Pimping out a child

Now what in the world kind of American Conservatism do we have here?

Could it be a release from the Tea Party looking for some kinder and gentler press from all sides?

Maybe it's an early draft of The Road to Serfdom scrawled by a toddling Friedrich Hayek after observing a servant doing what they do best.

Nah, as it turns out, this is what your tax-deductible dollars buy at The American Ideas Institute's The American Conservative blog by Rod Dreher: otherwise mommy blog-typical content filched from his unsuspecting 7-year-old daughter Nora, a frequent contributor of such child labor, and pimped out as his own cheap and easy post-filler. Not only your tax-deductible dollars, by the way, mine as well, because who do you think has to pay more now to cover your tax deductibility?

And yet not only does a child's stolen refrigerator art (it's highly unlikely Nora received a proportionate cut of Dreher's pay for this effort as an allowance bonus this month) qualify as a legitimate government tax expenditure these days, it apparently also qualifies as some sort of example of conservative "culture" - in some Downton Abbey conservative-cultury sort of way.

Yep, that's what conservatism has now been reduced and degraded to in some quarters: the government-subsidized pimping out of someone's 7-year-old daughter's labor in order to earn their own daily bread.

William Donohue: "Our moral code is patently incoherent"

From the Catholic League:

Bill Donohue comments on the decision by U.S. District Judge Edward Korman ordering the Food and Drug Administration to make the “morning-after” emergency contraception pill available without a prescription to girls of any age:

A 12-year-old girl in a New York City school cannot be given an aspirin by her teacher, even if she has a fever. The same girl cannot buy a large soda during lunchtime because Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decreed that it is not good for her. But she can be given a pill, unbeknownst to her parents, that could arguably abort her baby.

Neither Judge Korman nor Mayor Bloomberg has said what the aspirin-denying teacher should do if he sees a girl reaching for a large Coke to down her abortion-inducing pill.

This is what we’ve come to in our culturally schizophrenic society. Our moral code is patently incoherent, and the contempt shown for parental rights is astonishing. Hopefully, this imperial decision will be overturned.

On the same kind of incoherence: I've often wondered what will happen when marijuana becomes legal and the political activist pot-heads successfully get pot-smoking legalized in restaurants. My prediction is that cigarette companies will start putting small amounts of marijuana in the product to make them legal in eating establishment, thus setting up a "dope loophole".

People used to say that Marlboro did put some Buddha in the reds, but that was probably an urban legend.