Rights of conscience reaffirmed. | We need better private defense against shootings.| U.S. military strength is down. | Liberals deny science on abortion. | Alumni can reform higher ed.
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| October 7, 2017 |
The Trump administration has rewritten the contraception mandate; employers with faith-based objections are no longer required to cover contraception and abortion-inducing drugs in their employee health plans. What can be done about mass shootings? Instead of seizing law-abiding citizens' guns, let's try improving private defenses. U.S. military power is dwindling. Liberals are anti-science on late term abortion. Alumni have the power to reform higher education. |
| Rights of conscience have been reaffirmed. Melanie Israel reports that the Trump administration has revised the contraception mandate to protect conscience rights: "The [original] mandate, from the Department of Health and Human Services, requires that nearly all insurance plans must cover abortion-inducing drugs and contraception. This onerous mandate is a burden on employers, individuals, and religious organizations who, because of their beliefs concerning the protection of unborn human life, are faced with the decision to violate sincerely held religious or moral beliefs, pay steep fines, or forgo offering or obtaining health insurance entirely. "The Trump administration's interim final rules (which will go into effect immediately) provide relief for employers and educational institutions with religious objections to the mandate, as well as relief for certain organizations with similar objections based on moral convictions. […] "Predictably, liberals have immediately caricatured the interim final rules as the administration's attempt to deny women access to contraception, when in fact they do no such thing. "The administration calculates that the rules will affect the roughly 200 employers that previously filed lawsuits or object to the mandate on religious or moral grounds, and 'the number of women whose contraceptive costs will be impacted by the expanded exemption … is less that 0.1 percent of the 55.6 million women in private plans receiving preventive services coverage.' In other words, nearly all women in the United State will be unaffected by the rule. "Nor do the new exemptions affect the many existing programs that subsidize contraception at the local, state, and federal level. Moreover, the rules outline, at length, the various ways that women will remain free to make their own decisions about, and purchase or find coverage for, contraception. The only thing the exemption does is to exempt those with objections from coercion to be complicit in choices that would violate their religious or moral convictions." [The Daily Signal]
Yes, something can be done about mass shootings. But the answer isn't seizing the guns of people who mind their own business, writes Shika Dalmia: "[T]he kind of intrusive searches of the homes and property of gun owners [seizing guns] would entail would make the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance of telecommunications look positively restrained. Nor are Americans likely to simply lie down and take it. They will likely resist and fight back, which would require the government to crack down even more — or, in other words, declare war on its own people. "No matter how much liberals want a gun-free paradise, they can't simply wish away a deeply entrenched gun culture." A better approach, Dalmia writes, is to "encourage private entities to step up their own lines of defense." "It is really quite amazing that Paddock could sneak in so much weaponry — and install security cameras in his room to monitor police activity outside — completely undetected by the Mandalay Bay. As I have written previously, that kind of thing would never happen in my home country of India, where after the 2011 Mumbai attack, every hotel runs every car, every piece of luggage, and every hand bag through a metal detector. Ditto for movie theaters and malls. Neighborhoods have installed their own private guards. "One reason Indians are taking security into their own hands is that their government is so inept that Indians have no illusions that it will protect them. But even where the government is more functional, it can't be omnipresent — and protect everyone from every single threat. "The American Hotel & Lodging Association declared after the Las Vegas shooting that it will re-evaluate the industry's security protocols. That's good. Other industries should follow suit. "The only way killers like Paddock — or Islamist terrorists, for that matter — have a prayer of being thwarted is if we fundamentally rethink our security strategy and build millions of points of resistance." [The Week]
U.S. military power is dwindling. From Dakota Wood, some of the findings of the 2018 Index of U.S. Military Strength: "Since 2012, the Army has shrunk from 45 combat brigades to only 31. In February, Gen. Daniel B. Allyn informed the House Armed Services Committee that only a third of those brigades are considered combat ready and only three, count 'em, three, would be able to deploy immediately to a combat zone. […] "Things aren't much better for our air and sea forces. The Heritage Foundation's Index of Military Strength assesses the Air Force as being 24 percent short of the 1,200 fighter jets it needs. As for keeping the aging aircraft it does have flying, it lacks 1,000 pilots and over 3,000 flight maintenance crew members. Only four of its 36 combat-coded squadrons are ready to execute all wartime missions. "The Navy has shriveled to 276 combat ships—the smallest U.S. battle fleet since before World War I. And the readiness of the force continues to decline. In February, Adm. William Moran, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, testified before the House Armed Services Committee that 'the Navy's overall readiness has reached its lowest level in many years.' "His testimony was subsequently affirmed by a series of accidents that revealed a deplorable decline in basic seamanship. First, the USS Lake Champlain collided with a fishing vessel. Then the USS John S. McCain and the USS Fitzgerald hit cargo ships, costing 17 American sailors their lives. "All of these ships were part of the Navy's Forward Deployed Naval Forces, considered our most proficient, well-trained, and experienced force because they're operating all the time. But a report issued last month by the Government Accountability Office found that little to no dedicated training periods were built into the operational schedules. As a result, 37 percent of the warfare certifications for cruiser and destroyer crews based in Japan—including certifications for seamanship—had expired." [Fox News]
Liberals are anti-science on late term abortion. Jonathan Tobin: "More than two years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that studies had proven that infants at 22 and 23 weeks of gestation have a decent chance of survival outside the womb if given adequate treatment. This was reported on the front page of the New York Times, and subsequent research will likely further lower the age of viability. But opponents of late-term abortion bans have stubbornly ignored these developments. "Given the incontrovertible fact that babies who are still being legally aborted could live outside of the womb, the moral rationale for opposing late-term-abortion bans has disappeared. Nor is it reasonable to assert, as opponents of the ban continue to do, that a viable infant at that age would be incapable of feeling pain. "In order to justify opposition to the 20-week ban, Democrats must not merely ignore the moral and religious arguments that motivate pro-life advocates. They must now also pretend that the revolution in neonatal care that has occurred since Roe never happened. More to the point, Democrats who have treated opposition to any limits on abortion as a litmus test of support for the rights of women must come to terms with the fact that their extremism on the issue has led them to defend not so much a right to 'choose' as a procedure indistinguishable from infanticide." [National Review]
Demand change before writing another check to your alma mater. Michael Rubin writes that alumni should say no to universities funding campaigns until the schools reform. Rubin's checklist of reforms include: Require applicants to write an admissions essay on whether any constraints should be placed on free speech on campus; cut the administrative bloat relative to teaching faculty; stop lobbying Congress on issues unrelated to the university's educational mission; leave the investigation and adjudication of sexual assault to law enforcement authorities; and allow conservative ideas and conservative scholars to come to campus. In the meantime, says Rubin, there are other worthy educational programs to which you can donate: "The Buckley Program provides some balance at Yale University, and the Alexander Hamilton Society brings mainstream policy practitioners and right-of-center academics to university campuses to debate university professors on issues of the day. Stanford's Hoover Institution probably contributes more to public policy debate than the rest of Stanford combined. Or, those wishing to support universities' core missions can donate instead to institutions such as the University of Chicago, whose president has stood firm against the social and political trends buffeting so many other elite campuses. There are also worthy nonprofits, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which stand firm on free speech and academic freedom irrespective of politics. Indeed, in many ways, FIRE has been truer to its objective mission than even the American Civil Liberties Union in recent years. "Simply put, it's time for alumni to recognize their annual checks, capital campaign commitments, and end-of-life behests do more harm than good […] ." [American Enterprise Institute]
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