Skip to main content

Wanted: 76,000 idiots in Colorado (plus Mike Huckabee)


What will a longer-and-longer long-shot candidate for his party's presidential nomination do to pander to enough conservative voters to keep himself in the game (at least in his own tiny mind)?

Mike Huckabee is supporting a Colorado constitutional amendment to declare that fertilized eggs are human beings.

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement backing the Colorado Human Life Amendment.

“With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value.

“Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”


Among other things, this amendment would effectively make in-vitro fertilization illegal in Colorado. The way that IVF generally works is that a woman undergoes a cycle on fertility drugs and produces between 8-15 eggs. The clinic takes sperm from the potential father, and attempts to fertilize each of them in a petrie dish. Normally, about 5-10 of these eggs will fertilize and get to the four-cell stage, when the physician makes a decision about which ones look healthy and/or hardy enough to survive implantation. Two or three of these fertilized eggs will be implanted in the woman.

The rest of the eggs--what happens to them? Sometimes they are frozen for later potential use, sometimes they are handed over to the physician for experimentation, and sometimes they're simply destroyed.

Likewise, most ethical physicians require patients to agree ahead of time that on the off-chance that too many embryos adhere to the uterine wall that they will accept a selective reduction or abortion of one or more embryos to safeguard the health of the woman and the viability of the remaining embryos.

IF Mike Huckabee has his way, all of these actions would be classed as homicide in Colorado.

Fortunately, he will need 76,000 Coloradans to endorse this amendment, and having lived there I do not think he'll find them.

Of course, the amendment Huckabee supports would also have the effect of outlawing all abortions in the State, setting up a major confrontation with the Supreme Court, but for a man who wants to rewrite the US Constitution to make it more consistent with the New Testament, why think small?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...