A "controversy" has (almost) inexplicably rose up this week as far-left journalists, even farther-left bloggers, and the defenders of the sodomist agenda are freaking out about the policies of the centre-right Wildrose Party of Alberta.
Let's summarize this policy now, shall we? From the Wildrose list of member-approved policies (as in, chosen by members at a convention, this will come into effect later):
B. DeliveryThat's it. That's literally it. When it comes to the delivery of your healthcare, a Wildrose Government will have the follow eighteen integrated items on the subject of delivery. One of them is rather simple: no medical practitioner in Alberta will be forced to perform any actions in healthcare which violate their conscience. What's the applicability of this? Well, the classic example is abortion. The actual text of the Hippocratic Oath, which most (but not all) doctors swear fealty to, prohibits abortions. In the world inhabited by the likes of Alison "Red" Redford, forcing doctors to perform an action directly violated by an oath they have taken to God (well, okay, in this case, 'the heathen healing gods') is moral. Letting them tell the provincial government, which simultaneously tells doctors that they cannot perform their craft without license from, that they will not do this according to their conscience? That's perfectly moral.
9. A Wildrose Government will institute performance measures that are annually audited and publicly reported.
10. A Wildrose Government will build a unified, universal and cost-effective health services information network that will improve care and reduce long-term costs.
11. A Wildrose Government will give all citizens better access to their medical records and treatment histories.
12. A Wildrose Government will institute a Health Management System that rewards cost-effective, cost-saving administration by providing incentives to doctors, nurses and health care professionals.
13. A Wildrose Government will encourage and support innovations in the delivery of health care.
14. A Wildrose Government will alleviate pressure on emergency room services by expanding the funding for and the number of multi-disciplinary 24-hour-a-day community-based health care centres.
15. The Wildrose Alliance believes that the government should support not-for-profit and private long-term care facilities that will help address the needs of our aging population.
16. A Wildrose Government will establish a rural and remote health initiative to ensure Albertans get the care they need.
17. A Wildrose Government will implement legislation protecting the “conscience rights” of healthcare professionals.
18. The Wildrose Alliance believes that the Alberta government should provide an annual cost schedule for all medical procedures in the province.
The bit in italics is perhaps the most damning of all on this file. Doctors have no choice in Alberta but to be doctors under the yoke of the Province of Alberta. It's an "our way or the highway" setup in almost its classic formulation. In response, the membership of the Wildrose Alliance (who I'm going to suggest aren't mostly made up of doctors and nurses) thought it was more than fair to put a relief valve in place: those healthcare practitioners whose conscience does not allow a course of action that they disagree with are free to say nyet.
Abortion is, as I said, the classic example of this. But more and more, the Hippocratic proclamation against euthanasia has become applicable as well. Injecting Grandma with a cocktail of deadly chemicals so the kids don't have to feel embarrassed about not visiting her (or, say, a hospital administrator looking to 'free up' a bed, or a health minister trying to free up some space in the budget) may fit in with the conscience of some doctors, but not most. Under the Red Redford way of looking at healthcare, the doctor is just supposed to take it. Similarly the surgery that turns (well, almost) normal people in trans-testicles that was so well described in the link ("Mutilating the Body to Correct a Delusion"). Will doctors be forced into that procedure as well, now that Red Redford is in charge? (she has previously expressed support that ye ol' snip-snip be funded by Alberta taxpayers). What will be the next one down the road? Who knows? Will doctors be forbidden from proscribing a nonsense cure like homeopathy a few years down the road? Only time will tell, and such a future is far more scary when you realize that the moral decisions of individual doctors is apparently something very very important to be sacrificed for the "common good".
