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When necessary, then, compulsory sterilization is justified. This attitude suffuses the following passage, in which the possibility of putting a “sterilant” into a population's drinking water is seriously discussed. Holdren and his co-authors do not recommend this particular method, but their objections to it are merely practical and health-related, not moral or stemming from any concern for human freedom:
Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the oposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock...Again, there is no sign of such an agent on the horizon. And the risk of serious, unforeseen side effects would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent, even though this plan has the advantage of avoiding the need for socioeconomic pressures that might tend to discriminate against particular groups or penalize children.
Even though they do not recommend it, note that Holdren and his co-authors treat this as a serious policy proposal with serious drawbacks -- not as an insane idea unworthy of consideration.
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Later, the authors conclude, "Most of the population control measures beyond family planning discussed above have never been tried. Some are as yet technically impossible and others are and probably will remain unacceptable to most societies (although, of course, the potential effectiveness of those least acceptable measures may be great).
"Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying. As those alternatives become clearer to an increasing number of people in the 1980s, they may begin demanding such control. A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences, while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries."
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In his run for governor, McDonnell, 55, makes little mention of his conservative beliefs and has said throughout his campaign that he should be judged by what he has done in office, including efforts to lower taxes, stiffen criminal penalties and reform mental health laws. He reiterated that position Saturday in a statement responding to questions about his thesis.
"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."
McDonnell added: "Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older." He said that his views on family policy were best represented by his 1995 welfare reform legislation and that he "worked to include child day care in the bill so women would have greater freedom to work." What he wrote in the thesis on women in the workplace, he said, "was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views."
McDonnell also said that government should not discriminate based on sexual orientation or ban contraceptives and that "I am not advocating vouchers as there are legal questions regarding their constitutionality in Virginia."
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Obama retains extremely strong support from Democrats, and earlier this year lost much of the Republican support that followed a giddy Inauguration. It is the independents who appear to be currently on the move: Obama dropped 6 percentage points last week from the week before in Gallup’s tracking poll, and Quinnipiac University found a 5-percentage-point drop in approval from independents between early June and early July. Recent state polling shows drops over longer periods.
A Quinnipiac University poll of voters in economically troubled Ohio, released Tuesday, showed Obama’s approval rating slipping 8 points, to below 50 percent, from a poll two months earlier, with a plurality of 48 percent of independent voters disapproving of his job performance. A Public Policy Polling survey in Virginia found Obama’s approval and disapproval numbers effectively tied, with independents disapproving of the president’s job performance, 52 percent to 38 percent.
“That is fairly consistent with all our polling around the country — Obama tends to be really well-liked personally, but he’s starting to lose a majority of the independents,” said Public Policy’s Dean Debnam. Democrats have “had long enough in some voters’ minds that they’re getting blame for nothing happening, and Republicans are scaring them around health care and tax increases.”
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The canaries in the Democratic coal mine, however, may be this year’s top candidates: Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who trails Republican Chris Christie in polls, and Virginia Democrat Creigh Deeds, who trailed Republican Bob McDonnell overall in this week’s Public Policy survey, and by a whopping 21 percentage points among independents.
In both races, local and national issues will be hard to disentangle — but McDonnell, particularly, is trying to turn the tables on Democratic candidates who in recent years tried to make every race a referendum on George W. Bush’s presidency.
“A lot of issues, such as cap and trade and card check, are really resonating with Virginia voters, and what they see is Bob McDonnell clearly articulating his opposition to them, and Creigh Deeds is silent, which is basically supporting them,” said McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin.
McDonnell’s campaign sees particular potential in the coal-rich western part of the state, whose industry could suffer from policies aimed at shifting the country away from fossil fuels.
A Deeds spokesman, Jared Leopold, stressed his candidate’s commitment to state issues and said Deeds doesn’t have a position on the cap-and-trade bill.
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And Obama, of course, isn’t up for reelection anytime soon, and even nervous Democratic congressmen can keep their fingers crossed for economic recovery over the next year.
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So it had been at the military academies since they were established — West Point in 1802, the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845, the Air Force Academy in 1954— and so it would have continued to be had not Public Law 94-106, passed in 1975. decreed that women be brought into this quintessentially male world.
There is a place for women in our military, but not in combat. And their presence at institutions dedicated to the preparation of men for combat command is poisoning that preparation. By attempting to sexually sterilize the Naval Academy environment in the name of equality, this country has sterilized the whole process of combat leadership training, and our military forces are doomed to suffer the consequences.
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Nowhere is this more of a problem than in the area of women's political issues. Equal-opportunity specialists, women's rights advocates, and certain members of Congress have prided themselves on the areas of the military they have "opened up" to women. The Carter administration has come out in favor of "allowing" women to go into combat. These advocates march under the banner of equal opportunity.
Equal opportunity for what? They should first understand that they would not be "opening up" the combat arms for those few women who might now want to serve in them, but rather would be forcing American womanhood into those areas, en masse, should a future mobilization occur.
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Inside the truck stops and in the honky-tonks, down on the street and in the coal towns, American men are tough and violent. When they are lured or drafted from their homes and put through the dehumanization of boot camp, then thrown into an operating combat unit, they don't get any nicer, either. And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide those men with combat leadership.
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Some say men and women have a duty to share our country's burdens equally, that it is sex discrimination to require only men to fight. But history has shown the wisdom of this distinction, and the Israelis, who must do more than merely intellectualize about such possibilities, demonstrate its currency. Equal does not mean the same. Any logical proposition— sexual equality— can be carried to a ridiculous extreme— women should fight alongside men.
If Congress had considered these realities when it debated whether to open the service academies to women, and approached this as a national defense rather a women's issue, it may have voted differently.
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The thesis wasn't so much a case against government as a blueprint to change what he saw as a liberal model into one that actively promoted conservative, faith-based principles through tax policy, the public schools, welfare reform and other avenues.
"Leaders must correct the conventional folklore about the separation of church and state," he wrote. "Historically, the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment were intended to prevent government encroachment upon the free church, not eliminate the impact of religion on society."
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