the party of healing

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Oct 30, 2009

Amherst Professor of Jurisprudence Hadley Arkes remarks on the unexpected stubbornness of that almost-extinct species, the pro-life Democratic congressman, and the unexpected consequence that "health care" may find itself directed at health:

What the media have not understood is that the removal of abortion could doom the whole bill. For even they seem not to have grasped the truth that dare not speak its name: that the paramount, defining issue for the Democrats now -- the issue that gives scale and place to everything else -- is that commitment to abortion, for any reason, at any time. For people on the Left, that right to abortion has become the “first freedom,” taking the place of freedom of speech and religion. If abortion were explicitly barred from a vast new program of medical care, that would be taken as another, telling sign that the public has refused to accept the legitimacy of abortion as just another form of surgery. For the National Organization of Women, and the Left at the core of the Democratic Party, that kind of judgment is just not to be brooked. If that is the cost of national heath care, they would rather not have it than suffer this moral reproach running to the core of their lives.

'Liberty, equality, fraternity' provided the watchword for the 18th century enlightenment. Today, among the Democrats, the party of the enlightened, the two supreme goods are feticide and fellatio. To voice dissent on either issue, no matter how bashfully, is regarded as sedition. In the right mood Dems will recall their nobler tradition as "pro-family," but in order to make the claim they have camouflaged tolerance of abortion in euphemisms and redefined the family to include any assemblage of mammals that can crawl onto the same mattress at the same time. Small wonder Catholics of the Left mumble the obligatory family pieties as rapidly as possible and try to keep us focused on the big issues ("King Herod may have been wobbly on infanticide, true, but he was staunch in support of employer-funded substance abuse counseling …"). Back to Arkes:

But the calculations distract us from what is truly wrong with this picture. Past the feistiness of Bart Stupak and his gang of Blue Dogs is the hapless, if not witless, condition of the pro-life Democrats and the voters who keep them there. It is the same incoherence that afflicted the pro-life voters who voted to put Bob Casey in the Senate in Pennsylvania. If they were really pro-life, what sense did it make to vote for a man who would help put in control of the Senate or the Congress the party that is radically pro-abortion? If the Bart Stupaks truly regarded the protection of life as the issue that rises above all others, why have they been willing to make themselves agents for putting into power the party that regards the defense of abortion as its first, controlling principle?

Ricky Ray Rector was unavailable for comment.