-just me rambling a bit

Me, I am an educated, land owning white man. I am very conservative fiscally (republicans are not conservative FYI) and very Liberal Socially. Like I believe most Americans, if you can cut through the media and politics.

Fiscally, governments job is to referee, it's important business and people play by the rules. We have all seen what happens when they don't or are left to regulate themselves. Money makes people do very strange things. And if you are not careful, a very few really smart but morally suspect people will wind up with all the money and the rest of the people wind up with nothing. And that leads to revolution, and the destruction of society.

Government should pave our streets, put out fires, fight our wars. All those "social services" we need to exist as a country. But those services should be finite, and limited. Every time we have an issue, seems like we create an agency. Keep this up much longer and we will need every American to work for the government just to fill all the jobs in all the agencies.

Socially, government pretty much needs to stay out of our lives. And we as a people need to stop using government to stick our noses into other peoples lives. Create a level playing field, then let people play out their lives as they choose too. The constitution did a very poor job of protecting anyone who was not a white, land owning male (like me). Women, slaves, homosexuals were all but left out. So we fixed it, took a while but we did. It's time we all accepted that some people are different then us, and stop trying to use the government to control the actions of people we don't like. Let God sort it out later, it's not our place to judge.

Protection is another important role, and that means defining who is to be protected and what constitutes harm. We should error on the side of limited harms (small government theme again). Meaning, if someone punches you, that's harm, but if someone marries another man, you cannot claim it's harming your marriage, or corrupting your child because you don't believe it's right. That is a social debate you need to have with each other, government has nothing to do with it.

Who is to be protected? People, all people. Non-discrimination laws are good. A balanced society means one majority group cannot create or control society to benefit their particular subgroup. It's a founding point of this nation, even if it was not enforced until recently.

Finally, we need to determine what a is a person. By this I mean when does a person cross from a part of the mother, where she is the whole decider, to a person with individual rights of protection. Honest people disagree strongly on this. Personally I again error on the side of smaller government, meaning the mother should maintain control of her body for as long as possible. Woman should have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. If she makes an immoral choice, let God deal with her, not the government.

But we do need to draw a line at some point, for practical reasons. Is it birth? Seems to late to me. Medically what is the difference between the day before and the day after a baby is born? Not much. At what point does the baby become a person? When it's viable to live outside the mother? That would give the government the right to force a woman to have an operation (risk her life) to save a babies. Are we OK with that being decided by Congress? And not the individual? I am not comfortable with either choice, but I would choose life, and if the baby can exist outside he Mother, then that baby is entitled to be protected from harm, and thus is a person. That said, doctors should still be allowed to termintate, if in their judgement heatlh of the mother is at risk...and we, as Americans, are just going to have to trust people to make the right choice for themselves.