Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Ideologue inconsistences on issues like smoking, abortion – what else is new?

It seems we have inconsistencies on a pair of social issues now pending before Illinois state government. Yet that’s really nothing new – ideologues often don’t have a consistent train of thought in determining when they want to meddle with someone else’s life.
PRITZKER: Fear of J.B. scares ideologues. Good!

I refer to a bill now pending before Gov. J.B, Pritzker – the one approved last week by the General Assembly that says people ought to be 21 years old in order to legally buy tobacco products and other items for vaping. As in inhaling fumes from tobacco-less products.

THEN, THERE’S A pair of bills that will be pending before the state Legislature this spring – ones that would eliminate many of the restrictive measures that anti-abortion legislators have tried to impose throughout the years.

They’re going to screech “bloody murder!!!!” (literally, I kid you not) in claiming they’re somehow looking out for a life that has yet to be born, thereby justifying the taking into account of a mother’s sentiments about her own body into irrelevance.

But when it comes to efforts to reduce the legal availability of smoking-related products to young people, the ideologues amongst us are going to claim their opposition is meant to protect the rights of personal choice of young people.

It’s almost like they’re claiming the right of a 16-year-old girl to develop a smoking habit – claiming that it’s her own body she’s hurting. It’s her choice.

YET THEY’RE PREPARED to screech and scream the “murderer” and “baby killer” labels at a young girl who thinks she’s not ready for a baby, and is under the (as the ideologues would view it) the misguided belief that it’s her own body being impacted by the decision to terminate the pregnancy.

It was nearly a half-century ago that the Supreme Court of the United States issued the larger ruling that struck down measures criminalizing abortion. The strategy throughout the years is to accept the general concept, but have legislatures impose so many restrictions so as to make it next to impossible for some women to actually have access to abortion.

The two bills now pending (one in the Illinois House of Representatives and the other in the state Senate) would eliminate many of the restrictions they’ve tried to enact – even up to the final days of a pregnancy.

Their desire to meddle with the desires of a mother seem to be to the extreme they’d want to require the paramedics to be on the scene of an abortion to try to revive the fetus.

THEY TALK ABOUT denying unborn children “independent rights,” but it really comes across as meddling with the mother’s desires – even though hers is the existing life that ought to be the priority.

But then on a real public health issue such as smoking, we’re going to hear the nonsense rhetoric of how absurd it is to tell someone they have to be 21 in order to smoke.

Maybe we’ll even hear the argument made that people can enlist in the army and die for their country at age 18 – why not let them smoke?

As it was, the General Assembly passed a measure just last year calling for this same age increase – only to have then-Gov. Bruce Rauner wield the “veto” pen to the measure.

THE FACT THAT smoking is a foul habit that impacts everybody around you somehow doesn’t matter to the ideologues who want to view it solely as a personal choice. Whereas the baby forced into life because of the denial of a personal choice is something we all wind up having to cover the cost of caring for.

I find it amusing that the ideologues seem to fear Pritzker is going to push the abortion measure erasing generations of restrictions into law, while also giving his approval to a smoking age boost.

They’re going to get all hysterical with their rhetoric because government basically is going to prevent them from meddling into the lives of others – the young girl who really shouldn’t have a pregnancy now and the people who have to breathe in the fumes of the nitwit smokers amongst them.

But then again, hysteria and nonsense is oft the way of politics in Illinois!

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