Sanctity — the state or quality of being holy, sacred, or saintly.

Abortion data can be tricky due to the sometimes secretive nature of the procedure, but the CDC reported over 622,000 abortions between 2012 and 2021. That’s a ten year period. Move the decimal over one space and you get 62,000 per year. I’m not going to mince words. That’s a lot. A cursory search of births from the same year indicates that over three million children are born every year.

Obviously, there are an undisclosed number of miscarriages every year. So, it is impossible to know, but various reports would suggest that pregnancies in general are dropping. There are any number of push and pull factors that would impact that including economic factors, but we could also suggest that sex education and access to contraceptives might also have an impact on that as well.

My fuzzy math skills would indicate that after we allow for miscarriages that abortions would account for about one percent of pregnancies at least through 2021. In other words, they are relatively rare. A hefty percentage of those are due to the health of the mother or child. The idea that women are running out and getting elective abortions on the regular is just plain silly.

Demographic data shows us that gun deaths are not only higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world, but they are on the rise.  The data on gun deaths is pretty close to rates of abortion. We could parse out the numbers and argue that there are more suicides than murders. However, in a discussion about life that is irrelevant. It is perfectly analogous. A woman that wants to get an abortion can find a way to do it legally or illegally if she has the means. A person that wants to commit suicide will find a way whether they have access to a gun or not if they have the means.

If we are acting on a belief that life is sacred (as the definition of sanctity would indicate above) then wouldn’t it make sense to advocate for policies that would promote that? That would be all policies. Obviously, each of these issues are complicated. In cases where the health of the child or mother are at stake we don’t want red tape to block the wishes of a woman and her doctor.

Similarly, there is a certain amount of gun ownership that we can tolerate and most wouldn’t tolerate a world where gun ownership would be completely forbidden. So, we come to the idea that a wise compromise needs to be reached on both counts. Facts are limited on the latest mass shooting in Kansas City. We know there have been some arrests and we have some basic numbers, but we are unsure of the motives.

We know what causes this. We have seen this multiple times. We’ve tried nothing and we are all out of ideas. We have tons of thoughts and prayers. I don’t want to minimize that, but what in the heck are we praying for if we aren’t praying for wisdom and the fortitude to do what needs to be done to help? The Lord works in mysterious ways, but most of the time he works through us. If we aren’t willing to do anything then the prayer is a waste of breath.

The arguments against gun control and assault weapons bans are tortured at best. I don’t give a hoot what AR stands for in an AR-15. Okay, it doesn’t stand for assault rifle. Great. To argue that I don’t get to argue for gun control because I don’t know how that stupid apparatus works is just a creative dodge. It is designed to kill people. It is designed to kill a lot of people in short order. It has no positive utility and doesn’t belong anywhere near polite society.

If you oppose common sense gun legislation and blabber on about the sanctity of life you are a hypocrite.  Get your jollies anyway you want, but if your jollies present a danger to me or my family then you bet your ass I am going to argue for its regulation. If you care about life then you should care about all reasonable efforts to promote safety. Otherwise you are just full of excrement and need to sit down and shut up.

Two of my favorite songs on my playlist are “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream” by Pink Floyd. They were not officially released until the last decade because the band didn’t want to make them available for public consumption. They represented a time in Syd Barrett’s life when he was in a really bad way. Roger Waters said that they were akin to showing naked pictures of an aging actress.

In a similar way, saying anything about the rise and fall of Hershel Walker feels wrong in many instances. You have someone that is very clearly not all there. You can’t know whether a former athlete has CTE until you do the final autopsy, but we are about as sure about this as we can of anyone that played in the NFL.

However, Walker represents something bigger than himself. Everything old is new again in politics. Those that know U.S. history remember learning about the Know Nothing Party. The similarities don’t just end with the name. The platform is also pretty similar when we consider the brand of conservative politicians coming out these days. Give those pre-Civil War guys Twitter and 24 hour news and I imagine they would have come up with something eerily similar.

What can we say about Walker? He said he graduated with honors from the University of Georgia. He didn’t graduate. He said he was in law enforcement. He wasn’t. He fathered multiple children out of wedlock. He didn’t tell us the truth about that. The children we do know about all seem to be coming out against him.

Finally, we get the news that he funded an abortion in 2009. Yet, this is where you get into a pickle if you are a true progressive. We want people to be able to have the choice to have an abortion. So, ultimately do we care whether he funded one? The quick and simple answer is that we don’t, but that isn’t really the point. The point is that you don’t get to run on a sanctimonious platform when you have entire collection of skeletons in the closet.

