October 6, 2010
Answers to questions from Orange County Pro-Family Candidate Campaign
OCPFCC_questions
General comment: Leading questions abound and are not easy to answer in the format provided by the OCP-FCC. As always, I am answering in full.
1) I oppose tax increases at the city, county, special district, state and federal levels. We that pay taxes pay too many and too much already.
2) Rights are inherent in man, and not something that can be granted by government. No government at any level has any sort of giant tureen from which it can ladle out “rights”. This question is an indirect question about Prop. 8, and about hate crime laws. I do not support either Prop. 8 or hate crime laws. In the case of hate crime laws, crime is crime and we do not need extra layers of law. In the case of Prop. 8, the goal is to grant homosexuals extra privileges under law, effectively side-stepping the 14th Amendment. It seems to me we created the 13th Amendment exactly to get rid of this sort of problem.
More generally, I support getting the government completely out of the business of legislating marriage.
3) Although I am not a fan of abortion, Fountain Valley already has enough zoning laws. Local and state laws governing medical facilities should be applied to abortion clinics. Abortions is way more than just a choice: it is at least a medical procedure.
4) Obscenity laws have their place — especially when it comes to graffiti — but my direct experience with the Fountain Valley city attorney leads me to believe he is hostile to the whole Bill of Rights. As a result, I would not want to instruct him to even brush his teeth, for I am not sure what the results might be.
Law enforcement should enforce the laws of the city, or the laws of the city should be repealed. In practice, and by state law, in Fountain Valley the PD has no particular requirement to enforce any law or statute. The only requirements for the Fountain Valley PD are to 1) process CCW applications, and 2) respond to calls alleging domestic violence. By state law the City Council can set policy, but cannot force the local PD to enforce any particular law or statute.
5) The internet has let the porn genie out of the bottle, and it will be difficult to change the situation. Sale of pornography on private property, as a business, is already regulated some. If the question asks about sale of porn at a private residence, say as part of a yard sale, I cannot agree to regulating occasional sales of legal merchandise at yard sales.
Vending machines selling porn should not be readily accessible to minors. Any such law will likely be impossible to regulate, and thus void, due to the sale of porn through the internet. Does a sale of photo-realistic synthetic porn to a minor with a modern cell phone have any legal control? Can it?
6) Yes, I support such a law, but not for the purpose you might expect. The 2nd Amendment protects a fundamental right to keep and bear arms, yet the California has a 1000′ rule, prohibiting the exercise of fundamental rights. If we are to eliminate parts of the Bill of Rights due to school proximity, perhaps we can eliminate more of it. For example, perhaps nobody can speak or pray within 1000′ of a school. Or perhaps all houses within 1000′ of a school can be used to house police, or police dogs, or police vehicles.
Sales of pornography to minors is already regulated.
We need to get rid of all 1000′ rules.
7) Again yes, but not for the reason you might expect. No city employee should have health care benefits or life insurance coverage paid for by the city.
8) Again yes, and again not for the reason you expect. It is not the duty, obligation or need of the state or local government to provide health care. (Caveat: active enrollment in the California State Military Reserve, which IS NOT the National Guard, should provide some sort of medical care.) The purpose of government is to secure the liberties of the people. Providing health care to minors does not support the purpose of the government.
Public health laws should apply for students, but abortion is not a procedure associated with what is generally been known to be a public health threat.
9) Like it or not, the US is a Christian nation: the men that founded it made this quite clear. Fountain Valley is a subvention of the US, so it is a natural consequence that there might be religious artifacts or monuments in the city. The US Constitution does not guarantee freedom from religion, only freedom of religion. No.
10) Easy. Yes. Marriage is the bond between one man and one woman.
11) This question is a bit vague. What is the context? City employees? Long-term employees of registered businesses? Should the guy installing my water heater be required to get a drug test from me, since I am paying him?
In the general sense, I do not support mandatory drug testing. But being a public servant is not the general case. I do not condone, encourage, or tolerate drug use. As a tax payer, I want my public servants to be working hard all the time, so it is OK for the city to check for use of drugs. (Note that within living memory certain civil service positions required the use of amphetamines so more work would be done.)
12) This is a complex question. For certain observant Muslims, killing Christians, raping boys and female genital mutilation are “religious activities”; for some native Americans, spending time high on peyote is a religious activity; for Rastafarians, spending weeks high on marijuana is a religious activity. As an employer, these are activities I might want to discourage.
Non-debilitating, non-criminal actions of a religious or political nature are generally OK.
13) Badly worded question. There is a place for curfews where there is a clear problem. Yet curfew and truancy laws should not be so strong as to prevent a child from going to the funeral of a parent.
14) No simple answer here. Recall that what is now the United States was settled by a ethnic group whose religious practices defied civil law. Certainly the Jews in Nazi Europe did oppose and defy civil law. Anti-slavery activists in the antebellum south certainly were religious and certainly did violate civil law for the purpose of protecting an ethnic group.
In the United States today we have way, way, way too much law. We should always support those that want to expand freedom by minimizing law and the state.
I oppose activities, be they religious or secular, where the purpose of those activities is to destroy the United States as it was founded. Sharia law, from what I have read, does seek to destroy the United States.
15) I am not a fan of euthanasia. As a public servant, the question of who is paying comes up very quickly. Is the public paying for health care? If so, as a public servant I must keep in mind that death is, by far, the cheapest form of health care. This is not a simple matter to decide. Should 10,000 taxpayers each be required to work an extra day a month for 5 years to keep one person alive for 3 months? My answer is no — productive people should not be required to provide unlimited-cost care for those at the end of life.
There are other dimension to consider. What if the person being kept alive is not a citizen? What if the extra work required to create the wealth to keep one person alive reduces the life expectancy of all the workers? In that case, preventing euthanasia reduces life expectancy.
“Natural death” is hard to define. Just as crude oil is pure, natural and 100% organic, one can argue that murder by beating is a natural death. Nature is brutal and violent.
Overall I am in favor of laws that protect human life and prohibit euthanasia.
16) Physician-assisted suicide is hard to square with either Christian or Muslim beliefs, but is permitted by other religions. The term “justified” implies some form of justice, which generally implies some sort of wrong was committed.
In that narrow sense, where a criminal decides the best form of justice would be suicide, I support that idea.
If the question should have read “permissible” in place of “justified”, I am not completely against physician-assisted suicide in the case of terminal illness. But then one has to consider just what is a terminal illness, since we all end up dead eventually.
As a public servant, the question eventually gets around to money. Is the public paying for the practice? If so, I oppose paying for the practice, so I am against the practice. The public should not pay for medical care.
17) Both life and death begin at conception. The unborn are not just “choice”. The current scheme, where a mother has total discretion, but accidents or violent crime can result in a murder or manslaughter is idiotic. A father should have some say in the abortion procedure. So yes.
Frankperdicaro4fvcc2010 