Feds slam prof’s ‘kill severely disabled babies’ remarks

Peter Singer

The National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency, has slammed Princeton University ethics professor Peter Singer for arguing in a radio interview that it is “reasonable” for government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to severely disabled babies.

Singer contended the health-care system under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act should be more overt about rationing and that the country should acknowledge the necessity of “intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.”

Throughout the interview, Singer repeatedly referred to a disabled infant as “it.”

Singer was speaking on the “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” broadcast April 19 on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM.

In a lengthy rebuttal to Singer, the National Council on Disability, or NCD, distributed a statement contesting Singer on the facts and contending his views could foster discrimination against the disabled.

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“Professor, do your homework,” the NCD said.

“Discrimination because of disability is not likely to be reduced by Singer’s positions, or the logical policy positions that would emerge from them,” stated the NCD. “Discrimination is not solely a philosophical concept it remains a regular occurrence for individuals with disabilities.”

Singer essentially argues the right to life is based on a being’s capacity for intelligence and to hold life preferences, which in turn is directly related to a capacity to feel and comprehend pain and pleasure.

The NCD “categorically reject[ed] any calculus that assumes to ascribe a measurable, immutable quality of life to another human being – disabled or not.”

“There are simply too many variables to consider in making ‘quality of life’ assumptions.”

The agency said one of “the hallmarks of societal attitudes toward disabilities has been a tendency of people without disabilities, including media savvy philosophers, to overestimate the negative aspects and underestimate the positive features of the lives of those who have disabilities.”

“In contrast to Singer’s ivory tower speculations, the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that ‘society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.”

The NCD notes that increasingly, negative predictions of quality of life “have little to do with the actual life experiences of people with disabilities.”

“People with disabilities commonly report more satisfaction with their lives than others might expect,” stated the agency. “Though it might surprise Singer and those with limited imaginations, even people with disabilities who encounter obstacles, prejudice, and discrimination, derive satisfaction and pleasure from their lives.”

Kill disabled infants under Obamacare

In the interview, Klein asked whether Singer believes health-care rationing under Obamacare will become more prevalent.

Singer replied that rationing is already happening, explaining doctors and hospitals routinely make decisions based on costs.

“It’s different in the U.S. system, in a way, because it doesn’t do this overtly; maybe it doesn’t do it as much. And the result is it spends about twice as much on health care as some other countries for very little extra benefit in terms of the outcome.”

Klein quoted from a section of Singer’s 1993 treatise “Practical Ethics,” titled “Taking Life: Humans.”

In the section, Singer argued for the morality of “non-voluntary euthanasia” for human beings not capable of understanding the choice between life and death, including “severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved.”

For Singer, the wrongness of killing a human being is not based on the fact that the individual is alive and human. Instead, Singer argued it is “characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference.”

Asked whether he envisions denying treatment to disabled infants to become more common in the U.S. under the new health-care law, Singer replied: “It does happen. Not necessarily because of costs.”

He continued:

If an infant is born with a massive hemorrhage in the brain that means it will be so severely disabled that if the infant lives it will never even be able to recognize its mother, it won’t be able to interact with any other human being, it will just lie there in the bed and you could feed it but that’s all that will happen, doctors will turn off the respirator that is keeping that infant alive.

I don’t know whether they are influenced by reducing costs. Probably they are just influenced by the fact that this will be a terrible burden for the parents to look after, and there will be no quality of life for the child.

So we are already taking steps that quite knowingly and intentionally are ending the lives of severely disabled infants.

And I think we ought to be more open in recognizing that this happens.

Klein followed up by asking whether the killing of severely disabled infants should be institutionalized to reduce health-care costs.

Asked Klein: “I know that it happens and it happens certainly if the family gives consent. But do you think in the future in order to ensure a more fair rationing of health-care and health-care costs, that it should actually be instituted more? The killing of severely disabled babies?”

Singer replied that such a plan would be “quite reasonable” if it saved money that can be used for better purposes. He contended that most people would say they don’t want their premiums to be higher “so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”

Singer’s full response:

I think if you had a health-care system in which governments were trying to say, “Look, there are some things that don’t provide enough benefits given the costs of those treatments. And if we didn’t do them we would be able to do a lot more good for other people who have better prospects,” then yes.

