Peevish reactions to Dobbs v. Jackson WHO

Some guy named Billie Joe Armstrong is apparently an important rock star. (You couldn’t prove it by me.) While in London, he told concertgoers that he will protest the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision by renouncing his United States citizenship and moving to England. Good for him. Pray for England.

Another rock/pop star had plenty of cuss words for America (as did Billie Joe Armstrong). Pink told her fans who agree with the Supreme Court decision re Roe v. Wade to “never (cuss word deleted) listen to my music again.” Thanks, I will take you up on that, although the again part won’t be a problem for me! Perhaps she assumes a lot in thinking that pro-life folks actually listen to her music. She assumes more in thinking she gets to control who listens to her music.

We probably should praise these peevish reactions because (1) they are angry but not violent, and (2) they expose the underlying unthinking hypocrisy of many abortion proponents. The article I read says Armstrong is a native of California. Rather than controlling what Americans think, the Supreme Court decision pushes abortion laws back to the states. Armstrong’s state will have abortion freely available. Pink does not want the Court controlling her views and actions – yet she wants to control who can and cannot listen to her music! Pot meet kettle.

C’est la vie.

Sad Anniversary post removed

Sometimes I prepare posts ahead of time for a specific upcoming anniversaries, dates, events, and/or holidays. Today I removed a “Sad Anniversary” post I had scheduled for the 50th anniversary of the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court Decision. Six months before its fiftieth birthday, the Supreme Court aborted it with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.

The vote was 6-3 to uphold the Mississippi law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. However, though Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with that opinion, he held that the court should not have overturned Roe. The other three liberal justices opposed.

Biblically

• The Bible condemns murder – the taking of human life without justification.
• The Bible affirms the humanity of unborn children.
• Since the Bible establishes the humanity of the unborn child, then abortion is murder and cannot be morally permissible.

Legally

• The U. S. Constitution does not affirm abortion as a right.
• Murder should be regulated at the State rather than Federal level.
• The choice being made in abortion is the choice to take an innocent human life.

Thoughts on three Facebook “conversations”

In the wake of the Valentine’s Day shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school, Facebook lit up with the debate over gun control and the Second Amendment. It brought some interesting, unusual and often angry posts. Here I comment on three.

18 school shootings already in 2018?

One of the first that I saw was that by February 14th there had already 18 school shootings in 2018. That number was so that one of my Facebook friends lamented that even the liberal news media had grown callous and stopped reporting on school shootings! That, until he understood that the number was highly inflated based on what the average person would think of as a school shooting. According to Washington Post, No, there haven’t been 18 school shootings in 2018. That number is flat wrong. That number made the rounds, coming from a site called Everytown for Gun Safety, which “has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.” These kinds of numbers do not help the cause of safety for school children, more than likely a “little boy who cried wolf” eye-rolling response – whose lesson is that if you always tell tales, eventually people will stop listening to what you say.

The right to keep and bear a single-shot musket

A video about what guns were like when the 2nd Amendment was written was making the rounds on Facebook. It is entertaining and seems to make a point, but...

The 2nd Amendment does not guarantee “the right to keep and bear a single-shot musket...” The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, “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.” It binds the federal government in regards to the rights of citizens. “Arms” means “weapons and ammunition; armaments.” Not only does the amendment not say “keep and bear a single-shot musket” – the single-shot musket was not the only “arms” available in 1791 when the 2nd amendment was passed. Further, the SCOTUS in ‘District of Columbia v. Heller’ clarified that “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia...” It does not just guarantee guns for militia service, as some claim.[i] The Second Amendment “is what it is” and it is not going anywhere (does anyone seriously think they can get 38 states to vote to amend or repeal this?). Rather than a shrill argument over what’s wrong with the Second Amendment and how to get rid of it – an argument that never goes anywhere – perhaps both sides might try to see what things they could agree on. Under the Second Amendment as it exists and has been interpreted, how can we work together to curb violence in our country? It is a societal problem – and I would say spiritual problem – much bigger than guns or mental illness. Without guns, using diesel fuel and fertilizer, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier killed 168 people (19 of whom were children) and injured more than 500 people!

Repeal the right to keep and drive cars?

Briefly on Sunday morning I noticed a meme about the number of deaths from drunk-driving accidents circulating. Later when I went back to check this I couldn’t find a one! (I always have trouble finding things on Facebook when I go back to look for them. What’s up with that??) My concern was to check whether these figures about drunk-driving were accurate, or just “fake news” like some of the “Everyday” school shootings numbers. I went to an official site – the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (Drunk driving). According to their site, “Every day, almost 29 people in the United States die in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes—that’s one person every 50 minutes in 2016.” Or, stated another way, there were 10,497 deaths in the year 2016 from alcohol-impaired related driving accidents.

