Pat Buchanan Quotes
Men who proclaimed it a great advance for human freedom, when 4,000 unborn children are daily shredded in the abortuaries of the United States, are to be laughed at when they profess moral horror over the shredding of documents.
Reacting to the public and media outrage at Oliver North shredding documents in the Iran-contra scandal:
Pat Buchanan, White House Speech Writer (Republican), Candidate for Republican Preidential Nominee, Political Columnist, Quoted in Conservative Digest, February, 1988
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Johnson was an incompetent scientist who had developed a method for “squaring a circle” which was in reality totally invalid. It involved the mathematical number Pi which is an infinite decimal but Johnson wanted it to be a fixed number. He persuaded members of the legislature that things would be better in the state if the value of Pi would be fixed by law. So a bill was introduced to make Pi equal to 3.2. Professor C. A. Waldo was horrified that the state would even attempt to legislate what is a mathematical phenomenon. However, Pi was long known to be an infinite decimal with no finite fixed number that can ever be accurate. There were religious and other legislative objections to the notion of an infinite number and one that was not defined as the common man could use it. Hence the proposed legislation. Even if there were a fixed decimal legislated for Pi, 3.2 was definitely in error. For hundreds of years mathematicians the world over had calculated PI to a number of decimal places and the 3.{596032} (commonly in use) was much closer. Professor Waldo persuaded the legislature to abandon their attempt to legislate science and mathematics, and this advice was generally heeded in the United States until some of the states with few scientists and few highly educated citizens began to ban the teaching of evolution. Science and mathematics do not lend themselves to politics and legislation, and still governments often try to legislate science and technology but rarely do it well and without error. The one exception is the setting of standards for units of weights and measurement where consensus is what is important and there is no scientifically right solution. For example, the standard length of a yard can be set at any distance as long as all agree to use that distance. Here government helps a great deal to forge and document the standard.
One of the extreme religious fundamentalists in the Congress, Brownback was referring to Federally funded medical research which uses embryonic stem cells. The cells are generated from in vitro fertilization procedures and potentially if implanted in the womb of a woman could produce a child. Several cells are produced by the fertilization process but typically only one or two is needed. So some religious extremists believe that just because the cell has the potential for human life, it is human life. This is the same logic which opposes birth control on the grounds that sperm and egg cells are incipient life forms. It was as late as 1973 that bans on birth control devices were declared unconstitutional be the Supreme Court.
Barnabus, like most Christians at the time, was also Jewish and was reflecting the Jewish view on abortion and infanticide in that part of the world. However, the Christians tended to be more forgiving than traditional Judaism was and made much greater provision for repentance and forgiveness. See {620149} .
Churches are political organizations too and are subject to the forces of their membership. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 they passed resolutions to assure the right of a woman to have an abortion to protect her health. The position on abortion changed steadily thereafter to even pass Constitutional amendments to ban abortions except to save the life of the mother. See {614356},54122, {614358}, {614359}, {614360}, {614361} for the dynamic history of the change.
This was the traditional Jewish view of abortion and infanticide. It is the view of the Orthodox Jews of today, but the larger body of Reform Jews, like many Protestant sects, do not equate abortion to murder or infanticide.
- Born: November 2, 1938
- Nationality: American
- Profession: Journalist
Patrick Joseph Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was an assistant and special consultant to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election.