I think it would be reasonable for governments to say, “This treatment is not going to be provided on the national health service if it’s a country with a national health service. Or in the United States on Medicare or Medicaid.”

And I think it will be reasonable for insurance companies also to say, “You know, we won’t insure you for this or we won’t insure you for this unless you are prepared to pay an extra premium, or perhaps they have a fund with lower premiums for people who don’t want to insure against that.”

Because I think most people, when they think about that, would say that’s quite reasonable. You know, I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.

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Murder-case juror closer to being behind bars

A juror in a Grand Junction, Colorado, murder case more than a decade ago is one step closer to being behind bars herself after a judge ruled her in contempt of court.

According to the Grand Junction Sentinel, Marilyn Charlesworth “willfully” gave the wrong answer to a juror questionnaire she filled out before the 2004 murder trial of Michael Blagg, who was convicted.

The conviction now has been overturned, and a retrial has yet to be set. The 52-year-old Blagg remains behind bars for the 2001 death of his wife, Jennifer. The couple’s young daughter, Abby Blagg, remains missing and is presumed dead.

The Sentinel report said Judge Jane Tidball found that Charlesworth “beyond a reasonable doubt” must be held in contempt for her answer.

Her sentencing was scheduled for June 26, and she could be given up to six months in jail.

The Colorado paper reported Dan Rubinstein of the district attorney’s office also said Charlesworth should pay the costs of a second trial, including fees and experts.

Daniel Shaffer, Charlesworth’s attorney, argued she didn’t consider herself to be a domestic violence victim when she filled out the questionnaire in February 2004.

Get Judge Andrew Napolitano’s take on deception in American history, in “Lies the Government Told You.”

WND earlier reported the penalty for the juror could surpass $100,000.

KUSA-TV in Denver had reported Charlesworth was on the 12-member jury that returned the guilty verdict after she filled out a jury questionnaire that asked, “Have you, a family member, or close friend ever been involved in domestic violence?”

She said no, the station reported.

But then in 2013, she appeared at a Grand Junction City Council meeting to protest a city councilman-elect who had been accused of hitting his girlfriend.

She said she “was a victim of domestic violence for 10 years,” and her words were noticed.

Blagg’s defense counsel filed a motion, and the guilty verdict was overturned with Judge David Bottger’s conclusion that her “deliberative failure to disclose her domestic violence involvement makes this not a close question at all.”

The office of prosecutor Pete Hautzinger had helped defend Charlesworth earlier from accusations from the public defender about vision troubles and a failure to disclose the use of a prescription drug, none of which rose to the level of being an issue for the judge.

But KUSA reported the prosecutor has a new perspective.

See the report:

“I think it’s reasonable to ask the court to consider imposing some significant financial penalty on her,” he said.

The prosecutor’s concern, however, also was raised because of the tactics of the Colorado Public Defender’s Office, which has investigated Charlesworth for 10 years on and off.

“The idea that it’s OK to investigate jurors’ pasts months, if not years, after they did their juror service is troubling,” he told KUSA.

The station reported Charlesworth declined to answer questions about domestic violence but said court records show she filed for restraining orders against former husbands twice in the 1990s.

A friend told the broadcast outlet that the understanding Charlesworth has of domestic violence now is far from what she understood then.

“It’s very subjective, how you feel when you go through it, how you would answer that question,” said the friend, Anne Landman.

The station reported Amy Pohl of the Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence said victims frequently don’t understand clearly what domestic violence is, “because they weren’t being physically abused.”

And Pohl argued the wording on the questionnaire was inadequate, because there was no definition, leaving “a lot of gray area.”

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Houston pastors ratchet up fight over ‘transgender rights’

A fight over a Houston transgender ordinance that grabbed national headlines when the lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, subpoenaed the sermons of area pastors, is being escalated to the state Court of Appeals.