So while we're worrying about the delivery of healthcare, let's take a moment to ask about faggots. Why are we asking about faggots? Wait, why is this even something in the news? Well, it's all about what one particular lover of sodomists wrote a few days ago:
For those who don’t understand the concept of “Conscience Rights”, the simplest explanation is that conscience rights would allow a doctor to refuse to write a prescription for contraceptives based on his Judeo-Christian ethics, refuse treatment to someone based on their sexual orientation, or race, or differing creed, or anyone of a thousand different reasons only that doctor knows about.It's important to note here that the proprietor of KikkiPlanet.com got the bit about the Hippocratic Oath entirely bass-ackwards. In the parlance of the crazed right-wing Texas cowboy, she's...what's that quaint non-inclusive word? Oh yeah: she's wrong. As in, not correct. As in, inaccurate. Besides the fact that not everybody took the oath, and that clearly some doctors decided to violate it whole-heartedly by getting jobs with Henry Morgantaler in 1987, the key bit is that the doctor himself, not Red Redford and not KikkiPlanet and not Raj Sherman gets to decide, for themselves, when a government edict goes against their oaths and requires them to break their word. (Also, while Conscience Rights for lawyers is an interesting concept, the Wildrose policy book doesn't call for them, possibly because enforcing the consciences of lawyers would suck up 90% of the total provincial budget overnight).
Conscience rights allow doctors to ignore the oath they took when they became doctors. Conscience rights allow lawyers to ignore the oath they took to uphold the law, above all else, when they stood before the Bar to be admitted, thus allowing them to refuse to act on behalf of someone of a different race.
Having gotten the backgrounder entirely wrong [perhaps oversimplified? Perhaps liberals should try harder to understand the complex nuances in these matters -ed] Kikki turns to the matter dear to her:
Conscience rights allow marriage commissioners to refuse to marry same sex couples, despite the fact that those same commissioners are given powers by a government that acknowledges the rights of gays to marry.Well, no, nobody sees the "irony" there, because there isn't any. For one, doctors already have the latitude on which patients they get to see: that's why so many of them don't accept any new patients. Denying treatment to absolutely every man woman and child in Alberta not already on an arbitrary list is currently acceptable practice. Was this ironic? Marriage commissioners who don't want to marry a faggot (a right which, incidentally, such extreme right-wingers as former PM Paul Martin and current Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty have already defended) are also given the latitude to refuse to marry people who they believe aren't actually getting married. We already permit them to block heterosexual sham marriages, why not the sham marriages of ass pirates (which is to say, of course, all of them).
Conscience rights allow pharmacists to refuse to fill certain prescriptions. Conscience rights would allow me, if I were a doctor, to deny treatment to a Christian, based on the fact that I’m an atheist.
Conscience rights allow doctors to refuse to perform or recommend fertility treatments.
Yeah… you kinda see the irony there, right?
This is pretty much where KikkiPlanet's arguments go off the rails and she basically just establishes her poofter-loving bona fides -- with a brief foray into baby-killing (oh, those liberal mothers!):
“Doctors took an oath to save lives, not destroy them.”My favourite kind is chocolate. But again, Kikki's evaluation of what doctors are sworn by Hippocrates to do is wrong on the most basic of levels. For somebody who went off on such a tangent about the Hippocratic Oath did she not even bother to read it on Wikipedia? Here it is in its entirety
Holy sweetcheesecurds. Seriously? I suppose this is meant to speak to the issue of abortion. But the problem with this argument is that no doctor in this province, nay, in this nation, is required to perform an abortion. In fact, abortions in the province of Alberta are performed at specialized clinics and doctors and nurses choose whether or not to work in them. If the Wildrose Party of Alberta wants to argue public funding of abortions in this province, I understand that, but this “not destroy lives” counterargument is ridiculous and without any validity given that doctors aren’t required to perform abortions.
“Catholic doctors should not be required to write a prescription for birth control.”
First of all, this statement goes against the oath all doctors take. If they weren’t prepared to take that oath, they should have never become doctors. Yes, it is that simple. And I daresay none of those same “Catholic doctors” take issue with writing prescriptions for Viagra or Cialis. All good to enable men to impregnate their wives, all bad to allow women the right to control their own reproductive organs. Welcome to the 1950’s. Excuse me for a moment. I need to kick off my Prada heels, get impregnated and go bake a cake.
I SWEAR by Apollo the physician, AEsculapius, and Health, and All-heal, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation.That's both abortion and birth control all covered in there! As for Viagra, many doctors do avoid proscribing Viagra. It's such a common practice it makes it into throwaway scenes on throwaway American sitcoms. In 1998. So yes, doctors do avoid proscribing what they believe to be harmful treatments. Everybody disagrees already on what harmful treatments are (again, more on that later). It seems odd on Good Friday no less to be having to talk about those "nutty" Catholic ideas.
