Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As someone who rests their entire philosophy on a foundation of individual liberty first and foremost, I often find myself drawn to a handful of topics over and over. I am making a conscious effort to avoid hitting the same themes repeatedly, but, sometimes someone, or a group acting as government, does something so ostentatiously stupid that it cannot be ignored. Yesterday, Oklahoma’s legislature passed a bill that will take millions of taxpayer dollars from Sooner state residents, place it in a large pile, douse it with gasoline and set it alight.
The actual language of the bill is to make it a felony, punishable by three years in prison, to perform an abortion procedure within the state. Furthermore, the bill would restrict any physician who performs an abortion from obtaining or renewing a license to practice medicine in Oklahoma. This bill is a first-of-its kind in the USA, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion-rights group that is monitoring whether Republican Governor Mary Fallin will sign it into law. As of yesterday, the governor’s office was withholding comment until Fallin reviews the bill.
As mentioned above, the bill’s practical effect is to waste a ton of taxpayer money. The bill will be challenged in court should it be made law. The state will spend a lot of money defending it, and, they’ll ultimately lose. Big time. And, expensively.
Interestingly, the bill didn’t pass strictly on a party line vote. The Associated Press reported that Senator Ervin Yen (R-OKC), the only physician in the Senate, described the bill as “insane” and voted against it.
Doubling down on the insanity, the state’s House also passed a bill yesterday that requires the state’s Department of Health to start creating material that will help promote the creation of an “Abortion-free society” in Oklahoma. Mercifully, no money was budgeted to implement the bill, which now goes on to the Senate for a vote. It would have been more appropriate for the House to pass a bill directing the state’s Housing Finance Authority to build several, new, massive orphanages if they actually think the bill will ever take effect if signed into law. Which, it won’t. Pro-choice groups are promising a challenge before the ink of the governor’s signature dries, if indeed she’s dumb enough to put her name on this thing.
So, as Oklahoma’s government wastes a lot of its taxpayers’ money on an effort that objectively makes no sense even if it weren’t doomed to fail, I’m reminded that the entire “pro-life” movement, their very existence, is merely a symptom of the great, all-encompassing sickness that plagues all humankind: the utter inability of most people to mind their own goddamn business.
Really, when you look at most of the issues confronting us here in the USA today, gay rights, bathroom usage, terrorism, abortion, gun control, etc. it all comes down to, at its very heart, the fact that someone, or some group, just can’t figure out where the line is that denotes what is their business, versus what lay on the other side of the line, which isn’t. Each of the aforementioned issues in the preceding sentence is an example of people who can’t mind their own stuff, period.
It’s nobody else’s business if two dudes want to get married, it’s nobody else’s business which bathroom a person uses as long as they’re not disrupting anyone else’s rights, it’s no one else’s business what religion people practice, it’s no one else’s business what a woman does with her own body, it’s no one else’s business what guns a person owns. And, to an intelligent person, what I just wrote and you just read makes perfect sense. Of course, we are quite obviously living in a country populated by a firm majority of unintelligent people, and, worse yet, many of them are busybodies to boot.
So, in addition to being very simply wrong on objective facts, reality and logic, pro-lifers, anti-gunners and assorted religious nutters are also wrong in their activism for their causes.
We have devolved into a society of such hyper-sensitive pantywaists, however, that minding one’s own business has become border-line impossible. Indeed, college kids today have been successfully conditioned to view just about any utterance as a “micro-aggression” born of “(insert racial or gender attribute here) privilege.” The mere existence of a viewpoint that is contrary to the “progressive-elite-approved” stance they’ve been “taught” is itself a threat to order that must be destroyed. Or, at the very least shouted at, protested and threatened before the aggrieved return to their “Safe zone.” It’s no longer good enough to agree to disagree. Add to this fundamental mental weakness the younger generations’ massive sense of entitlement, and you have the origin story of every online Social Justice Warrior you’ve ever run across.
And the old-guard anti-abortion crowd is no better, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to pick exclusively upon the younger ones here. Indeed, they likely learned some of their obnoxious habits by watching the original masters of unfounded activism, the so-called “pro-life” movement. Busybodied imbecility is not a generational, or partisan problem. It is spread across all age groups and all political persuasions (save mine, of course). It is the root of all the evil in our world today.
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