The pastors, in announcing they have filed an appeal on Thursday, released a statement explaining, “After ten months, thousands of man hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs for the coalition, Judge Robert Schaffer caved in to political pressure by the LGBT political force who endorsed him and ruled that we were a few hundred signatures short.

“His subjective determination that a group of circulators’ signatures were not legible – a standard that does not exist in Texas election law and violates the federal Voting Rights Act – invalidated over 5,000 signatures, nearly 10 times the number needed to erase even his declared shortfall. We are confident that his decision will be overturned on that basis alone at the state Court of Appeals,” the statement said.

When the city council adopted the ordinance, the coalition immediately collected signatures to put the decision before the voters, but the city fought back and disqualified signatures, so the pastors’ group filed the legal challenge.

“The resolve of our pastors and leaders has not wavered and we intend to right a voting rights wrong. We will take this to the Texas Supreme Court if needed to assure that the rule of law is restored in Houston, voters have our day at the ballot and to protect basic, God-given rights of the citizens in the fourth largest city in America,” the pastors said.

The case over the city’s transgender ordinance, adopted at the behest of Parker, who once said the fight was all about her, drew national attention last year when WND broke the story Parker issued subpoenas to five pastors for copies of their sermons and other communications. The pastors later called for an investigation of city hall’s actions.

A nationwide outpouring of criticism prompted officials to drop the subpoenas.

And Rush Limbaugh at the time called the subpoenas “one of the most vile, filthy, blatant violations of the Constitution that I have seen.”

Just what is going on America? The details all are in “A Queer Thing Happened to America,” which explains how an America of 40 years ago, when most knew little about homosexuality, arrived at today, where one can’t watch a sitcom without being indoctrinated with the “gay” lifestyle.

After turning in more than 50,000 signatures, including more than 30,000 that were pre-verified as belonging to Houstonians, the pastors, working with the Houston Area Pastor Council were told by the city secretary that she had stopped counting because more than enough valid signatures had been verified.

Then the city attorney, at the direction of the mayor, stepped in and simply ordered thousands of additional signatures invalidated.

The pastors, working as the No UNequal Rights Coalition, said in their statement, “We knew on July 3, 2014, that the massive coalition of pastors, churches, community leaders and citizens who had worked tirelessly over 30 days to gather over 54,000 signatures had submitted more than enough valid signatures to Houston City Secretary Anna Russell. On August 4, 2014, it was evident that Mayor Anise Parker had conspired with her City Attorney David Feldman to deprive the voters of the right to decide at the ballot whether to protect our women from having biological males in their restrooms, showers and locker rooms. She broke the law and declared the petitions invalid.

“We could not allow that kind of tyranny and lawlessness to occur in Houston so we filed a legal challenge against the mayor and city of Houston. During the succeeding months of depositions, hearings, briefs and trial, coalition attorney Andy Taylor firmly established that under established Texas law and precedent there were indeed not only an adequate number but a surplus of valid signatures submitted.”

The judge had said the pastors collected 16,684 signatures, of the needed 17,269, but at least 5,000 were disqualified over “legibility” issues, which the pastors said were not defined in the law.

During preparation for the court fight, longtime city Secretary Anna Russell testified the city charter “provides that the city secretary determine the number of qualified voters who sign the petition.”

In her testimony, she was asked: “And based on that understanding, you did that; and the result of your work was that 17,846 signatures had been validated. And that was more than the minimum number necessary, correct?”

“That’s correct,” she replied.

Then the city attorney, Feldman, then stepped in and disqualified most of the signatures that had been collected, and the city has been fighting efforts to overturn the ordinance ever since.

Houston officials have declined to respond to WND requests for comment.

A jury at trial found no fraud by the pastors coalition.

F.N. Williams, senior pastor at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, earlier said the city’s attorneys “went to extraordinary lengths to discredit, demean, denigrate and disqualify as many petitions and signatures as possible.”

Pastor Steve Riggle, a leader of the coalition, said the pastors all along knew the fight over the ordinance might be long and hard.

“We are … greatly confident that justice will be served and the people will have our day at the ballot on this very important matter,” he said.

