anonemouse

That's great!

Oooo-kay. Interesting.

Yes, but we aren't giving welfare to only drug addicts, are we? How?

Yes, but if you know without a doubt that the person is going out to buy more drugs, you are knowingly funding drug traffic. With this program, drug addicts are specifically targeted. It would be different if, say, you were offering $300 to anyone willing to be sterilized. If you know that the only reason someone is doing something is to get money to buy more drugs, you are taking advantage of that.

True, but only the woman would produce drug-addicted children, and that's the aim of the program, correct? Paying him to be sterilized would be a waste of money, since he can't produce drug-addicted children in the first place. Even if the group is privately funded, I doubt the people overseeing it would waste money. If the woman is also addicted, it's a safe assumption to make that she's sleeping with other men, also. I doubt the guy wouldn't tell her about the program, since her $300 would probably help fund his addiction, also.

Has anyone thought of the fact that while drug-addicted children would not be born because of the program, paying drug-addicted women to be sterilized would be funding illegal drug activity and all that goes with it? It'd be horrible to think that a woman went to her drug dealer to buy drugs with the $300 she was paid and someone innocent got killed if something went wrong.

Why not? The side effects caused would be offset by the fact that there wouldn't be drug-addicted children being born, right? Why are those side effects not acceptable, but the women never being able to have children again is acceptable? Well, it's women that you want to stop from reproducing, right? Since men can't give birth to addicted kids, I fail to see why they would be included anyway. You can solve the problem of finding a reliable means of birth control for men by not allowing them to take part.

Yeah, I wouldn't consider using a form of birth control like the pill, which relies too much on the woman being responsible enough to take it. An implantable long-term birth control device seems much more appropriate. I'm sorry, I didn't see your response. There are implantable long-term birth control devices for women and chemical sterilization for men. Depo Provera, probably.

Even permanent sterilization isn't 100%, in some cases. I've heard of men having children after vasectomy and women having children after tubal ligation.

Then we should be considering birth control instead of sterilization. Chemical castration in men, long-term birth control in women. I still think that would solve everyone's problems. An extremely low chance of babies being born to addicts, and those addicts still having the ability to reproduce once they are clean.

Will someone answer my question about temporary sterilization? Why does the sterilization have to be permanent, regardless of whether it's free or not?

I think I got the "clutter gene" from both sides of my family. My parents are almost to the point of being hoarders. At their house, they literally have things piled feet-high in some areas. My dad's been known to pick up broken VCRs and DVD players from the dump and bring them home. Heck, we've still got the broken VCR that we stopped using 10 years ago. You know those zippable plastic bags that sheets and blankets come in? They won't throw them out because "you never know when something might be useful." I'm not nearly as bad as my parents, but I am a slob. I just don't clean or throw stuff out, so I am constantly surrounded by trash. Add to that, I'm completely disorganized. I don't have a filing system for anything, it just gets thrown on the nearest pile. Heck, I still haven't unpacked from when I moved two years ago.

Hey, this is Rants and Raves, so anything goes (with a few exceptions). I think the articles a bunch of BS, but she is allowed to post it. Of course, that also means people are allowed to say what they think of it, too.

And neither do we. All Christians are not hypocrites. But it seems to me that the louder someone cries "sin!," the more likely they are to be a hypocrite. That's the entire reason there is so much publicity when a conservative Christian leader, because they've set themselves up for the scrutiny and late-night TV jokes. You know how it is, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."

No, I can't. I think we consider it to be a human right, not one that has to be spelled out in the Bill of Rights. Just like the right to be clothed and fed is not spelled out anywhere in a legal document.

See, that bothers me. Conservatives are always claiming that liberals "stand for nothing", when we just stand for other things. I personally stand for being a good, moral, non-hypocritical person. If that's "nothing," then I'd hate to see your "something". I stand for peace, whenever possible. I stand for loving my fellow man and recognizing that he is worthy of all the rights that I have. I stand for the poor being helped. I stand for all people having access to equal health care and equal education. I stand for supporting our veterans as much as we can. I stand for protecting the environment. Don't you dare tell me I stand for nothing.

They're not, but they (at least a lot of the more conservative ones, anyway) are generally among the first to loudly proclaim how the actions of others are sinful. So I think it is understandable how people get a kick out of so many of them are being exposed as hypocrites of the highest order.