Watching conservatives fumble around with representatives and candidates that are clearly intellectually deficient is hilarious on one level, scary on another, and just pitiful on the rest. Whether it’s not knowing that “wanton” murder doesn’t refer to the soup found in Chinese restaurants or watching Walker be told that the lieutenant governor said something about him, watch him ask who the lieutenant governor was, be told who he was, and then ask what that guy was currently doing.

Commenting about such things is the true no win scenario. No one should make fun of half-wits. It would be akin to making fun of someone with a physical handicap. Yet, here we are and this is the field that the GOP has laid down before us. At some point we need to put the blame on the powers that be that parade these folks out there for us to exploit and laugh at. Laughing feels utterly awful, but at a certain point you just can’t help it.

This is one of those topics that seems to be hitting me a lot lately. It is especially acute when holidays like Independence Day come rolling around. People fly their flags and you can see all kinds of posts and personal messages about how much they love freedom, their religion, and their guns. Heck, I love two out of three of those. I’ve talked about the first two, so it is time to address the last one.

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Technically speaking I’m not an English teacher. I primarily support English teachers and I did teach it for three years, but I would be remiss to call myself an expert on grammar. At one grammar workshop, the instrusctor admitted that the two weeks we had was not nearly enough time. I’ve always been an intuitive writer, so diagraming sentences is not my strength. That being said, I will give the second amendment my best shot.

It is made up of a dependent clause and an independent clause. The technical term for this is a complex sentence. In this case, the independent clause relies on the dependent clause. In plain English, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is dependent on a well-regulated militia befing necessary for the security of a free state. Obviously, one cannot know precisely whether a majority intended for guns to be necessary in the absence of a well-regulated militia. It should be noted that case law is at the very best divided on this as well.

Ignorance of the law bothers me, but it is understandable. Ignorance of history is also understandable. That bothers me even more as a historian. Blatantly flauting both the law and history in a faux expression of patiotism is enough to make me lose my lunch. The same people that are so gung ho to respect and appreciate the original intent of the framers have no idea how offbase they are.

If we look at the Bill of Rights we see that both the second and third amendments address large standing armies directly. This was the forefathers biggest fear. They addressed it in multiple amendments and one of them is seen as a throwaway now. Students always asked me why it was even there. Admittedly, the idea of how the framers felt about private gun ownership of guns on their own is murky at best. It is hard to separate people from the realities they exist in.

In addition to large standing armies encroaching on people’s freedoms, they were virtually useless in defending private citizens. So, guns were in fact necessary. Yet, today we have the largest standing army (counting advanced technology) in the history of the planet. So, we are supposed to follow the letter of the law and the original intent of the framers on guns and yet we should ignore it on large standing armies. Furthermore, how would the framers have felt about the state of policing we have now?

So, it is wrong to infringe on the rights of private citizens to own and operate guns, but it is perfectly fine to trample all of the framers and their desire to limit large standing armies. The same folks that argue for private gun ownership and against limits on the same also argue for more defense spending and are first in line to argue for more policing and against police reform. Interesting isn’t it?

There is nothing worse than hypocrisy. If one wants to be an originalist they need to be an originalist. If one wants to pick and choose what precepts they want to follow they need to be up front about that. That’s the world most of us live in. We allow circumstances to mold our beliefs on any number of issues. As long as we admit that we can have discussions in good faith. It should be added that case law is consistent on legislatures rights to regulate gun ownership. If we can stop wrapping ourselves in the flag long enough maybe we can finally have some frank conversations about private gun ownership.

The Texas state legislature and Governor Abbott have decided to abandon conservative principles, but then again what else is new? The mask has become the symbol for ideological warfare in America. There are all kinds of idiots out there, so there is little time to address them all. Suffice it to say, anyone that treats a mask as anything more than a piece of cloth or fabric is an idiot.

Enter Greg Abbott. The new law makes it illegal for a school or government building to require masks after June 4th. Considering the increasing rates of vaccinations and reducing positive rates it makes some sense on its face. Most adults are now fully vaccinated. So, there’s that.

The problem is two-fold. One of the problems exists on a philosophical level. Conservatives have been crying for generations about how much national and state governments have exercised too much control over local governments and the people. So, here the state government is barring the local governments and school districts from exercising local control. Does anyone else see the problem here?

The move at least follows a pattern with Abbott and the legislature throughout the pandemic. He is anything but consistent. From the beginning he has refused to lead in any positive way to limit the spread of the virus. He prefers to let local entities do the work. That would be fine except that whenever a local entity acts responsibly and safely he tells them they’re doing it wrong. This is another one of those instances.

The second problem is that while adults are getting vaccinated, children are not. Children under 12 cannot be vaccinated and those over 12 have just started. The good news is that by June 4th, most students and teachers will be home for the summer. Yet, there will still be summer school and who knows how many students will be vaccinated by August.