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Hillary partnered with radical Alinsky group

Saul Alinsky

The exact nature and extent of Hillary Clinton’s relationship with radical community organizer Saul Alinsky has long been the subject of speculation and intrigue.

The interest has been largely fueled by Clinton’s suppressed and later released 92-page senior thesis for Wellesley College offering an extensive, largely positive critique of Alinsky and his work.

Now WND has found that long after Alinsky’s death in June 1972, a group Clinton co-chaired maintained a working relationship with Alinsky’s main community organizing outfit, the Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF.

The partnership extended into the 1990s and yielded influence over the education policy of the Bill Clinton presidency, it can now be disclosed.

Founded by Alinsky in 1940 and run by him until his death, the IAF is a national community organizing network established to implement Alinsky’s expansive organizing agenda. After Alinsky’s death, the IAF was taken over by his longtime associate and designated successor, Ed Chambers, who became the group’s executive director.

Dick Morris, a former top political adviser to Bill Clinton both as governor of Arkansas and as president, noted to WND that education reform “is the key issue Hillary Clinton used to propel herself independently to the forefront of Arkansas politics during Bill’s governorship.”

“The revelation of how closely linked her efforts were back in the 80s – and have been since – to an Alinsky radical front group is deeply disturbing and expands our understanding of Hillary’s fundamental radicalism and commitment to the new left of Saul Alinsky,” Morris said.

David Horowitz, whose parents were members of the Communist Party and who himself became a leader in the new left movement of the 1960s and 1970s before rejecting it, said the revelation is significant though not surprising.

“When radicals set out to fundamentally transform a society, the first institution they attack is the educational system which under their influence becomes a system of indoctrination in radical ideas,” he told WND.

IAF partnership

The thread of Clinton’s ties to the IAF runs through the National Center on Education and the Economy, or NCEE, a group that helped Bill Clinton reform the U.S. education system.

In 1988, Clinton joined the board of the NCEE, which specializes in education reform. Until at least 1992, Clinton served as co-chairman of the NCEE’s Implementation Commission, the group tasked with implementing the NCEE’s education agenda.

To forge that agenda, the NCEE worked with several listed “partners,” most notably Alinsky’s IAF.

In 1989, the NCEE formed its Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which carried out an extensive analysis and survey of the U.S. education system, interviewing more than 2,000 people and hundreds of government and private agencies.

The NCEE’s commission in June 1990 released an extensive policy paper with specific recommendations on how to reform the national education system, with Hillary Clinton, then a partner in the Rose Law Firm, serving as co-chairman of the group tasked with carrying out the recommendations.

In 1992, the NCEE created an expansive proposal to the New American Schools Development Corporation, a nonprofit that teamed up with government agencies to reform U.S. schools.

Titled “Schools – and Systems – for the 21st Century,” the NCEE’s proposal listed the IAF as a partner.

“The Industrial Areas Foundation, perhaps the most experienced agency in the United States in the arena of community organizing, will help us think through the parent engagement and organizing issues,” it said.

Clinton implemented Alinsky education agenda?

As co-chairman of the NCEE’s commission to implement its agenda, which was formed with IAF input, Hillary Clinton co-authored an extensive article for the U.S. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

The 1992 article was also authored by longtime Clinton adviser Ira Magaziner, who served on the NCEE’s board and currently works for the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

In their piece, Clinton and Magaziner highlighted the NCEE’s recommendations for how to reform America’s school system.

Many of the recommendations mirror some of the IAF’s longtime goals for education policy.

Alinsky’s IAF, for example, stated in a concept paper that “the entire community must be meaningfully involved in the public education system and held accountable for its results.”

As documented by Discover The Networks, one IAF paper on education calls for teachers and childcare workers to play a larger role in the upbringing of minors.

Stated the IAF: “Schools must be prepared to teach parents how to play a supportive role. In some cases this might mean making provision for parenting education. … Increasingly, schools will find it important to employ social workers who can coordinate necessary services and to intervene on behalf of a child in need. … Schools will need to help working families make provision for after-school childcare, and day care for pre-schoolers.”

To that end, Clinton and Magaziner touted their NCEE’s recommendation for a coalition of schools, the federal government and “local leadership to organize and oversee the new training-to-work transition programs and training systems.”

