Here's a library of articles
by me and others on many topics. "Think right" is
a challenge to myself, not an injunction to the reader. It
has meaning on three levels: reason well, grasp truth, be
conservative.
Some believe these three are synonymous,
others disagree. But there can be no doubt that better government
starts with better thinking, hence my esteem for the Independence
Institute and other think tanks.
This section could also be called "Doc
and friends," playing off my nickname from college pals
who joked that even then I sounded off like a Ph.D. (though
I never got that degree).
To this day my life is a sort of
ongoing think tank, Senate duties notwithstanding, and I enjoy
nothing more than dialogue about ideas. So come on in, browse
the articles, and respond via the Talk
Back forum if you'd like. I hope you do.
Facts &
Unfacts Arapahoe Republican Men's Club Monthly
Newsletter
The Men's Club has been my political home
here in Colorado for 30 years now. Their weekly breakfast
meetings, party support activities, and newsletter exemplify
grassroots citizenship at its best. I'd put our club up against
any local political group in the country for energy and effectiveness.
Join us for scrambled eggs and hot debate
any Wednesday morning at 7:00 in the Metropolitan Club dining
room, 7800 East Orchard Road in Greenwood Village. And for
the current issue of FACTS & UNFACTS, click
here.
Written in January 1998 to commemorate the (then) 37 million American children killed in the womb
during 25 years since the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, January 1973
In the year 2776, the 13 settlements broke with the mother country and became independent as the League of Lands. In 2787 they wrote a charter to protect the life, liberty, and property of individuals and to place limits on government. The Conclave, representatives elected by the people, would make all laws. The Truth Council, nine lawyers appointed for life, would give true readings of the charter and render true judgment in disputes.
The League of Lands was a happy nation, fortunate in the wisdom of its charter and especially blessed in the faith of its people, most of whom were followers of the living God. But as time passed, the people began to go after other gods. In particular, a huge following with great power and prestige came to surround the mirror deity, Zelf.
The worship of Zelf was lavish, elaborate, devoted, encrusted with gaudy ritual, cloaked in a solemn liturgy of mystical words whose meaning was other than what they seemed. It was an odd mixture of apologetic evasion and brazen shamelessness. It included a mass cult of human sacrifice, known as adoration. .
Adoration was a sort of death sacrament, honoring Zelf by the slaying of babies between the ages of birth and nine months. The clergy did not conduct this ritual, though they assisted with the instruments of the medical priesthood and chants from the media chorus. It was the prerogative of either parent, usually the mother, to sense in prayer that Zelf desired their child's death, and then to offer up the little one in response.
Zelf would whisper to the parent one of many reasons for being displeased with the infant. Wrong time, wrong chromosomes, wrong sex, too many siblings, too expensive, inconvenient, unwanted, or simply, "This baby does not suit me." Whatever the reason, that verdict of displeasure meant that the baby must be made to go away, for the supreme rule of this religion was at all times: Suit Your Zelf
One Day in 2973
"Which of us do you really love, Me or that mass of tissue?" Zelf would demand of the devout. "If it's me you adore, then prove it. Have the adoration. Choose." With these worshippers, to choose was a holy act. And when they chose, it was bye bye baby.
Well, for a long time, lawmakers in all of the lands (50 in number by now) forbade adoration as an awful crime just short of murder. A few determined worshippers would still do the sacrifices in secret, aided by renegade priests. But the might and majesty of civil law throughout the League of Lands still stood between the lives of the defenseless and the bloodthirsty appetite of Zelf.
But one day in 2973, all of this changed. And it all changed in one day. There was no great debate between candidates or parties, no long loud campaign leading up to millions of citizens casting ballots, no passage of bills in the separate lands, no dramatic vote on a single grand bill by 535 elected members of the Conclave. Just one ruling from the Truth Council, one stroke of the pen on a split decision by those nine life-tenured, black-robed old men, and that was it.
"We find that the charter grants an absolute right to adoration by all parents everywhere in the League of Lands. No government high or low may shelter the life of any baby younger than nine months. The demands of Zelf outweigh all other law. This is truth, for we the Truth Council say so."
Of course, it was not a truth but an untruth, this bald invention of the Truth Council, by any fair reading of history, custom, precedent, and the plain language of the charter. Since it was unjustifiable, one justification was no worse than another as a pretext for it. The Truthmen might have justified it under freedom of religion, or under parents' property in their offspring, might have said that what could not walk or talk or feed itself was not a human life. As it happened, they claimed to find in the charter a personal privacy right by which baby-killing and adoration for Zelf were solely the parents' own business.
One might have expected a storm of outrage and a massive uprising of resistance. After all, everyone and everyone's children and everyone's parents had once been nine months old themselves. What was law for, if not to protect the otherwise unprotected innocent? But there was no storm, no uprising, only a low murmur of concern and scattered voices of condemnation. Soon the adoration death toll in the League of Lands was running at a steady one million infants per year.