They should, since I have several obesity-related conditions. I have PCOS, insulin resistance, high cholesterol, asthma, etc.

Yes, you have. I was never talking about them being competent parents. I was talking about them being incompetent to sign legal papers. That's what I meant by "but parenting ability has nothing to do with their competence to sign and understand the legal ramifications of signing a medical release form." I was talking about this supposedly hypothetical situation and this supposedly hypothetical situation only, not implying anything about any other situation, including the parental ability of the people in question. I never mentioned their parental ability because I was never talking about their parental ability. But I'll still answer your questions. 1) Yes (well, while they are high or looking for a fix to get high) 2) No 4) No IMHO, I think drug addicts are not competent parents, at least not while they are addicted. I personally think that they should all be forced to give up custody of their children while they are addicted. And I think there is clearly a "right to reproduce" in this country, or at least a "right to control our own reproduction". Otherwise, why all the fuss about China forcing women to have abortions to enforce their "1 child per family rule"?

I would say it is a matter of hypocrisy. The reason the Conservative Christian Right gets so much publicity when one of their own does wrong is that they have generally been very loud about condemning people who they consider to have "sinned." Liberals who have done wrong don't really get as much mention, because they haven't been known as much to be criticizing what they have actually been doing themselves. Take that minister that was recently outed, for example. It wouldn't have made that much news if a liberal Unitarian-Universalist minister was outed, because they generally don't condemn homosexuality. This guy did, condemning homosexuality and homosexuals very loudly. What did we find? The guy was secretly gay and hiring male prostitutes. So it isn't that they are being attacked and ridicules because they are Christian, it's because whenever something happens, it generally exposes the massive hypocrisy.

There are several surgeons in the Nashville area. I was originally going to be banded by Dr. Olsen from Centennial Center for the Treatment of Obesity. I had to switch to a surgeon in Memphis, though, because he wasn't covered by my insurance.

I just wanted to point out that there is a Patients' Bill of Rights. I would imagine that refusing to refer a patient to a physician because you don't agree with the treatment that they would like to receive would violate a person's right to have their choice of providers. I would think that a doctor refusing to perform either of the following would violate their patients' rights: refusing to give referrals to their choice of physician refusing to tell patients about possible treatment options

Let me ask about this scenario: A person that looks very poor or homeless goes to a clinic and is diagnosed with a certain condition. Is their physician obligated to present all the available treatments to that person, or just the ones that the physician thinks that person can afford or that the physician agrees with? Would the physician's failure to inform the patient about all the available treatments violate that patient's rights? Does the physican have the right to not tell the patient about treatments that have promising results but that he doesn't think are morally correct? (For example, if the patient needs a heart transplant, would it be right for a Jewish physician to not inform them of the possibility of a transplant from a pig?)

This is what I said in post #2. Does it conflict with what I said in post #22? Not necessarily. To me, actively keeping a patient from receiving certain medical care includes refusing to perform a certain duty if there is no other option available to the patient. To me, that includes refusing to perform an abortion and refusing to refer a patient to another physician who would be willing to perform it. In my experience, most ob/gyns require a referral before they will see you. If other physicians require a referral, and the physician refusing treatment alse refuses to give that referral, they are violating both ethical rules and, IMO, the rights of the patient. I guess it is a matter of what I consider to be a responsible, moral human being. I am trying to state what I personally believe, so I'm sorry if you think it is contradictory. Let me see if I can simplify it. If conditions were ideal, and there is a doctor on every corner, and those doctors took patients without referrals, I have no problem with a certain doctor refusing to treat a patient, because there are acceptable alternative options. To me, that violates no one's rights. If conditions were different, say he was the only doctor within several hundred miles that was accepting patients, or the other doctors refuse to see patients without a referral from their previous doctor, etc., and the doctor refused to give that referral, then yes, I think that violates the patients rights to medical care of their choice. At that point, there are no acceptable alternative options. By acceptable alternative, I mean acceptable to the patient. To a patient that wants an abortion, there is no acceptable alternative. The options are either pregnancy or abortion.

My point is that the conversation is about Iraq and the US government's actions there. The 9/11 hijackers have nothing to do with that conversation. What I meant by saying "it's what Bush did" is that Bush used 9/11 to stir up patriotic feelings and make us want to go after people. He used our need for revenge against the people who attacked us to get approval to go into Iraq, when the 9/11 hijackers and bin Laden had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq or Saddam Hussein.