Clinton and Magaziner call for the establishment of a working group of “federal, state and national government leaders, with business, labor and education leaders” to begin discussions on the implementation of their recommendations.

The pair further advocated that states take responsibility for ensuring students meet proposed new education standards.

The IAF called for employers and taxpayers to help pay for new education standards.

Clinton and Magaziner proposed “all employers will invest at least 1 percent of their payroll for the education and training of their workers.”

Bill Clinton’s education reform

The NCEE yielded enormous influence during the Bill Clinton presidency.

The group was founded and is still run by longtime Clinton friend Marc Tucker. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he brought in Tucker to help oversee restructuring of the state’s educational system.

The NCEE website documents the central role the group played in reforming the education system under Bill Clinton’s two White House terms.

From 1992 to 2000, the website relates, “almost the entire agenda advanced in” the commission’s report, as co-chaired by Hillary Clinton, “was enacted into legislation by the Congress and signed into law by the President (Clinton), including the School-to-Work Act, the National Skill Standards Board, and the Workforce Investment Act.”

Continues the history section of the NCEE’s website: “At the Rose Garden ceremony at which President Clinton signed his signature education legislation, the President departed from his prepared remarks to single out the contribution made by NCEE to the national education reform agenda.”

“Subsequently, many states also enacted policies designed to support the recommendations made in the America’s Choice report,” the website stated.

Clinton and Alinsky

Clinton’s 1969 Wellesley College senior thesis was titled “There Is Only the Fight … : An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” The thesis received attention when it was released after the Bill Clinton presidency. According to reports, in early 1993, the White House requested that Wellesley keep the thesis confidential and not release any copies.

Clinton was said to have met with Alinsky several times in 1968, when she was writing her thesis. In her most recent memoir, Clinton wrote that she rejected a job offer from Alinsky to instead attend law school.

The Clinton-Alinsky relationship received more media attention last September, when the Washington Free Beacon uncovered direct correspondence between Clinton and Alinsky from the archives of Alinsky’s IAF.

The correspondence dates to the summer of 1971, when the 23-year-old Clinton was living in Berkeley, California, and interning at the law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.

In a July 8, 1971, letter to Alinsky marked “personal,” Clinton wrote: “Dear Saul, When is that new book [Rules for Radicals] coming out — or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?

“I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people,” she wrote, referring to a 1948 Alinsky treatise on community organizing.

Clinton went on to tell Alinsky that she had “survived law school, slightly bruised, with my belief in and zest for organizing intact.”

“The more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them, the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead — if the commitment to a free and open society is ever going to mean more than eloquence and frustration,” wrote Clinton.

The Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman notes the letter documents Clinton and Alinsky had kept in touch since she entered Yale and that Alinsky even offered Clinton advice on campus activism.

“If I never thanked you for the encouraging words of last spring in the midst of the Yale-Cambodia madness, I do so now,” wrote Clinton.

Clinton wrote that she missed their regular conversations and asked if Alinsky would be able to meet her the next time he was in California.

“I am living in Berkeley and working in Oakland for the summer and would love to see you,” Clinton wrote. “Let me know if there is any chance of our getting together.”

The Free Beacon reported that Clinton’s letter “reached Alinsky’s office while he was on an extended trip to Southeast Asia, where he was helping train community organizers in the Philippines.”

Alinsky’s secretary, Georgia Harper, sent Clinton the following response, which noted the radical’s fondness of her.

“Since I know [Alinsky’s] feelings about you I took the liberty of opening your letter because I didn’t want something urgent to wait for two weeks,” Harper wrote to Clinton in a July 13, 1971 letter. “And I’m glad I did.”

Harper informed Clinton: “Mr. Alinsky will be in San Francisco, staying at the Hilton Inn at the airport on Monday and Tuesday, July 26 and 27. I know he would like to have you call him so that if there is a chance in his schedule maybe you can get together.”

It was not clear whether Alinsky and Clinton met at that time.

With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.