Amnesia and Denial
This continued for a quarter of a century, well past the time when the first of the sacrificed children would have had children of their own, if they had been permitted to live. Citizens of the League of Lands who did remain alive as the adoration era settled in and the slaughter mounted, became in a certain terrible way dead at heart.
The entrenched legal and political reality of adoration rights, the numbing immensity of lives being snuffed out by the thousands of thousands, the voiceless invisibility of the victims, and the hypnotic trance woven by the soothing songs of the media chorus, all combined to make decent people forget that there had ever been a time when a baby was a precious thing deserving protection at all costs.
Decent, moral, conscientious people who would never dream of putting to death any child of their own, newborn or unborn, disruptive or even defective, learned to ignore the brisk trade in sacrificial slayings routinely occurring all around them every day.
Tens of millions who regarded themselves as faithful followers of the living God, Yahweh or Christ, came to insist that their faith positively required respectful tolerance of the carnage exacted by the death god Zelf; came to regard as bigoted haters those Christians who withheld such tolerance.
Political debate was enveloped with the same fog of amnesia and denial. Lincolnites, proud that their party had been founded in 2856 to oppose human slavery, unapologetic that its first president had led the nation into civil war rather than yield that principle, now recoiled in fear and distaste from the party's determination to oppose human sacrifice.
"Adoration is a personal matter," they said. "The subject is distasteful. The issue is dividing our party. It doesn't even belong in politics."
"The other side is killing us with this," they said; never mind that mothers and fathers were killing their own little boys and girls.
Millions of people, to their credit, did passionately and fiercely resist the adoration holocaust. They spoke out against the practice, prayed against it, organized it, fought it by every lawful means., and sometimes, in their heartbreak at the mounting death toll, a few even resorted to unlawful means.
Who are You to Interfere?
By 2998, a determined though pathetically narrow counterattack was being mounted in the Conclave and in the legislatures of some lands, within the tiny scope permitted for legislation under a series of decisions by the Truth Council since its original 2973 decree.
Proponents sought to ban what they called "partial-person adoration," the killing of unanesthetized infants within two weeks before their nine-month birthday. They pointed out that some children were precocious enough to have begun speaking their first words or taking their first steps by this age, practically qualifying them as human beings. "Even you were once 8-1/2 months old," they pleaded to opponents.
"Choice is a chartered right, and no one will take it away from us," the stubborn opponents screamed back. "Who are you to interfere with a man's or woman's right to control the birth¬products of their own bodies? How dare you defy Zelf? You can't turn back the clock!"
Proponents objected that when a clock is wrong, you not only can but should turn it back and set it right. When a law devalues life you should reverse it. But their logic was to no avail. The Zelf cult had grown. too powerful for even this tiny concession. Partial-person adoration remained as legal as all the other sacrificial variations that had been commonplace for a generation now.
With this defeat, political momentum shifted heavily against the pro-child forces. The following year, 2999, plaintiffs including Private Parenthood and the National Organization of Worshippers prevailed in a suit before the Truth Council, objecting to language in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag mentioning "the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God."
From now on, the Truthmen ordered, this passage would speak of "the diversity for which it stands, plural gods under a multicultural nation."
Pro-sacrifice forces held jubilant rallies. Leaders said their next lawsuit would ask the Truth Council to raise the age limit to 18 months, or perhaps three years (the age of a child's mandatory enrollment in government schooling), or even to remove any age limit and give parents unfettered choice, up to the very time when a son or daughter reached adulthood. (Which was now determined not chronologically, but biologically, in the early teens, by puberty tests at government sex clinics).
As these plans were taking shape, the adoration lobby forced hearings in the Conclave to challenge the motto, "In God We Trust," which had appeared' on all currency and coins of the League since the time of the founders. The Pledge having been rewritten, a new motto now seemed in order.
Scholars from the government university testified that this God was an idol of bigotry, a hate¬monger against the followers of Zelf: guilty of vicious slurs in his Old Testament against the killing of infants by Pharaoh and in his New Testament against a similar massacre by Herod. The nation's trust could ill be placed, these experts said, in a God who had arbitrarily halted the patriarch Abraham in the very act of sacrificing the boy Isaac.
This was all that Conclave members needed to hear. The bill swept through both houses in November 2999. It was signed into law by President Clinton Jefferson Williams in a gleaming, new child sacrifice center recently opened on the south lawn of the executive mansion.
The old coinage of hate would circulate no more. All commerce in the League of Lands, whether payment of the worker's wage, purchase of milk and bread, or procurement of medical services for saving lives or taking them, would henceforth be conducted in currency bearing the words, "Adoration for Zelf."
On a bright winter morning a few weeks later, the calendar turned into January 3000. The new millennium dawned upon a future of unlimited personal possibilities, with old superstitions about the sanctity of human life consigned to a forgotten past.
