Did you hear the one about the nosy pediatrician in Ocala, Fla.?
A young mother took her infant daughter in for a checkup. While she was there, the white-coated busybody asked whether there were guns in her home. She quite properly declined to tell him, at which point the prying doc completed the exam and told her she had one month to find a new physician for her baby.
She was no longer welcome because supposedly she had violated the trust he sought to develop with his patients. The pediatrician told the Ocala newspaper he needed to know whether the home had guns so he could provide safety tips.
Bullfeathers.
Here is an approach he might have tried if offering safety advice were his only interest: “Ma’am, it’s none of my business whether you and your husband exercise your Second Amendment rights by having a gun in your home to protect yourselves and your infant from violent intruders. But in case you do, here is a list of safety tips to ensure that your child doesn’t accidentally get hold of any guns you may have.”
In reply, the mother might have said: “Why thank you, doctor. I appreciate your concern for our baby’s welfare, as well as your respect for our right to possess or not possess firearms, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and our right not to divulge that information to third parties.”
The doctor would have kept a patient and gotten his point across about gun safety. The mother would not have had to compromise her family’s privacy nor shop around to make sure her baby girl got the care she needed.
But somebody couldn’t mind his manners or his business, so everybody lost.
Dandy.
Judge strikes out
To read the beginning of an article out of California, you’d think a hideous injustice had been perpetrated: “A homeless man is free after spending 13 years behind bars for trying to steal food from a Los Angeles church kitchen,” The Associated Press reported.
Thirteen years for trying to fill his belly? That’s harsh!
Or at least it would be if it were true.
We have only Gregory Taylor’s say-so that a sandwich was his aim when he was caught trying to break into the church. The original prosecutor is of the opinion that Taylor, a drug addict, was on a quest for valuables – hardly a stretch given that the church in question had often willingly fed Taylor prior to the break-in.
And that alarmist bit about getting a long prison sentence “for trying to steal food”? Baloney. (Or bologna, as it were.)
Taylor had two previous robbery convictions, which, in combination with his conviction for the church burglary, put him on the wrong side of California’s three-strikes law and consigned him to a 13-year vacation in the big house.
That’s the idea behind three-strikes laws: You get a couple of passes before they start to have some bite. They do not condemn you to prison for years on end for a single instance of petty larceny but rather for multiple offenses deemed serious enough, in their totality, to merit keeping you off the streets for a long time.
Of course, that sentence endures only until some judge, egged on by self-styled do-gooder law students, declares it “outside the spirit of the three-strikes law,” as a judge recently ruled in turning Taylor loose on the public.
Which proves some judges deserve only one strike.
To reach Steve Barrett, call 423-757-6329 or e-mail sbarrett@timesfreepress.com.