It is quite possible to overreact to something like this. For one thing, it is highly possible that most school districts would have reached this conclusion on their own. After all, the order doesn’t say you can’t wear masks. It just says that you can’t require it. However, some districts likely would have maintained the mask order if left to their own devices.

It also brings us back to the original point about masks. They have become a political symbol. I usually still wear one in public even though I am vaccinated. We have to wear one at work and it is just easier to do it rather than have to remember which places allow you to go without and which ones don’t. I increasingly get dirty looks in public because people automatically make an assumption about my politics based on my adherence to wearing a mask.

In this case they would be right, but that’s not really the point. The point is that a public safety measure shouldn’t be the flashpoint for a political debate. That’s true whether you look down at someone for wearing a mask or make fun of someone for not. Either way you are turning a piece of cloth or fabric into something it was never intended to be.

The irony of Conservatives complaining about “cancel culture” and “attacks on free speech” is thick.  They have been banning things other Americans do for decades – everything from being able to access healthcare to banning certain imagery from public grounds while promoting images of white supremacists, Bible verses, and crosses the size of sky scrapers. Ignoring all that, the inventors of bans and boycotts are now offended at measures to stop systemic GOP racism, racist dog whistles, brazen voter suppression, and just outright lying and are passing all kinds of laws outlawing everything from voter registration efforts to protesting police brutality.

So, the next time you are in a conversation with a conservative and they complain about “cancel culture” ask them if they agree with the 28 year ban on YOGA in Alabama schools.  That’s right, folks, since 1993, yoga and meditation have been banned in Alabama schools because The Hindu might rub off on students while exercising.  The effort to lift that ban has been tried the last legislative session and gained traction this session until it was killed by religious conservatives scaredy cat bigots in the Senate judiciary committee.  The blocked bill had even prohibited using the word “namaste” and forbade chanting and mantras, and required all yoga poses be named in English, but that wasn’t good enough.  In testimony, Christian activist religious zealot Becky Gerritson said, “Yoga is a very big part of the Hindu religion.  If this bill passes, then instructors will be able to come into classrooms as young as kindergarten and bring these children through guided imagery, which is a spiritual exercise, and it’s outside their parents’ view. And we just believe that this is not appropriate.”  Hilariously, representatives of Roy Moore’s Foundation for Moral Law, claimed yoga would lead to proselytizing in public schools by followers of Hinduism.  Recall that the weirdo and failed US Senate candidate likes little girls and was banned from the local shopping mall for harassing them.  Connecting the name Roy Moore with the word “moral” can cause whiplash in normal people.

So, when you get “Cancel Culture” from a conservative, just reply “Yoga ban.”  They’ll have no idea what you’re talking about, so you’ll enjoy explaining it to them.

Apparently, the impeachment proceedings are flushing all the Trump nuts out into the light, especially on social media.  I had another one of THOSE FB conversations last night, this time with a Trumpist friend of my Never Trumper friend who described himself as a moderate.  When an obvious Trumpist describes themself as a moderate, you know the conversation is going to go bad.  This one did, and it didn’t take long for him to retreat into the normal Trumpist tropes.  He characterized himself as a moderate who supports Trump (while never actually saying that); when I talked about Trump’s many well documented felonies, he said it was inappropriate for me to say he was a criminal without him being convicted of said crimes.  He said that I should always use the word “alleged” before every act that Trump has committed.  So, to play the game, I described Trump’s “alleged” 12,000 lies documented by the Washington Post and his ten “alleged” acts of felony obstruction of justice documented in the 480 pages of the Mueller Report, as well as his “alleged” attempts to get help from the Russians in 2016 which are also well documented.  I then pointed out that Trump didn’t use “alleged” when he lied thousands of times over 6 years that Obama was not an American.  Or that no one used the word “alleged” when conspiracy nuts lied thousands of times over 10 years that Michelle Obama was actually a cross dressing gay man and their daughters were actually born in Africa (Yes, that happened; look it up).  The irony of that was lost on said Trumpist, so he told me that my “extreme fear” of Trumpists was hurting my ability to communicate with them.  I pointed out to him that it wasn’t “extreme fear” of Trumpists but complete disdain for them.  After he criticized my “reading skills” the conversation ended just as you can imagine.

I’ve never had a conversation with a Trumpist that has gone well.  It normally devolves as above.  My observation is that Trump supporters are either willfully ignorant, radically partisan, selfish, or just plain stupid.  The first two of these traits are normally linked since a radical partisan will over look all weakness of the side they support.   Now that we’re in impeachment territory, I’m giving no ground to them.

This phenomenon is hard to understand, but engraved in stone real.  AND, it’s not fun.