TO RECHON him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required; to look up his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation; and that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according the law of medicine, but to none others.
I WILL FOLLOW that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give a woman a pessary to produce abortion.
WITH PURITY AND WITH HOLINESS I will pass my life and practice my Art. I will not cut persons laboring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.
WHATEVER, IN CONNECTION with my professional practice or not, in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret.
WHILE I CONTINUE to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men, in all times! But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot!
“No doctor should be forced to perform a sex change operation.”See what I mean about going off the rails? While transtesticles like Sonny and Cher's
Oh… the idiocy of this statement is …. no words. No doctor IS required to perform a “sex change” operation. It’s a field of specialty for doctors. By the way, your referring to it as a “sex change” operation further goes to prove just how out of touch and ignorant you are. Read a book or even an internet article. Follow Chaz Bono on Twitter. Do anything but please, get educated! (It’s called “gender reassignment”. Learn it. Use it. “Sex Change” is an offensive term, right up there with “fag” and “dyke”).
“Well, should a Catholic Priest be required to marry a gay couple?”Besides the irrevocable fact that Sandra Fluke exists, the slippery slope is already being greased up in New York. This whole thing sort of calls to mind what I wrote about Jack Layton's sick support for undesirable members of society six years ago:
Of course not. I support separation of church and state. I don’t believe forcing religious institutions to marry gay couples benefits anyone. But the truth of the matter is I don’t know a single gay couple (and I gotta tell ya, I know A LOT of gay couples) that would go to the Catholic church to perform their marriage ceremony. So… what is your point here? No one is forcing any church to perform gay marriages.
What moral qualms of today are the NDP willing to abandon to the latest desires of "progressives" of tomorrow? The big (and obvious) question is will anybody pick up on this and ask the big questions? My guess would be no: except for me. If you're browsing past this blog and wondering about the original thoughts within it that make it worth bookmarking, this is it:Here we are, six years later, and still we're on the same page. What is the next item on the sodomist's agenda? What is the sick depraved lifestyle (that 90%+ of the population today opposes) whom progressives will fall in love with next, culminating in an Alberta circa 2035 where doctors and other service providers both private and public are forced to give full deference to? That's exactly the point: perched in the "barbaric backwards" era of 2012 we're only sitting and waiting. Will it be vegetarians? Pedophiles? Bestialists? Some other sick desire we haven't even heard of yet?
I AM THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAS THE BRAINS AND THE BALLS TO ASK JACK LAYTON WHAT SICK LIFESTYLE HE OPPOSES TODAY AND WILL SUPPORT TOMORROW.
Having proudly abandoned any notion of drawing a moral line in the sand, we can only preclude that if Jack only lived long enough, we'd see him and his NDP cronies in Parliament happily endorse the sickest and most depraved of sexual acts with a straight face, proud that they have become morally evolved human beings.
And what will happen to you, dear 2012 reader, by then? You became a doctor in 1975 and thirty years later you're forced to perform abortions. You became a marriage commissioner in 1999 and ten years later you're forced to pretend sodomites can really be married. These weren't part of your practice when you took this oath, but they are now. You're in school to be a nurse and graduate in 2014? Enjoy that world of tomorrow. In KikkiPlanet and Red Redford's Alberta, you're a gnat, an automaton. The directive from comes in from the office of the Premier of Alberta. This is the way it is going to be as a cousin of mine was particularly fond of saying during his Elementary School years. You are merely a tool, a hand with a scalpel in it. What to do, how to do it, and whom to do it to? That's all set out of your control. Here's some money and just shut up about all that morality. It's embarrassing the government. It's embarrassing the middle-aged housewives who love pederasts because they are just like "one of the girls". Take your outdated morality, your sense of right and wrong, the very thing that makes you a human being and squelch it away. Pinch it off like the tapered end of a sausage. Throw it out! Throw it out! We can't have people and their beliefs running rampant in our province!
