Conservatives are hypocrites.
Conservatives want a lenient justice for them and their children, and the harshest possible justice for other people.
We see this in Jim-Bob Duggar, when it comes to his son being guilty of a sex crime, against his four sisters and another girl.
We see it with Jeb Bush when his kids were guilty of crimes while he was governor, especially when his daughter was a drug addict. Daughter Bush went to rehab, but at least went through the justice system -- but only apparently because Jebbie couldn't avoid it. Jim-Bob Duggar acted as a vigilante, keeping HIS son out of the system of justice entirely, and certainly did not hold him accountable under our system of laws, much less subject him to the death penalty for rape and incest.
We see it when Mike Huckabee used his position as governor to keep his son from being held accountable in the courts for animal cruelty in hanging a stray dog. Then-governor Huckabee is alleged to have used his power and influence to prevent an investigation and prosecution, according to the authorities who attempted to investigate and prosecute the case. Of course, this NEVER stops ol' Mike Hucksterbee, purveyor of quack cures, from being critical of OTHER people's parenting, like his criticism of the Obama's for the choice of music they allow their daughters -- while Huckabee pals around with pedophile Ted Nugent, performing sexually offensive lyrics with him -- and then lying about it.
From Right Wing Watch:
After Mike Huckabee criticized Beyoncé’s music as “obnoxious and toxic mental poison” unfit for children and compared the singer to a prostitute, it didn’t take long for people to point out that he himself had once joined with Ted Nugent to perform a sexually explicit song on his national television program.Video available here. You have to wonder at how much forgiving of the pedophiles Mike "Family Values" I-Wannabe-President REVEREND Huckabee can offer. It appears to be quite a lot, given that among the many examples truly evil sexual conduct in super close friend Ted Nugent, covered by the HuffPo a year ago February:
Huckabee is, predictably, reacting by pretending that what happened didn’t actually happen, telling the Christian Post today that Nugent “changed the lyrics pretty dramatically” when he sang the song “Cat Scratch Fever” on Huckabee’s Fox News show.
In fact, anyone who watches a video of the performance can see that Nugent didn’t change any of the song’s explicit lyrics as Huckabee accompanied him,
In fact, in the case of Nugent, we have even come to see alleged child sexual abuse as some sort of eccentricity or harmless vice. Can you imagine anyone else who had been accused of having sex with a 12-year-old, written a song about raping a 13-year-old and adopted a 17-year-old so that he could have sex with her going on to campaign alongside all the most conservative "family values" candidates?
When Ted Nugent was 32 years old, he released the song "Jailbait." Here's a taste of the lyrics (written by him):
Well, I don't care if you're just 13The albums' next track is titled "I Am a Predator."...
You look too good to be true
I just know that you're probably clean...
Jailbait you look fine, fine, fine...
It's quite alright, I asked your mama
Wait a minute, officer
Don't put those handcuffs on me
Put them on her, and I'll share her with you
Two years before recording "Jailbait," Ted Nugent had the novel idea of becoming legal guardian to a 17-year-old girl, so that they could have sex without, you know, her parents having legal recourse. They acquiesced. "I guess they figured better Ted Nugent than some drug-infested punk in high school," he told VH1, years later. In the same documentary, he claimed to have had several relationships with young girls, and seems to brag about gaining their parents' approval, too. (Though he didn't go so far as to adopt any of them.)
Oh those hypocritical claims of the moral high ground! Another perfect example of the conservative do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do, and- if-it-becomes-inconvenient- lie ideology. Another example of the problem with conservatives, sex, and religion -- because of course, Hucksterbee shares a love of god and guns and maybe grits with gravy with the Nuge, and that makes everything else all okey-dokey and forgiveable.
Justice under conservatives is for OTHER PEOPLE, not 'them" and not "theirs' - and that is dangerous, that is unfair, that is uncivilized, that is not the rule of law under the U. S. Constitution. Justice is for evangelical conservative men, and screw justice and legal protection for women and girls.
Via Patheos:
Before he was the star of 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob Duggar was a prominent political figure in Arkansas, serving as a member of the state’s House of Representatives before running for the U.S. Senate in 2002.Here is just a part of what is wrong with what passes for Duggar thinking, above and beyond the draconian punishment that characterizes conservatism. It is that we should not be executing anyone, even rapists. I'll give Duggar this much agreement, rape IS a heinous and terrible crime, for which there should be appropriate and severe consequences AND FOR WHICH THERE SHOULD BE DUE PROCESS IN CRIMINAL COURTS. Josh Duggar should receive real legal consequences, but he should also receive real treatment, not fake pray-away-the-
Duggar lost his 2002 bid to be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, however, he did take positions as a candidate. While trying to justify his anti-choice, anti-abortion stance, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Bob Duggar stated forcefully and clearly that those guilty of rape and incest should be put to death.
The following appeared on Duggar’s campaign website:
Q. What is your abortion position, and specifically, where do you stand on rape, incest, and threat to the mother’s health?
A. If a woman is raped, the rapist should be executed instead of the innocent unborn baby. Adoption is an option. Many couples would love to adopt and are waiting for a baby. Abortion has been and always will be the destruction of an innocent child. Rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes. The developing infant committed no crime and should be allowed to live. In the unlikely event that the life of both mother and baby would both be lost (for example, a tubal pregnancy) all should be done to save the life of the mother.
But in seeking restorative justice rather than retributive justice (eye for an eye), we should be seeking treatment for offenders, not simply the most extreme punitive action we can devise. Nothing is made whole or better after excessively punitive justice, in contrast to restorative justice where the goal of the process focuses on an outcome that is not based on vengeance, on trying to feel better by hurting a person who did something wrong or bad.