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Feds slam prof’s ‘kill severely disabled babies’ remarks

Peter Singer

The National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency, has slammed Princeton University ethics professor Peter Singer for arguing in a radio interview that it is “reasonable” for government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to severely disabled babies.

Singer contended the health-care system under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act should be more overt about rationing and that the country should acknowledge the necessity of “intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.”

Throughout the interview, Singer repeatedly referred to a disabled infant as “it.”

Singer was speaking on the “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” broadcast April 19 on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM.

In a lengthy rebuttal to Singer, the National Council on Disability, or NCD, distributed a statement contesting Singer on the facts and contending his views could foster discrimination against the disabled.

Is the U.S. on a “slippery slope” toward voluntary euthanasia? “Terri’s Story: The Court-Ordered Death of an American Woman” will take you inside the gripping saga.

“Professor, do your homework,” the NCD said.

“Discrimination because of disability is not likely to be reduced by Singer’s positions, or the logical policy positions that would emerge from them,” stated the NCD. “Discrimination is not solely a philosophical concept it remains a regular occurrence for individuals with disabilities.”

Singer essentially argues the right to life is based on a being’s capacity for intelligence and to hold life preferences, which in turn is directly related to a capacity to feel and comprehend pain and pleasure.

The NCD “categorically reject[ed] any calculus that assumes to ascribe a measurable, immutable quality of life to another human being – disabled or not.”

“There are simply too many variables to consider in making ‘quality of life’ assumptions.”

The agency said one of “the hallmarks of societal attitudes toward disabilities has been a tendency of people without disabilities, including media savvy philosophers, to overestimate the negative aspects and underestimate the positive features of the lives of those who have disabilities.”

“In contrast to Singer’s ivory tower speculations, the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that ‘society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.”

The NCD notes that increasingly, negative predictions of quality of life “have little to do with the actual life experiences of people with disabilities.”

“People with disabilities commonly report more satisfaction with their lives than others might expect,” stated the agency. “Though it might surprise Singer and those with limited imaginations, even people with disabilities who encounter obstacles, prejudice, and discrimination, derive satisfaction and pleasure from their lives.”

Kill disabled infants under Obamacare

In the interview, Klein asked whether Singer believes health-care rationing under Obamacare will become more prevalent.

Singer replied that rationing is already happening, explaining doctors and hospitals routinely make decisions based on costs.

“It’s different in the U.S. system, in a way, because it doesn’t do this overtly; maybe it doesn’t do it as much. And the result is it spends about twice as much on health care as some other countries for very little extra benefit in terms of the outcome.”

Klein quoted from a section of Singer’s 1993 treatise “Practical Ethics,” titled “Taking Life: Humans.”

In the section, Singer argued for the morality of “non-voluntary euthanasia” for human beings not capable of understanding the choice between life and death, including “severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved.”

For Singer, the wrongness of killing a human being is not based on the fact that the individual is alive and human. Instead, Singer argued it is “characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference.”

Asked whether he envisions denying treatment to disabled infants to become more common in the U.S. under the new health-care law, Singer replied: “It does happen. Not necessarily because of costs.”

He continued:

If an infant is born with a massive hemorrhage in the brain that means it will be so severely disabled that if the infant lives it will never even be able to recognize its mother, it won’t be able to interact with any other human being, it will just lie there in the bed and you could feed it but that’s all that will happen, doctors will turn off the respirator that is keeping that infant alive.

I don’t know whether they are influenced by reducing costs. Probably they are just influenced by the fact that this will be a terrible burden for the parents to look after, and there will be no quality of life for the child.

So we are already taking steps that quite knowingly and intentionally are ending the lives of severely disabled infants.

And I think we ought to be more open in recognizing that this happens.

Klein followed up by asking whether the killing of severely disabled infants should be institutionalized to reduce health-care costs.

Asked Klein: “I know that it happens and it happens certainly if the family gives consent. But do you think in the future in order to ensure a more fair rationing of health-care and health-care costs, that it should actually be instituted more? The killing of severely disabled babies?”