Kikki's not done in the deep end, mind you (that's a drowning in a pool analogy, not a layer-cake style hierarchy of thought):
In fact, one supporter suggested that the queers just get themselves a queer commissioner and all will be right with the world.The wild-eyed fantasy of faggots to equate themselves with the black men who berate them (or, over on the Dark Continent, kill their effeminate asses) is classically hilarious. Equating a racial or cultural heritage (which you're born with) with a sexual depravity you invent upon yourself is already a false dichotomy from the start (a better dichotomy for those keeping track is religion, but for obvious reasons the tinkerbells aren't too quick to sign onto that comparison). That the world would be a better place with Harvey Milk and Gloria Steinhem raising a suburban family in Connecticut together is already patently obvious. More importantly though, as a practical matter, MLK could have lived long enough to end up in de facto segregated water fountains enthusiastically setup by groups happy to exclude "the other" from their world. Pushing civil rights for an easily definable (and in MLK's case, identifiable) group works all fine and good so long as you stick to the individual. Once you start pushing down the door marked "group rights" you're not going to like what you find behind it. And by then it's too late.
And Rosa Parks could have just walked home.
Harvey Milk could have stayed in the closet.
Gloria Steinhem could’ve stayed in her kitchen and baked cookies.
Millicent Fawcett could’ve sat silently while her husband and his cohorts discussed politics.
Martin Luther King Jr. could’ve dreamed about drinking from a “blacks only” water fountain for the rest of his life.
Again, what's available to stop such a world? A world where groups that currently have a sympathetic ear in government get protection from any consequence of your opinion of them? A KikkiPlanet, as it were, where your freedoms, your opinions, your beliefs, your ideology, your conscience are "private matters only", pushed ever deeper and deeper out of the public sphere by your political opponents and their perverse oxen to grind? Take it away, Mark Steyn:
Seven years ago, George Weigel published a book called The Cube and the Cathedral, whose title contrasts two Parisian landmarks — the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the giant modernist cube of La Grande Arche de la Defense, commissioned by President Mitterrand to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution. As La Grande Arche boasts, the entire cathedral, including its spires and tower, would fit easily inside the cold geometry of Mitterrand's cube. In Europe, the cube — the state — has swallowed the cathedral — the church. I've had conversations with a handful of senior EU officials in recent years in which all five casually deployed the phrase "post-Christian Europe" or "post-Christian future," and meant both approvingly. These men hold that religious faith is incompatible with progressive society. Or as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's control-freak spin doctor, once put it, cutting short the prime minister before he could answer an interviewer's question about his religious faith: "We don't do God."That "freedom of conscience" thing in bold is an interesting note. Steyn's article from over a month ago predates even the writ dropping in Alberta. But it's oddly prescient here.
For the moment, American politicians still do God, and indeed not being seen to do him remains something of a disadvantage on the national stage. But in private many Democrats agree with those "post-Christian" Europeans, and in public they legislate that way. Words matter, as then-senator Barack Obama informed us in 2008. And, as president, his choice of words has been revealing: He prefers, one notes, the formulation "freedom of worship" to "freedom of religion." Example: "We're a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses." (The president after the Fort Hood murders in 2009.) Er, no, "we're a nation that guarantees" rather more than that. But Obama's rhetorical sleight prefigured Commissar Sebelius's edict, under which "religious liberty" — i.e., the freedom to decline to facilitate condom dispensing, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion — is confined to those institutions engaged in religious instruction for card-carrying believers.
This is a very Euro-secularist view of religion: It's tolerated as a private members' club for consenting adults. But don't confuse "freedom to worship" for an hour or so on Sunday morning with any kind of license to carry on the rest of the week. You can be a practicing Godomite just so long as you don't (per Mrs. Patrick Campbell) do it in the street and frighten the horses. The American bishops are not the most impressive body of men even if one discounts the explicitly Obamaphile rubes among them, and they have unwittingly endorsed this attenuated view of religious "liberty."
