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Spanish abortionists on strike.
Spanish abortion clinics began a week-long strike on Tuesday, criticising the government for what they said was harassment since a series of police raids on Barcelona centres accused of illegal abortions.
More than 1,000 women will be unable to have an abortion this week after 31 private clinics shut their doors to all cases except for those when the mother's health was at risk, said a spokeswoman for abortion clinic association ACAI. The 31 clinics performed most of Spain's 101,592 abortions in 2006, ACAI said.
Late last year Barcelona police arrested 13 people, many of them gynaecologists and anaesthetists, in raids against clinics accused of performing illegal, late-term abortions.
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"We think the number and manner of inspections is abusive," Garcia said, adding that so many inspections, three times the norm in some clinics, violated the privacy of patients and was a slur on the professionalism of staff.
Spain decriminalised abortion in 1985, 10 years after the death of conservative dictator Francisco Franco, but while the number of abortions has doubled in the last decade, the practice is controversial in the traditionally Catholic country.
Most excellent. God willing, abortionists around the world will continue to feel persecuted and put-upon for many decades to come until the practice is finally outlawed altogether, just like the slave trade.
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Apparently Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic has dug up some old newsletters by Ron Paul that say some pretty weird, offensive, and unacceptable stuff. Paul's cheerleaders at LewRockwell.com (seriously, if you think I've ever been over the top in my support of Paul, you should check their blog archives) are attacking the messenger. I've read the article and the quotes. Paul says he didn't write them, and I believe him. Compare the newsletters to works that have undoubtedly been written by Paul. Either he's had a major personality transplant, he's an unusually smooth liar ("smooth" is a word neither his friends nor enemies would use to describe him), or he allowed his name to be used for material he didn't check on before publication. At worst, Paul is guilty of not doing his homework. I think it reveals the greatest weakness of the libertarian/Jeffersonian worldview: left to their own devices people tend not to do the right thing. Smarter libertarians understand that even if they don't believe in Original Sin. The idea is that government causes a lot more damage when it doesn't do the right thing, which is nearly always because it is run by fallen creatures. The smaller the government, the less damage it will cause to civil society.
I think it's bizarre that anyone at TNR spent time researching this considering how small a chance Paul has at winning the GOP nomination. Why is Paul doing so poorly? I think this is the smartest take on why that is. People need to understand that Paul is not a libertarian; he's a constitutionalist. He supports libertarianism only insofar as it coincides with the US Constitution. He's certainly not a "lifestyle libertarian." Those people drive me just as crazy as other self-identified conservatives. It's not libertarianism that's unpopular - it's constitutionalism. When people say, "The Constitution needs to keep up with the times," or that it's a "living document," or that Paul's ideas are crazy, what they usually mean is, "Constitutionalism would make it impossible for the federal government to do something I approve of."
The faith comes first, so any candidate that holds a position incompatible with Catholic teaching gets dismissed out of hand. That's why I can't vote Democratic or for Giuliani under any circumstances. The other Republican candidates I could vote for, but won't because of disagreements too wide to paper over.
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But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us. Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO
The very first issue Lopez cites is torture. If you're out of step with conservatives on the State's right to torture anyone it declares to be an enemy combatant, you're no longer one of them. If a commitment to torture has become a conservative litmus test, then I'm ashamed to call myself a conservative. This isn't something minor like tax cuts, or education policy, or energy plans. This is a question of whether you are civilized or a savage. I'm sorry so many self-described conservatives are coming down on the side of barbarism. God help us, they'll probably start arguing that they want torture to be safe, legal, and rare. Go, John, go.
I'll bet an ounce of gold (the price keeps going up) that the same people who defended Bush's right to abduct and torture anyone he pleases will suddenly become passionate defenders of habeas corpus, the sixth amendment, and other civil liberties if Hillary gets sworn in in 2009.
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