Singer replied that such a plan would be “quite reasonable” if it saved money that can be used for better purposes. He contended that most people would say they don’t want their premiums to be higher “so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”

Singer’s full response:

I think if you had a health-care system in which governments were trying to say, “Look, there are some things that don’t provide enough benefits given the costs of those treatments. And if we didn’t do them we would be able to do a lot more good for other people who have better prospects,” then yes.

I think it would be reasonable for governments to say, “This treatment is not going to be provided on the national health service if it’s a country with a national health service. Or in the United States on Medicare or Medicaid.”

And I think it will be reasonable for insurance companies also to say, “You know, we won’t insure you for this or we won’t insure you for this unless you are prepared to pay an extra premium, or perhaps they have a fund with lower premiums for people who don’t want to insure against that.”

Because I think most people, when they think about that, would say that’s quite reasonable. You know, I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.

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Murder-case juror closer to being behind bars

A juror in a Grand Junction, Colorado, murder case more than a decade ago is one step closer to being behind bars herself after a judge ruled her in contempt of court.

According to the Grand Junction Sentinel, Marilyn Charlesworth “willfully” gave the wrong answer to a juror questionnaire she filled out before the 2004 murder trial of Michael Blagg, who was convicted.

The conviction now has been overturned, and a retrial has yet to be set. The 52-year-old Blagg remains behind bars for the 2001 death of his wife, Jennifer. The couple’s young daughter, Abby Blagg, remains missing and is presumed dead.

The Sentinel report said Judge Jane Tidball found that Charlesworth “beyond a reasonable doubt” must be held in contempt for her answer.

Her sentencing was scheduled for June 26, and she could be given up to six months in jail.

The Colorado paper reported Dan Rubinstein of the district attorney’s office also said Charlesworth should pay the costs of a second trial, including fees and experts.

Daniel Shaffer, Charlesworth’s attorney, argued she didn’t consider herself to be a domestic violence victim when she filled out the questionnaire in February 2004.

Get Judge Andrew Napolitano’s take on deception in American history, in “Lies the Government Told You.”

WND earlier reported the penalty for the juror could surpass $100,000.

KUSA-TV in Denver had reported Charlesworth was on the 12-member jury that returned the guilty verdict after she filled out a jury questionnaire that asked, “Have you, a family member, or close friend ever been involved in domestic violence?”

She said no, the station reported.

But then in 2013, she appeared at a Grand Junction City Council meeting to protest a city councilman-elect who had been accused of hitting his girlfriend.

She said she “was a victim of domestic violence for 10 years,” and her words were noticed.

Blagg’s defense counsel filed a motion, and the guilty verdict was overturned with Judge David Bottger’s conclusion that her “deliberative failure to disclose her domestic violence involvement makes this not a close question at all.”

The office of prosecutor Pete Hautzinger had helped defend Charlesworth earlier from accusations from the public defender about vision troubles and a failure to disclose the use of a prescription drug, none of which rose to the level of being an issue for the judge.

But KUSA reported the prosecutor has a new perspective.

See the report:

“I think it’s reasonable to ask the court to consider imposing some significant financial penalty on her,” he said.

The prosecutor’s concern, however, also was raised because of the tactics of the Colorado Public Defender’s Office, which has investigated Charlesworth for 10 years on and off.

“The idea that it’s OK to investigate jurors’ pasts months, if not years, after they did their juror service is troubling,” he told KUSA.

The station reported Charlesworth declined to answer questions about domestic violence but said court records show she filed for restraining orders against former husbands twice in the 1990s.

A friend told the broadcast outlet that the understanding Charlesworth has of domestic violence now is far from what she understood then.

“It’s very subjective, how you feel when you go through it, how you would answer that question,” said the friend, Anne Landman.

The station reported Amy Pohl of the Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence said victims frequently don’t understand clearly what domestic violence is, “because they weren’t being physically abused.”

And Pohl argued the wording on the questionnaire was inadequate, because there was no definition, leaving “a lot of gray area.”

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Houston pastors ratchet up fight over ‘transgender rights’

A fight over a Houston transgender ordinance that grabbed national headlines when the lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, subpoenaed the sermons of area pastors, is being escalated to the state Court of Appeals.

