Life, Liberty, and the Leeches of Liberalism

The malignant ideology we call modern liberalism never lacks for examples of its propensity to destroy. Modern liberalism is, in many ways, anathema to Life itself.
 
In days before modern medicine possessed verifiable knowledge, doctors employed leeches to perform the act of “blood-letting,” whereby the blood sucking critters supposedly helped cure illness caused by too much blood in relation to other properties in the body. Healthy blood had to be removed for the good of the patient – so doctors thought. This belief sounds rather familiar. So…liberal. Blood-letting is rather akin to the Vietnam War-era mantra that a village had to be destroyed in order to save it – an analogy worthy of modern liberalism and so easy to understand that a CNN reporter could grasp it.
 
The most important possession each individual has is Life. Life must be valued over every other facet of our physical selves in a civilized society. With a foundation of respect for Life, valued concepts such as morality, the rule of law, and property ownership are possible. How could morality, for example, be explained if Life held little or no meaning?
 
Respecting Life means respecting innocent life. At some point, to tolerate certain behaviors – namely behaviors which by their very nature diminish Life – is to devalue what we should cherish. This explains how a consistent application of the death penalty serves as a protector of innocent life – a deterrent to rational people against taking innocent life.
 
While many people hear the word “Life” and think about stopping abortions, there are numerous ways in which modern liberalism denigrates Life. We now know, for example, that the Obama administration’s “PROMISE” agreement with Broward County (and later replicated in over 50 school districts around the country) was more concerned about not “labeling” problem students, and thus allowing school districts to lower their arrest rates, than protecting innocent lives in schools and neighborhoods. This policy kept the Marjory Stoneman Douglas gunman from being disqualified from purchasing a gun by keeping him from having a criminal record. We know what he did with that gun.
 
Modern liberalism has consequences.
 
An older case with recent results drives home the relationship between Life and modern liberalism.
 
New York City; 1984; Palm Sunday. In a dispute with an apartment owner who also dealt drugs, Christopher Thomas murdered the man’s pregnant wife, another woman, and eight children.
 
Here the story must pause. The description in the paragraph above is too clinical; too sterile. Thomas held a gun to the head or neck of each child, aged 4-14, and pulled the trigger, taking lives in a most brutal fashion. The judge in the case referred to Thomas as “the most brutal killer” he had ever met and sentenced Thomas to 83-250 years. He declared that the vicious creature should serve “every single day, hour, and minute” in prison, according to the 1985 New York Times story about the case.
 
What happened next was a “perfect storm” of modern liberalism. Some of the jurors interviewed explained their decision to convict the mass killer of the crime of manslaughter rather than murder because the crime was fueled by the cocaine in Thomas’ system, or as a member of the jury stated, he suffered from “extreme emotional disturbance because of a cocaine habit.” Under New York’s laws at the time, the maximum amount of time that could be served for manslaughter was 50 years. With good behavior in prison, Thomas only needed to serve two-thirds of his sentence.
 
What is Life worth? A little over three years each, apparently.
 
A recap is in order. Undoubtedly liberal jurors – if not actual liberals, then sufficiently emotion-based, non-thinking human beings – decided that because the criminal used an illicit drug before committing the heinous crime, the taking of human life was not as egregious as it would have been had the criminal “just said no” to drugs.
 
Prior to the shooting, New York politicians thought that devaluing penalties to two-thirds of assigned punishment was a good idea. How does “good behavior” ever figure into the equation for families who lose loved ones to murderous people? How does “good behavior” foster deterrence to the commission of crime? Why should an incarcerated person ever receive the benefits of “good behavior,” and what exactly is this good behavior? Is it staying in a straight line at meal time? Is it making his bed every morning? Is it resisting the urge to break out? Is it complimenting a guard on a new pair of shoes? Does any good behavior atone for murdering ten people, shooting them for no other reason than their existence?
 
At the risk of stating the obvious, although stating the obvious appears to be necessary for the benefit of New York politicians and citizens who voted for those politicians, placing a gun to the head of a child and pulling the trigger is not an act of respecting Life or which should be tolerated in a civilized society. Every day after the trial which saw Christopher Thomas draw a breath was a day of injustice – not just to the families of the victims, but to society at large. A lack of respect for Life is a lack of respect for all members of society.
 
A recent news story revealed that, at the beginning of this year, New York authorities quietly released Thomas back into society.
 
To a liberal, the life of a murderer seems to be more important than that of an average New Yorker.
 
Like leeches sucking blood from its host, liberals deplete the life of the very society they claim to wish to enhance. Modern liberalism drains Life and Liberty. It eats away the foundations of institutions and moral principles needed for freedom to thrive. It promises a better world but destroys that world. It replaces stability with chaos, wealth with poverty, good with evil; yet, somehow, we accept this destruction as normal. Liberalism is the norm. The quality of life drains away.
 
The blood-letting caused by modern liberalism drains America. The question is: Can the patient survive?