I don’t want to juxtapose drunk-driving deaths against mass shooting deaths in order to de-emphasize the latter. Mass shootings and school shootings are very real problems with which Americans need to grapple. Nevertheless, it seems we have decided to complacently live with a much greater problem in terms of actual deaths. In the same period as above, 2016, there were possibly 477 mass shootings in the U.S., which resulted in up to 606 deaths. Some of this info is hard to find, as far as totals, and some hard to trust. I have chosen to use the high-end numbers for comparison purposes,[ii] derived from the Mass Shooting Tracker.[iii] 10,497 deaths in 2016 from drunk driving. Possibly 606 deaths in 2016 from mass shootings. One every 50 seconds from drunk driving; 1.66 every day from mass shootings (even using some of the highest numbers reported). What does this mean? Have we become complacent about drunk-driving fatalities? Will we become complacent about mass shooting fatalities? Is our outrage selective? Will we trade it for a new style of outrage when the next new problem comes along? And finally, if banning guns to citizens is the right solution to stop mass shootings, why wouldn’t banning cars and alcohol be the right solution to stop drunk-driving fatalities? Why, there are not even constitutional bills of rights for those activities!

---

[i] But “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose...”

[ii] In contrast to Mass Shooting Tracker, Mother Jones (clearly not a conservative pro-NRA site) lists only 6 mass shootings in 2016 – Cascade Mall shooting, Burlington, Washington; Baton Rouge police shooting, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Dallas police shooting, Dallas, Texas; Orlando nightclub massacre, Orlando, Florida; Excel Industries mass shooting, Hesston, Kansas; and Kalamazoo shooting spree, Kalamazoo County, Michigan – with 71 deaths and 73 injuries. Mother Jones uses a different definition of “mass shooting” than Mass Shooting Tracker. The average person hearing “school shooting” thinks Columbine, Sandy Hook, and now Parkland – not about some guy shooting himself after school hours near a school that was not even open! That person hearing “mass shooting” thinks Orlando, Las Vegas, and Sutherland Springs – not about four drug dealers who shot each other in a turf war! While we should not ignore other forms of murder and violence, conflating other crimes with the ever-growing problem of shootings like the one at Parkland confuses both the issue and the understanding of it.

[iii] Part of the problem for comparison purposes is that there is no standard definition of a “mass shooting.” Mass Shooting Tracker writes, “Our definition is this: a mass shooting is an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree.” The FBI defines a mass murder as one event, in one location, when three or more victims are killed and the offender is not included in the victim count. When Congress enacted the “Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012,” they indicated “the term ‘mass killings’ means 3 or more killings in a single incident.” The Congressional Research Service calls a “mass shooting” one in which a gunman kills four or more people, selects victims randomly, and attacks in a public place. Also problems arise in that data used by sites like “Everyday” and “Mass Shooting Tracker” comes from media accounts rather than official records.

Abortionist found guilty of murder

Today abortionist Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia has been found guilty of murdering infants born alive after botched late-term abortions. He was also convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of an adult patient. More can be read on Fox News HERE and on Life News HERE.

Two Baptist blog commentaries on the conviction can be found and more are sure to come:
Dr. Gosnell’s Guilt, the Death Penalty, and Justice
Gosnell is found guilty of first degree murder

An East Texas look at "Bernie"

Truth is stranger than fiction, and so says the movie Bernie’s tagline: “A story so unbelievable it must be true.” "Bernie" was released April 2012 and stars Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, and Shirley MacLaine. The story is true, though the movie is a fictionalized documentary-style account of it. In Carthage, Texas in 1996, assistant funeral home director, singer and lay minister Bernie Tiede killed Marjorie Nugent and hid her body in her deep freeze for nine months before the plot was uncovered.

The movie is styled a "dark comedy."

I didn't know Bernie Tiede, though I might have seen him at Hawthorn Funeral Home. It is in a town about 30 miles away, but is not a place where we make frequent trips to funerals. Everyone in the area knew something of the surreal murder mystery, even if they didn't personally know the participants. A brother-in-law of mine didn't know him well, but had sung at nursing home singings where Bernie was also singing. I was curious about the film. We watched it over the Christmas break.

Local people and local places
One thing that intrigued me about the movie was the locals. There were a couple of people we knew -- knew of, not close friends -- so we were aware that some of the people that were "interviewed" for the "documentary" were from the nearby area. Because of this I searched for information about the interviews. Did the movie just use impromptu material from the locals? "No, it’s scripted," said director Richard Linklater, "but they kind of put it in their own words, quite often. I looked at a lot of people and found people that could be themselves, doing material and throwing in." Comparison of the movie dialogue with Skip Hollandsworth's Midnight in the Garden of East Texas shows that often the scripted dialogue is based on real comments by real people. In an interview with  of National Public Radio, Hollandsworth said that a lot of it "came straight out of my notebook." At times interviewees are actors rather than locals -- and in a few cases actors who are or were locals (e.g. Matthew McConaughey and his mother Kay lived in nearby Longview, Texas). Hollandsworth said that 21 of the "gossips" were "genuine East Texans who've had little or absolutely no acting experience whatsoever." Real or imported, the folks on "Bernie" sound like East Texans.