The pastors, in announcing they have filed an appeal on Thursday, released a statement explaining, “After ten months, thousands of man hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs for the coalition, Judge Robert Schaffer caved in to political pressure by the LGBT political force who endorsed him and ruled that we were a few hundred signatures short.

“His subjective determination that a group of circulators’ signatures were not legible – a standard that does not exist in Texas election law and violates the federal Voting Rights Act – invalidated over 5,000 signatures, nearly 10 times the number needed to erase even his declared shortfall. We are confident that his decision will be overturned on that basis alone at the state Court of Appeals,” the statement said.

When the city council adopted the ordinance, the coalition immediately collected signatures to put the decision before the voters, but the city fought back and disqualified signatures, so the pastors’ group filed the legal challenge.

“The resolve of our pastors and leaders has not wavered and we intend to right a voting rights wrong. We will take this to the Texas Supreme Court if needed to assure that the rule of law is restored in Houston, voters have our day at the ballot and to protect basic, God-given rights of the citizens in the fourth largest city in America,” the pastors said.

The case over the city’s transgender ordinance, adopted at the behest of Parker, who once said the fight was all about her, drew national attention last year when WND broke the story Parker issued subpoenas to five pastors for copies of their sermons and other communications. The pastors later called for an investigation of city hall’s actions.

A nationwide outpouring of criticism prompted officials to drop the subpoenas.

And Rush Limbaugh at the time called the subpoenas “one of the most vile, filthy, blatant violations of the Constitution that I have seen.”

Just what is going on America? The details all are in “A Queer Thing Happened to America,” which explains how an America of 40 years ago, when most knew little about homosexuality, arrived at today, where one can’t watch a sitcom without being indoctrinated with the “gay” lifestyle.

After turning in more than 50,000 signatures, including more than 30,000 that were pre-verified as belonging to Houstonians, the pastors, working with the Houston Area Pastor Council were told by the city secretary that she had stopped counting because more than enough valid signatures had been verified.

Then the city attorney, at the direction of the mayor, stepped in and simply ordered thousands of additional signatures invalidated.

The pastors, working as the No UNequal Rights Coalition, said in their statement, “We knew on July 3, 2014, that the massive coalition of pastors, churches, community leaders and citizens who had worked tirelessly over 30 days to gather over 54,000 signatures had submitted more than enough valid signatures to Houston City Secretary Anna Russell. On August 4, 2014, it was evident that Mayor Anise Parker had conspired with her City Attorney David Feldman to deprive the voters of the right to decide at the ballot whether to protect our women from having biological males in their restrooms, showers and locker rooms. She broke the law and declared the petitions invalid.

“We could not allow that kind of tyranny and lawlessness to occur in Houston so we filed a legal challenge against the mayor and city of Houston. During the succeeding months of depositions, hearings, briefs and trial, coalition attorney Andy Taylor firmly established that under established Texas law and precedent there were indeed not only an adequate number but a surplus of valid signatures submitted.”

The judge had said the pastors collected 16,684 signatures, of the needed 17,269, but at least 5,000 were disqualified over “legibility” issues, which the pastors said were not defined in the law.

During preparation for the court fight, longtime city Secretary Anna Russell testified the city charter “provides that the city secretary determine the number of qualified voters who sign the petition.”

In her testimony, she was asked: “And based on that understanding, you did that; and the result of your work was that 17,846 signatures had been validated. And that was more than the minimum number necessary, correct?”

“That’s correct,” she replied.

Then the city attorney, Feldman, then stepped in and disqualified most of the signatures that had been collected, and the city has been fighting efforts to overturn the ordinance ever since.

Houston officials have declined to respond to WND requests for comment.

A jury at trial found no fraud by the pastors coalition.

F.N. Williams, senior pastor at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, earlier said the city’s attorneys “went to extraordinary lengths to discredit, demean, denigrate and disqualify as many petitions and signatures as possible.”

Pastor Steve Riggle, a leader of the coalition, said the pastors all along knew the fight over the ordinance might be long and hard.

“We are … greatly confident that justice will be served and the people will have our day at the ballot on this very important matter,” he said.

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