Editor’s note: Below is a guest op/ed submitted by Jonathan Narcisse, the Iowa Party candidate for Iowa Governor. Â The views reflected in this op/ed are not necessarily those of Caffeinated Thoughts, its sponsors or its contributors.
By Jonathan Narcisse
In a recent article posted on this site Dr. Lee Hieb hinted that I might be part of the Borg or Branstad Machine and that I was, at the very least, anti-her.
Neither is true.
I will not use this space to defend my years of uncompromised activism. I was a member of the Des Moines School Board and never sold out. I was a weekly fixture on the Steve Deace Show and wrote the foreword for his first book. I have been on the Jan Mickelson Show regularly for more than a decade and I was a gubernatorial candidate in 2010. My positions are a matter of public record and pre-date Dr. Hiebâs candidacy.
As for being anti-Hieb, that’s absurd. I have met her and like her.
I will be voting Jonathan Narcisse November 4th for two reasons – one, we have real and relevant solutions to Iowa’s challenges the other campaigns lack and, with 2% of the vote for governor, we create a powerful accountability tool focused on protecting Iowans and our tax dollars.
No, I am not anti-Lee Hieb. I am proudly, fiercely and unapologetically pro-life.
This is not a partisan or even political issue to me. It is deeply personal concern. Here is a video affirming  my position on life:
What I have said regarding Dr. Hieb is that she is not pro-life as many have been led to believe but a very traditional pro-choice candidate based on her “Personal Views” abortion comments on her campaign website.
Here is what Dr. Hieb stated in her own words:
….As a believer in limited government, I would like to see government out of this issue. That is not to morally condone the act of abortion. But every time we give government power over us it behaves badly. Government is not âamoralâ, it is âimmoralâ, because the nature of government is force against our fellow man. The truth of the world is there are very important issues that cannot be legislated…
….I do not personally believe in elective abortion medically nor ethically. Although not made generally known, the risk of breast cancer is significantly raised after elective abortion (due to the lack of normal maturation of the breast buds in pregnancy), and depression is common. And it is crazy that Iâas a physicianâcan be prosecuted for âbatteryâ for performing a fracture repair on a child without parental consent, but a minor can have an abortion without any parental notification. (In Iowa, a minor can go through Planned Parenthood and get a judicial wavier for this.) I am appalled at the thought of aborting viable infants, and have never been given a good medical reason for third trimester abortion. Partial-birth-abortion is really infanticide.
But, I do not think criminalizing the act of a desperate woman makes sense. I do not want government interposed into the doctor patient relationship, which is really a three-way relationship between a woman, her doctor and God. We have never made anything go away through legislation. We tried to outlaw alcohol — we got Speakeasies and the Mob. We outlawed drugs — we got the Calle Cartel and MS-13 shooting each other in our streets. We outlaw abortion and once again women will resort to back-alley abortion clinics, which kill not only the unborn but the mother. Humans are fallible, and as a physician, I donât want women to resort to back-alley abortion clinicsâthe results of which I learned about from my mother who witnessed the horrors of these during her long career as an OB-GYN nurse…
Bottom line, Dr. Hieb does not believe government should protect the life of the unborn child in the womb but instead leave the decision to kill the baby to the mother and her physician. Dr. Hieb even goes so far as to invoke the lessons learned from her mother in defense of her classic pro-choice arguments.
Democrats Tom Harkin, Chet Culver and especially Mike Blouin all started their political careers fiercely against abortion. Eventually, however, they all adopted both the Dr. Lee Hieb position and, nearly verbatim, used her rhetoric to justify their flip flops in support of legal abortion.
Mike Blouin as a Congressman actually proposed a Constitutional Amendment to ban abortion before doing a 180 degree turn as a gubernatorial candidate. Like Lee Hieb he has tried to be on all sides of the issue yet this really isnât possible.
- You believe it isnât a life and therefore abortion isnât murder as does former gubernatorial candidate Ed Fallon.
- You believe it is a life in the womb but itâs ok for the mother and Dr. to terminate the pregnancy and end the life as did former gubernatorial candidate Mike Blouin or current gubernatorial candidate Dr. Lee Hieb, who learned from her mom legal abortions are better than back alley abortions.
- You believe life begins at conception and the child in the womb deserves the same protection as a child outside the womb.
While Dr. Hieb, a Libertarian, bases her position on government first, I, as a believer in Jesus Christ, first base my position on his mandate we protect life, especially our children. Jesus said weâd be better off if we had a millstone tied around our neck and were cast into the sea than to harm a child.
Thatâs why I unapologetically believe life begins at conception and the unborn child must be protected from harm in the womb just as the born child must not be harmed outside of it.
One of the arguments Dr. Hieb has made, including during our one-on-one conversation Saturday at the State Capitol, is that anti-abortion laws are almost impossible to enforce.
For the sake of argument letâs say she is correct. For the sake of argument.
As a society we can’t always enforce laws against theft, rape or murder yet we outlaw them regardless. At times these laws are deterrents. At times they just donât work. At other times they give us license to punish the wicked doers, if we catch them, for crimes we couldnât prevent but could make the villains answer for later. Punishing the evil doers is one of the Biblically sanctioned purposes for government.
And while Dr. Hieb, like most Libertarians uses a blanket indictment against government, it was our founding fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution and created the United States of America and our government.
I am a low tax, small government, free market constitutionalist. Read AnIowaWorthFightingFor.com and you will understand better my views on 21st Century Governance. But if there is any reason ever for government to exist it exist to help us defend our innocent children and our families.
