The Patriot Post® · Platform Shoos Away Younger Voters on Abortion
The Democrats’ national platform doesn’t just lack common decency when it comes to unborn life — it lacks common ground! For the last three years, the party of Obama and Clinton has been fighting to do away with consensus limits on abortion — and based on the latest polling, that isn’t exactly endearing them to voters.
In 2016, the DNC decided to take Democrats where no party had gone before. Hillary’s radical call to repeal the Hyde Amendment, the only thing standing between taxpayers and government-funded abortion, wasn’t just unpopular with Democratic leaders like Senator Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Rep. Dan Lipinski (Ill.) but Americans too. She went on to lose the election, and a lot of pundits — including the Washington Post’s — think her extreme social views were a big reason why.
The DNC didn’t listen to Americans then, but if it cares about the millennial vote, it may want to listen now. Most people — the media included — assume the under-34 crowd is in the Left’s back pocket. But a new survey from Students for Life of America shows what a mistake that assumption has been. On abortion, the DNC is turning out to be its own worst enemy. Not only are millennials one of the larger voting blocs in America, they’re also one of the most cautious when it comes to taking human life. In a poll that should scare the daylights out of the Democratic Party, only seven percent of the 18-34 crowd agree with the DNC’s national platform on abortion — which is no legal limits and funded by taxpayer dollars.
Another seven in 10 support restrictions on abortion, with 42 percent opposing abortion “broadly.” That’ll come as a shock to the Democrats’ system, which is betting most of its credibility on a surprisingly pro-life age group. Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, thinks this poll ought to be a wake-up call to any liberal taking the millennial vote for granted. Obviously, she said, “labels like pro-life, pro-choice, access, health, or women’s rights often camouflage the true realities of the policies that today crisscross the country.” Just because some young people call themselves “pro-choice” doesn’t mean they’re anti-regulation.
That’s especially bad news for liberals, who’ve spent the better part of a decade fighting common sense restrictions on abortion. Now, caught in an incredibly shrinking tent, Democrats might be forced to reconsider their opposition to things like parental notification or the pain-capable abortion ban. Of course, that much has been clear for a while. According to the Marist poll, people of every age think abortion does more harm than good. “Seventy-four percent of Americans — including 54 percent who identify as ‘pro-choice’ — are in favor of ‘significant restrictions’ on abortion.” And that crosses every racial, gender, and political line.
Young people also had a surprisingly unfavorable view of Planned Parenthood. “By about a 3 to 1 margin (48 percent to 17 percent), millennials said they preferred that their tax monies went to Federally Qualified Health Centers rather than the abortion giant, Planned Parenthood.” Democrats are losing their grip on this demographic — and soon. If there is a future for the party, one thing’s for sure: they’d better rethink their abortion platform.
Originally published here.
The Socialist Media Generation
It’s been almost 15 years since the country was first introduced to the charismatic 43-year-old Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. When the dad of two took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, young people were especially captivated. They climbed aboard the bandwagon that took America on a sharp left turn, never understanding the danger that his radicalism posed to America.
Now, a decade and a half later, millennials seem just as hypnotized by the glamorous version of socialism that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is making popular with kids who have no idea what it means. And for that matter, neither does she!
During an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Anderson Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez, “When people hear the word socialism, they think Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela. Is that what you have in mind?” “Of course not,” she replied. “What we have in mind — and what of my — and my policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.” As a matter of fact, Michael Knowles writes on Fox News, her policies have very little in common with any of those Nordic or British countries.
It’s that kind of ignorance, he warns, that’s starting to define Ocasio-Cortez’s generation. In a jaw-dropping survey from Reason-Rupe and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the majority of American millennials now identify as socialist. “That’s the bad news,” Knowles says. “The good news,” he points out, is that just 32 percent of millennials can actually define socialism.
Their ideas about socialism were formed by Bernie Sanders — not the Cold War. “Young people today don’t associate socialism with an enemy of the United States,” Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute points out. And that’s part of the problem. This all goes to the heart of what’s not being taught in our classrooms — which, as these surveys show, isn’t history!
“One third of millennials believe President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin,” Knowles explained. “Over 40 percent of millennials have never heard of Mao Zedong; another 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively, are unfamiliar with Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara. Two-thirds of Millennials cannot identify Auschwitz, and 22 percent have never heard of the Holocaust, twice the percentage of American adults on average.”
They support collectivism over capitalism, and welfare over work. They may be able to name the 58 genders accepted by Facebook, but when it comes to the murderous regimes of their grandparents’ generation, they have no clue. And ignorance on that level can be dangerous. As Tom Palmer points out, this kind of political illiteracy creates the perfect environment for socialists to take over a country and completely destroy the economy.
Is that what’s happening in America? Not yet, Knowles says, but it’s hard to ignore where millennial miseducation, “which grew into the Tree of the Lack of Knowledge as activist educators substituted ideology for scholarship” has brought us.
“During the 2018 midterm elections, the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed 42 candidates for local, state, and federal office across 20 states. Of those candidates, 24 won their primary campaigns, and 18 won in general elections. Millennials have largely cheered them on. Raised in the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these young Americans have been sheltered both empirically and academically from the myriad horrors wrought by socialism throughout history. And so the problem worsens.”
Thanks to the liberal takeover of public education, most of our children are taught to be ashamed of American systems and values — which have produced the most successful republic in all of human history. Until we start teaching true civics, our schools will continue to put future generations on an ideological path that ends in the most unjust government known to man. “Socialism is an economic disease born of envy and ignorance,” Knowles cautions. “Unfortunately, both abound in our present politics.”
Originally published here.
FFRF: Their Ark Is Worse Than Their Bite
The Freedom from Religion Foundation was trying to scare school districts away from the Ark Encounter. Instead, it won them all free tickets!
Ken Ham’s Creation Museum has been a major tourist attraction in Kentucky — so much so that the secularists like FFRF are desperate to keep people from going. The last thing they want is for busloads of children to visit the Ark Encounter and the rest of Ham’s exhibits and be confronted with the convicting truth about God. So FFRF decided there was one way to keep schools away: scare them.
In a letter to 1,000 nearby districts, the Wisconsin group makes a not-so-veiled threat that any school officials who authorize a visit may be making a second trip — to court. “Public schools cannot organize trips for students to either the Creation Museum or the Ark Park,” FFRF wrote. “The obligation to remain neutral on religion includes not teaching creationism, intelligent design, or any of their creatively named religious offspring to public school students…” the organization claims. “It is unacceptable to expose a captive audience of impressionable students to the overtly religious atmosphere of Ham’s Christian theme parks.”
As far as intimidation campaigns go, it was a good try. But thanks to some creative thinking, it was Ken Ham who got the last word. The atheist groups like the Freedom from Religion Foundation have spent years, Ham told Fox News, trying to “brainwash people with an interpretation of the First Amendment… I would like to see some public schools and public parks to stand up to them and not succumb to their bullying and intimidation,” Ham said. And he’s going to be right there to defend them if they try.
“Because the FFRF has sent letters to 1,000 school districts, I’m offering them free admission for the teachers, students who come on an official public school trip. And if they do sue them, we have expert attorneys who are willing to defend them in court and I’d like to see a test case go to the Supreme Court and stop this nonsense from these atheist groups who try to outlaw Christian influence in this nation.”
Instead of silencing Christianity and spooking schools, the Freedom from Religious Foundation may be responsible for exposing more students to biblical truth than ever! Talk about a campaign of harassment gone wrong. The best way to fight a bully is to stand up to him. And five states of schools are grateful that Ken Ham is ready to back them up when they do!
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.