childhood memories may well be of that September morning simply known as "9/11."

You deserve better memories than 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing. And you are not the only ones. In Syria, at least 120,000 people have been killed, not simply in battle, but in wholesale massacres, in a civil war that is increasingly waged across a sectarian divide. Violence is escalating in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Libya, in Egypt. And far more than was the case when you were born, organized violence in the world today is disproportionately concentrated in the Muslim world.

Another striking feature of the countries I have just named, and of the Middle East generally, is that violence against women is also increasing. In Saudi Arabia, there has been a noticeable rise in the practice of female genital mutilation. In Egypt, 99% of women report being sexually harassed and up to 80 sexual assaults occur in a single day.

Especially troubling is the way the status of women as second-class citizens is being cemented in legislation. In Iraq, a law is being proposed that lowers to 9 the legal age at which a girl can be forced into marriage. That same law would give a husband the right to deny his wife permission to leave the house.

Sadly, the list could go on. I hope I speak for many when I say that this is not the world that my generation meant to bequeath yours. When you were born, the West was jubilant, having defeated Soviet communism. An international coalition had forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The next mission for American armed forces would be famine relief in my homeland of Somalia. There was no Department of Homeland Security, and few Americans talked about terrorism.

Two decades ago, not even the bleakest pessimist would have anticipated all that has gone wrong in the part of world where I grew up. After so many victories for feminism in the West, no one would have predicted that women's basic human rights would actually be reduced in so many countries as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.

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Associated Press

Today, however, I am going to predict a better future, because I believe that the pendulum has swung almost as far as it possibly can in the wrong direction.

When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago. The misnamed Arab Spring has been a revolution full of disappointments. But I believe it has created an opportunity for traditional forms of authority—including patriarchal authority—to be challenged, and even for the religious justifications for the oppression of women to be questioned.

Yet for that opportunity to be fulfilled, we in the West must provide the right kind of encouragement. Just as the city of Boston was once the cradle of a new ideal of liberty, we need to return to our roots by becoming once again a beacon of free thought and civility for the 21st century. When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with condemnation, but with concrete actions.

One of the best places to do that is in our institutions of higher learning. We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I'm used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.

I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women's and girls' basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight.

The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.

So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.

Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.

The motto of Brandeis University is "Truth even unto its innermost parts." That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.

Ms. Hirsi Ali is the author of "Nomad: My Journey from Islam to America" (Free Press, 2010). She is a fellow at the Belfer Center of Harvard's Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.