The Catholic Church is the oldest continuously operating entity in the Western world. The earliest recorded use of the brand first appears in Saint Ignatius's letter to the Smyrnaeans of circa a.d. 110 — that's 1,902 years ago: "Wherever Jesus Christ is," wrote Ignatius, "there is the Catholic Church," a usage that suggests his readers were already familiar with the term. Obama's "freedom to worship" inverts Ignatius: Wherever there is a Catholic church, there Jesus Christ is — in a quaint-looking building with a bit of choral music, a psalm or two, and a light homily on the need for "social justice" and action on "climate change." The bishops plead, No, no, don't forget our colleges and hospitals, too. In a garden of sexual Eden, the last guys not chowing down on once-forbidden fruits are the ones begging for the fig leaf. But neither is a definition of "religion" that Ignatius would have recognized. "Katholikos" means "universal": The Church cannot agree to the confines Obama wishes to impose and still be, in any sense, catholic.
If you think a Catholic owner of a sawmill or software business should be as free of state coercion as a Catholic college, the term "freedom of conscience" is more relevant than "freedom of religion." For one thing, it makes it less easy for a secular media to present the issue as one of a recalcitrant institution out of step with popular progressivism. NPR dispatched its reporter Allison Keyes to a "typical" Catholic church in Washington, D.C., where she found congregants disinclined to follow their bishops. To a man (or, more often, woman), they disliked "the way the Church injects itself into political debates." But, if contraceptives and abortion and conception and birth and chastity and fidelity and sexual morality are now "politics," then what's left for religion? Back in the late first century, Ignatius injected himself into enough "political debates" that he wound up getting eaten by lions at the Coliseum. But no doubt tut-tutting NPR listeners would have deplored the way the Church had injected itself into live theater.
Ignatius's successor bishops have opted for an ignobler end, agreeing to be nibbled to death by Leviathan. Even in their objections to the Obama administration, the bishops endorse the state's view of the church — as something separate and segregated from society, albeit ever more nominally. At the airport recently, I fell into conversation with a lady whose employer, a Catholic college, had paid for her to get her tubes tied. Why not accept that this is just one of those areas where one has to render under Caesar? Especially when Caesar sees "health care" as a state-funded toga party.
But once government starts (in Commissar Sebelius's phrase) "striking a balance," it never stops. What's next? How about a religious test for public office? In the old days, England's Test Acts required holders of office to forswear Catholic teaching on matters such as transubstantiation and the invocation of saints. Today in the European Union holders of office are required to forswear Catholic teaching on more pressing matters such as abortion and homosexuality. Rocco Buttiglione's views on these subjects would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic of half a century ago. By 2004, they were enough to render him ineligible to serve as a European commissioner. To the college of Eurocardinals, a man such as Signor Buttiglione can have no place in public life. The Catholic hierarchy's fawning indulgence of the Beltway's abortion zealots and serial annullers is not reciprocated: The Church of Government punishes apostasy ever more zealously.
The state no longer criminalizes a belief in transubstantiation, mainly because most people have no idea what that is. But they know what sex is, and, if the price of Pierre Trudeau's assertion that "the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation" is that the state has to take an ever larger place in the churches and colleges and hospitals and insurance agencies and small businesses of the nation, they're cool with that. The developed world's massive expansion of sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shriveling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty, and the right to self-defense are under continuous assault by Big Government. In New York and California and many other places, sexual license is about the only thing you don't need a license for.
The Big Government forces under the yoke of President Monkey in the United States are currently being influenced by Red Redford here in Alberta. Danielle Smith threatens to take that power from them, and use it to...well, not use it. If you disagree with Danielle Smith's morals (or the morals she expresses in legislative fashion from "under the dome" of the Alberta Legislature) and you happen to work for her, you're able to pass that TPS Report over to the next cubicle. That doctor who is prescribing you 4-hydroxy-2-methyl-N-(5-methyl-2-thiazolyl)-2H-1,2-benzothiazine-3-carboxamide-1,1-dioxide is doing it because he believes that it is the right drug for you. He's not prescribing it based on Directive 11463, Paragraph 17, Subparagraph J from the Alberta Health Ministry recommending meloxicam in all teenaged girls to treat rampant cases of independent thought or (worse) negative opinions of protected minority groups. That's a scary world to think you could be living in, and while Conscience Rights aren't the be-all and end-all of ethical healthcare policy, they do exist as such.