Most of the movie was not filmed in Carthage. According to Wikipedia, blogs, and so forth, much of Bernie was filmed in Bastrop, Texas -- as well as Smithville, Austin and San Marcos. Daddy Sam's BBQ & Catfish and Jalapeno Tree are real Carthage restaurants where we have eaten. I don't think Jalapeno Tree was opened in Carthage until after Mrs. Nugent's murder, though.

Truth or fiction
"Bernie" is based on a true story, contains much truth and some fiction. Many of the names of locals are changed, some facts are left out, and the story is told mostly from the point of view of Bernie Tiede and locals who liked him. District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson said, “The movie is not really about the murder. It’s more about the life of Bernie.” The community outpouring toward Bernie was very real, but the movie skews the fact that there were others in the community who viewed this as a heinous crime, regardless of what they thought of Mrs. Nugent.

In How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze, Mrs. Nugent's nephew, a journalist who no longer lives in Carthage, wrote, "There are little things in 'Bernie' that aren’t exactly true, bits of dialogue, a changed name here and there. But the big things, the weirdest things, the things you’d assume would have to be made up, happened exactly as the movie says they did. The trial lawyers really did wear Stetsons and cowboy boots and really were named Danny Buck Davidson and Scrappy Holmes. Daddy Sam’s barbecue and bail bonds, just a few blocks from the courthouse in Carthage (population: 6,700), really does have a sign that says, 'You Kill It, I’ll Cook It!' And they really did find my Aunt Marge on top of the flounder and under the Marie Callender’s chicken potpies, wrapped in a Lands’ End sheet. They had to wait two days to do the autopsy. It took her that long to thaw."

Local reaction
Local reaction to the movie is varied, from those who love it to those who hate it and all points in between. "The movie does not tell her side of the story," objects D.A. Davidson. He is certainly correct. Others object to a comedy -- even a dark one -- being made about the tragic death of a local resident. Carthage resident Toni Clements said, "If it was fiction it might be funny, but this was a real person in a real town and no, I don't think it's funny at all." Hollandsworth recognized this concern is his NPR interview, saying, "I think there was always the concern that people would think we were making fun of a death or we were parodying the people of East Texas."

Some thought it made Panola County residents look bad, but others disagreed. The Hawthorn Funeral Home allowed the movie to show a front view of their building, but did not allow the name of the funeral home to be used. Nevertheless, Carlton Shamburger, current owner of the funeral home, felt that the movie didn't make Carthaginians look bad. "If you are worried about us looking stupid, we don’t." He felt the people were the same on screen as they are every day. But he further added, "I wouldn’t recommended the [Nugent] family to look at the movie."

Concluding thoughts
One of my first reactions to the movie was that this might make us East Texans look stupid (but then again, you've got to be able to laugh at yourself). On further reflection I think that the movie doesn't really say anything more (or worse) about East Texans than it does about anyone anywhere else. Director Richard Linklater is an East Texan himself -- well, Houston, but that's just East Texas gone to town. He says "East Texas is 'where the South begins'."

To a large degree, "Bernie" is a story about people believing what they want to believe. East Texans are no more or less this way than others. Just look in the mirror for your own reflection of truth. One person can believe the moon landing. Another sees a vast conspiracy. As recently as the coverage of the Newtown, Connecticut massacre some have seen conspiracy where others see tragedy. Evidence may demand a verdict, but more often we are satisfied to approach life as we see it. Not only do we create our own reality, but also our own morality. It should not be lost on the viewer that in this conservative town where most folks would view murder and homosexuality as sins, Bernie Tiede confessed to one and was suspected of the other and was still held in very high esteem.

"Bernie" drives home the point that in some ways we are not who we are, but who the community grapevine says we are. Gossip may not be true, but it often what is believed. It not only drove the perception, but drove a district attorney (rather than the usual defense attorney) to ask for a change of trial venue!

Murder in general is not funny. Neither is the tragic end of Mrs. Marjorie Nugent. But events that are just too bizarre to be made up will likely strike a dark comedic chord that resonates with most of us. Tragedy and comedy really are two sides of the same coin.

Things to read and watch
Bernie Tiede
Carthage residents react
Carthage residents react (YouTube)
How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze
Kay Epperson
Local reaction
Midnight in the Garden of East Texas

More old news that is new to me

"[John] Lott...noted that the Aurora [Colorado] shooter, who killed twelve people earlier this year, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a 20-minute drive of his home. The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals." -- The Facts about Mass Shootings

The above is an interesting fact that I had never heard mentioned before. As far as I know, there is no proof that the shooter deliberately chose the Cinemark because of its posted "no guns" signs. But what I find bothersome is whether there was some ulterior motive for reporters never mentioning that fact.