The Patriot Post® · Clinton Can Run but She Can't Hyde
Who could possibly be more liberal than President Obama? Try the woman applying for his job. After eight years of over-the-top extremism, the DNC is making it quite clear: you ain’t seen nothing yet. If you thought the last two Democratic Platforms alienated moderates, the 2016 edition was essentially an eviction notice for anyone in the party not pledging allegiance to Planned Parenthood and its candidate, Hillary Clinton.
After sinking to new lows by defending Cecile Richards’s group (probably the only group that’s been investigated more than their nominee), the DNC vowed to strip states’ rights on abortion, topple the ban on taxpayer-funded abortion, and crackdown on pro-life counselors. In a twisted irony, Democrats write that they are “committed to creating a society where children are safe and can thrive” — though no one is quite sure how under a platform that makes the womb the most dangerous place on earth. As Susan B. Anthony List’s Marjorie Dannenfelser points out, “There is no further left for the Democratic Party to go” (except maybe full-blown infanticide).
Less than a decade after telling voters that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare (“[and] I mean rare,” she insisted), Clinton is changing her tune. Not only does she want abortion to be a routine medical procedure, she wants Americans to pay for the entire world’s! Under the DNC platform, the language is so outside the mainstream that it may as well have declared abortion good for your health. It is, as the text reads, “core to women’s, men’s, and young people’s health and well-being.” Of course, the most shocking change in this year’s document is the call to overturn the Hyde amendment — something even Obama refuses to do overtly.
Taking her cues from Planned Parenthood, Clinton warned this would be coming when she said, “Let’s repeal laws like the Hyde amendment that make it nearly impossible, make it nearly impossible for low-income women, disproportionately women of color, to exercise their full reproductive rights.” As most pro-lifers know, the Hyde amendment is the one thing standing between taxpayers and the unilateral government funding of abortion-on-demand. If it goes, America will become the greatest shareholder in the abortion business in the world.
Asked if his boss agreed with the change, White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz shook his head no. “Like you said,” he told reporters, “we have a longstanding view on this, and I don’t have any changes to our position to announce today.” Any voter under the illusion that Hillary Clinton would be more moderate than Obama should take note: Even the most pro-abortion president in the history of our country, who has repeatedly violated the spirit of the Hyde Amendment, thinks formally repealing the Hyde amendment is a step too far.
She even made the issue a condition of her vice presidential pick. [Wednesday], Clinton’s aides confirmed that Senator Tim Kaine was told he had to surrender his views on taxpayer-funded abortion. Kaine, who many have wrongly pegged as less progressive on the issue, agreed. Whatever fears abortion activists had about Kaine were more than allayed when the Virginia senator took office in 2013. Since then, he’s earned 100 percent rating from the fanatics at NARAL — hardly the stuff of moderation. Like others, Kaine is trying to soften his extremism by insisting that he personally opposes abortion.
“I’m kind of a traditional Catholic,” he said on “Meet the Press” last month. “I don’t like it personally. I’m opposed to abortion. I deeply believe, and not just as a matter of politics, but even as a matter of morality, that matters about reproduction and intimacy and relationships and contraception are in the personal realm. They’re moral decisions for individuals to make for themselves. And the last thing we need is government intruding into those personal decisions.”
He doesn’t want the government to “intrude” in those decisions, but he sure doesn’t mind intruding on taxpayers to force people to pay for them. If it’s truly a personal decision, then it should be personally funded and government should not be serving as the broker to facilitate abortion.
And conservatives aren’t the only ones who feel that way. In a powerful op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Democrats for Life’s Kristen Day can only marvel at the DNC’s inability to practice the diversity it preaches. As far as she and millions of others are concerned, “The 2016 Democratic platform is a flat-out betrayal of millions of Democrats, undoing policies that have kept us in the party working toward common progressive goals on a host of other issues…”
Noting the connection with other issues, she goes on to say that “removing even a nod toward ‘religious liberty’ from the platform puts Democrats at fundamental odds with the many religious organizations whose mission is nonviolence and protection of the most vulnerable.” Already, she warns, the party’s hard Left turn has left many voters with no choice but to leave the party — and many more, she speculates, will be looking for the exits after this platform. “The percentage of extreme abortion rights advocates is increasing in the party, but only because the total number of Democrats has shrunk to its lowest level since the Hoover administration.”
It’s a ridiculous strategy, she points out, since the party is so dependent on the votes of young people and women — “both groups,” she notes, “who are far more anti-abortion than is generally known. For instance, clear majorities of women — and of young people — favor a 20-week limit on abortion.” The future of the party, she warns, depends on “its ability to remain inclusive. The 2016 platform language on abortion torpedoes those goals. When Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia heard about the platform’s call to repeal the Hyde amendment he had a succinct response: ‘That’s crazy.’ We couldn’t say it any better.”
Originally published here.
Glean around the Gills
Common sense isn’t the only thing that fell by the wayside in the DNC platform — so did religious liberty. America’s first freedom didn’t make the cut in what everyone agrees is the most radical document of the party’s history. In order to make room for its outrageous LGBT agenda, the DNC is admitting what they’ve implied since Chai Feldblum: religious liberty is incompatible with sexual liberalism. The president’s former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In the effort to find balance between special rights and religious liberty, Feldblum had an interesting solution: “Gays win; Christians lose.” I have a hard time, she famously said, “coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”
Now, after years of phony soundbites about coexistence and compromise, the president’s party openly agrees. And while they can’t take an eraser to the Constitution, they have taken it to their guiding document, scrubbing it of the First Amendment’s most basic protections. During this week’s events, liberals weren’t even feigning attempts at middle ground in their latest push for genderless bathrooms, special treatment for transgenders, gay sex-ed curriculum, gay history, and more. Instead, the mask came off, and Americans finally saw the ideology for what it is: fiercely and proudly intolerant.
During one session, when scenarios about Christian bakers, florists, and business owners came up, the ACLU refused to offer even a fig leaf of conscience protections. “Does someone’s religion trump my freedom,” an attendee asked? According to World magazine’s Jamie Dean, the group’s James Esseks replied, “My answer to that question is no.” Then, providing a glimpse into the battles already being fought, he bragged, “We’re working on keeping those laws from happening in the first place.”
When Congressman Jared Polis (D-Colo.), who identifies as gay, suggested there may be room to accommodate men and women of faith, it was treated like blaspheme. A spokesman for the pro-LGBT Gill Foundation quickly interjected: “I want to be careful that we don’t say there is a kind of balance between equality and religious freedom.” Now that liberals have gotten what they wanted out of same-sex marriage, there’s no point in hiding the rest of the agenda — which, unfortunately, too many Americans never saw coming.
Originally published here.