Which is why it's so hilarious to see Raj Sherman, the doctor leading the Alberta Liberal Party, speaking out in full favour of the Province of Alberta prohibiting doctors from what they feel is right. Here's the hilarious comment I made for when the Alberta Liberals feel the need to delete it:
It's good to see Doc Sherman expressing his support for the Government of the Province of Alberta to be able to force doctors to act against their conscience. After all, such a doctor might decide to refuse treatment to a woman whose husband's religion dictates he decides when her tubes are tied. Or worse, the Provincial Government in its infinite wisdom might find it advantageous to push friends and financial contributors ahead of the general public in the health waiting queue. Doctors who learn of such a practice may try to object as a violation of their conscience, and I'm sure that Doc Sherman is fully in favour of preventing healthcare professionals from doing so.For those who don't fully follow, the sole reason Doctor Raj Sherman is the leader of the Alberta Liberals is that he was one of the loud voices speaking out against doctor intimidation done by the "Progressive" "Conservative" Party of Alberta in a queue-jumping scandal.
Here's some key bits about that scandal. Think about how the Alberta Government's track record is on the matter of doctors and their conscience:
Patients wait too long in emergency rooms and doctors dare not advocate for patients if they want to keep their jobs, according to a report on Alberta's healthcare system.
The Alberta Health Quality Council panel, which authored the report, said it has found widespread instances of physicians experiencing intimidation and muzzling when advocating for patients, evidence of a culture of fear and alienation across the province.
The mainstream far-left media, which of course has also heard of these horror stories and routinely reported on them when it was an example of heartless Conservatives stomping the little guy. The fact that it was actually a consequence of our disastrous public healthcare system qua public healthcare system doesn't dissuade them. It almost never does. The mainstream news media across the continent is inexplicably drawn to strong controlling central governments. Even when they disagree with the current residents of them (as is the case when "Conservative" is on the nameplate underneath the name of the office, particularly in the case of Ralph Klein or Stephen Harper) they always wistfully wish for a time when one of their people sits in the big chair: a "progressive", a person who will control everybody's lives in the way that their circle of friends thinks is appropriate -- a Jack Layton or an Alison "Red" Redford. Anybody but a Danielle Smith! Which is why this is even a story. Your little "voice in the wilderness" blogpost was endlessly promoted by the far-left Edmonton Journal's resident lover of far-left causes Paula Simons. It made it in far-left Calgary's FFWD free newspaper. It was constantly trumpeted across the social media circles, as it was finally the wedge they could use against the Wildrose. Those damned right-wingers and their silly ideas of personal liberty and personal responsibility, always talking about what's moral and right like...you know, facts exist, man. It's frankly pathetic: having manufactured a case the newsmedia leap upon it like a hound, hoping to create an Alberta where sodomites can get married by your priest against his will, where trans-testicles will get their surgery paid for by you the taxpayer against your will, where babies will be wholesale slaughtered by a nurse who just has to go home and cry at night, and where doctors can be intimidated by the government healthcare system to prioritize treatments of friends of government officials.
Members of the Wildrose Party of Alberta have also heard these horror stories. They've looked at a society where an overly powerful central government in Edmonton is dictating morality in every sphere of our lives. Healthcare is a prime example where doctors are everyday being asked by the KikkiPlanets of the world to violate their Hippocratic Oath and insist that a plain statement doesn't say what it really says. In such a nightmare world where advocates of baby-killing and special rights for the epicene keep demanding to you that 2 + 2 = 5, and a health minister whose re-election campaign sees dollar signs is telling you that the little guy in the monocle is the next guy in line for heart surgery, they wanted a way for the power of the individual (one of the most beautiful of all powers, and indeed the central starting point for such conservative thinkers as Ayn Rand and Delenn and Gandhi) to stand firm, with the power of their own individual sense of what's right and what's wrong, and declare:
No. You are wrong. I won't be a party to this.
In Danielle Smith's world, you can have that power. In the statist world of Red Redford and KikkiPlanet and Raj Sherman, you can't. Who are you being empowered by again?