Dr. Hieb, like most Libertarians uses anti-government rhetoric to defend her views. In this instance, she uses anti-government rhetoric to not only abdicate our responsibility to protect defenseless babies in the womb but by opposing the outlawing of abortion endorses a practice that has resulted in a national holocaust of the unborn and one that serves as the chief weapon in an ongoing genocide launched by Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood.
Sanger in Pivot of Civilization called Blacks “…human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning… human beings who never should have been born.”
She was also quoted in a Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon as saying âWe do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population⊠“
To this day the slaughter of innocents continues with an unrelenting campaign against unborn Blacks disproportionately targeted by pro-abortionists who aggressively plant abortion clinics in predominantly black communities.
Some so-called pro-lifers looking for an excuse to vote for Dr. Hieb have suggested her position is nuanced because she has promised to sign Personhood legislation should she get elected.
For one, she is not going to get elected so this is an easy promise to make knowing sheâll never have to sign anything. Two, if she were elected, how can her position be trusted when she is so passionately pro-choice, as evidenced by her own words?
I have always been skeptical of politicians who betray their heart felt positions as Dr. Lee Hieb is promising to do. The question must be asked âdoes she mean what she says in her âpersonal views on her websiteâ or does she mean what sheâs said to voters of faith and the pro-life movement?
She canât mean both!!!
As for me, my position is less nuanced.
When I was a late teen I got a girl pregnant and her Dr. Surgeon dad made her get an abortion killing my eldest and only biological child. One of the best young men I know, heâs been a part of my life for more than 20 years, was the product of rape and incest. He now has three amazing kids and a fourth on the way. My two adopted daughterâs birth moms were targeted by the pro-abortion crowd in Chicago and New Orleans. They instead came to Des Moines, gave birth and life to my daughters.
Yesterday I dropped off my eldest daughter at UNI in Cedar Falls where she attends and on Friday mornings I take my youngest daughter to volleyball practice at Roosevelt HS in Des Moines at 4:40 a.m.
Dr. Hiebâs position is that government had no place in trying to stop those who would have enthusiastically killed the latter three and, without my knowledge until too late, murdered my eldest child.
So again, my position is void of nuance – life begins at conception, the unborn child must be protected in the womb just as we protect the born child outside the womb.
The Personhood Trick
In America the courts and law have already recognized the personhood of the unborn. That’s why in some jurisdictions if you kill a pregnant woman you are charged with two murders. So the Personhood movement, which repeats the same mistake as the marriage protection movement is setting up Iowans for a massive disappointment.
On marriage the people spoke and activists judges in several states, including Iowa, and at the federal level, usurped Constitutional Authority and thwarted the will of the people. Instead of being impeached at both the state and federal levels for legislating from the bench in violation of their sworn oaths their assertion they have absolute power was affirmed by a cowardly governor and legislature in Iowa and a Congress and President who checked the wind and determined they would get more votes abdicating their authority than calling the courts to account.
So why will Personhood be different than marriage?
It wonât be!
Anyone who believes simply affirming personhood officially will make judges behave is naive. State and Federal Judges have proven over and over and over again they believe themselves above the rule of law and constitutional accountability.
We live in an age of judicial tyranny and have no reason to believe the same U.S. Supreme Court that ignored the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution and gave us Obamacare; the same U.S. Supreme Court that consistently ignores Article One Section One of the U.S. Constitution (All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives), and the same U.S. Supreme Court that most recently dismissed the 10th Amendment voiding the right of states to make laws regarding marriage being between a man and a woman, will simply uphold Personhood.
There’s not a shred of evidence to support that assumption; it is reckless and irresponsible to believe our federal jurists will not continue to behave as tyrants answerable to no authority but their own will and conscious.
This is why I support a 28TH AMENDEMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION protecting the life of the unborn. Meanwhile, Dr. Hieb, in her own words, doesn’t even want the government involved instead leaving the choice to kill the unborn to the mother and her physician.
One Final Note
The assertion that Governor Branstad is pro-life when he has repeatedly signed appropriations bills funding abortions is beyond defensible. This isnât even debatable. The official record found at the Statehouse confirms this.
Branstad is not pro-life and that lie needs to end. More important, his public pronouncements that he is pro-life makes ongoing support of state paid for murder of babies that much more repugnant.
As egregious is that so-called pro-life groups, sold out completely to the Republican establishment, continue to promote this lie.
These groups constantly blame the âother sideâ for preventing Branstad from protecting life yet the other side has not prevented him from getting his big commercial property tax cut passed or finding the money to fund a Middle Eastern nationâs construction of a fertilizer plant in Lee County.
James Baldwin once wrote: The author of a crime is what he is – he knows it, can make no more demands, nor is anything more demanded of him. But he who collaborates is doomed, bound forever in that unimaginable and yet very common condition which we weakly suggest as Hell. In that condition, and every American walking should know it, one can never again summon breath to cry let my people go!
Governor Branstad, Dr. Lee Hieb, others have the right to be pro-choice. They even have the right to pander to the pro-life vote in the face of incontrovertible proof their rhetoric is double speak.
In the end they are not the villains.
Those that allow them to get away with it are.
This is not a partisan or political issue. This is as raw and real as it gets â either we protect our unborn babies or we donât. And the willingness to pretend there is a place in the middle is not only wrong but betrayal at the most fundamental level.
Jonathan Narcisse, newspaper publisher and former Des Moines Public School Board Member, is the Iowa Party candidate for Governor.