From Wikipedia:
Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Victims take an active role in the process, while offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions... In addition, it provides help for the offender in order to avoid future offences. It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the state. Restorative justice that fosters dialogue between victim and offender shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.We do not have exemptions for abortion as a constitutional right; this is something that conservatives, in their fundamentally flawed concepts of right and wrong, innocence and guilt, are attempting to impose on the women in this nation. Women have a right to abortion (a limited right as established by Roe v. Wade) because women have autonomy over their bodies, because women have a right to determine if they consent to being pregnant rather than having it imposed on them against their will.
Embryos and fetuses are clumps of cells in the process of differentiation into a variety of kinds of tissues and potentially into the component body parts and systems. But embryos and fetuses are NOT PEOPLE, they lack the essential neurological development to have the essential awareness and capability that we define as living human beings. We use the same criteria to determine if someone is alive or brain dead -- and no longer able to think or feel as a living human being, even if there is some residual bodily processes that continue.
The simple reality is that most fertilized ova do NOT go on to become human beings, due to a failure to implant in the uterus and therefore they fail to complete that developmental process, possibly as high a rate of failure as 80% without intervention, and as high as 100% with contraception. The fertilized ova has no rights and deserves no rights, contrary to the efforts of extremist conservatives to force personhood on the nation as law. A conceptus is NOT A PERSON, and is unlikely to become one.
The simple reality is that many embryos and fetuses in nature do not continue to develop either. We can engage in a superstitious idea about reproduction, or we can accept the reality that pregnancy is a choice, and that most attempts at reproduction are not successful, much less entitled to continue at the expense of an unwilling woman's body.
It is very difficult to rationalize that some omnipotent deity, or the biological system of nature created by such a deity, produces all these little zygotes, these fertilized ova, and then fails to follow through with them -- but we are supposed to believe that we humans cannot make this conscious decision for ourselves about reproduction? That is ridiculous on the face of it, and there is nothing anywhere in the Judeo-Christian religious texts which preclude doing so. In fact quite the opposite is true -- there are a lot of accounts in the Bible of ripping open pregnant women so as to destroy pregnancies among conquered peoples. The Bible actually requires it in the old testament, unless you posit that God only creates SOME pregnancies but not others.
2 Kings 15:16King James Version16 Then Menahem smote Tiphsah, and all that were therein, and the coasts thereof from Tirzah: because they opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that were with child he ripped up.
Hosea 13:16King James Version 16 Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.
Abortion has NOTHING whatsoever to do with guilt or innocence of that potentially developing cellular process. The reasoning that posits this is a human being with rights or guilt or innocence is BADLY FLAWED.
Even if you accept the premise of religion over rational thought, even Jim-Bob Duggar's own faith posits that a conception is not 'innocent', because of the doctrine of original sin -- that EVERYONE is born with sin and guilt. The Duggars, like former ordained pastor Mike Huckabee, are Southern Baptists; but the concept of original sin is a foundational concept and part of most forms of Christianity.
In other words, there is no state of innocence unique to the zygote, conceptus, embryo or fetus that places them in a position superior to assert a right over an existing fully formed human being.
James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888), the founding president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, affirmed the federal headship of Adam and the doctrine of original sin. On whether man inherits guilt and is under condemnation prior to actual personal transgression, Boyce writes:Consequently, at the very moment of birth, the presence and possession of such a nature shows that even the infant sons of Adam are born under all the penalties which befell their ancestor in the day of his sin. Southern Baptists and the Doctrine of Imputed Sin
It is not for conservatives in their flawed concept of good and evil, innocence and guilt, to decide that women are bad for having sex, so they deserve pregnancy, or that people are to be divided into good and evil -- which is apparently synonymous (or should that be SIN-nonymous) with being part of "them" in a black and white extremism of right and wrong that gives passes to conservatives but imposes the harshest possible outcomes on those they identify as 'other' or different than them.
EVERY human being on this planet, now and in the past and in the future, is a combination of good and bad, regardless of their religious or political beliefs -- or lack of them.
As to the notion that women should simply hand over 9 months of their lives, and their bodies, to continue as victims of rape or incest, because there are lots and lots of waiting adoptive parents......if that were true we would not have so many children in need of adoption already.
When we look at the generous forgiveness of those conservatives supporting the Duggars, including Mike Huckabee who was governor while Jim-Bob was in the Arkansas legislature, and while the Josh Duggar incest crimes were taking place, we see this about the outcomes of the conservative hypocritical justice system, from the fact check of Huckabee's past political ads:
Via On the Issues:
When it comes to violent crimes, a category that includes murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, Huckabee’s record is mixed: Murders and robberies declined, while rapes and aggravated assaults increased. Overall, the violent crime rate was actually 5.2% higher than in 1996, when he took office.Thanks to the double standards and conservative hypocrisy of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee, add Josh Duggar's multiple incidents of rape and incest against his four sisters and another young girl to those statistics -- because they were excluded under the term in office of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas.
Conservatives FAIL at governance, because their fundamental - and fundamentalist - concepts of how the world generally, and how government, and especially justice specifically operate are flawed and faulty, and inherently unfair and unjust. Conservatives mean well, but do badly... and they hate being held accountable for those failures and failings. Accountability is reserved for anyone who does not think or believe as they do.
THAT is why not one of the conservatives currently running for office should be elected, and why those who are the most extreme pose the greatest danger to our society and citizens.
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