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Social Issues And Morally Lazy Republicans


Thanks to State Representative Rob Samson, one of the few legislators who have not been cowed by Connecticut’s powerful abortion lobby, abortion extremists have publicly shown their horns.

The Family Institute of Connecticut (FIC) put it this way: “On the final day of the legislative session June 7th, Rep. Rob Sampson attached a pro-life parental notification amendment to a contraception bill. But the possibility that a parent might be notified about her underage daughter’s decision to have an abortion so enraged Connecticut’s pro-abortion lobbyists that they killed their own bill rather than allow a vote on the amendment!”

Resistance to extremist social views on the part of the moderate corner of Connecticut’s campaign barracks has been virtually non-existent for a host of reasons. Within the Democratic Party, what used to be called the moderate “vital center” is no longer vital or centrist. Progressivism, especially on social issues, has moved the needle far to the left. Democrats have moved far beyond liberalism in the direction of libertinism. Republicans are either cowards or they see no political utility in opposing abortion extremist groups, an extremist being anyone, including Connecticut U.S.  Senator Dick Blumenthal, who believes that the abortion industry should never be subject to the indignity of regulations, however prudent and necessary. This single-minded devotion to non-regulation is a glaring piece of hypocrisy in the case of Blumenthal, for two decades and more the state’s hyper-regulatory Attorney General.

Moral posturing within the Democratic Party now is devoted almost exclusively to vote-generating left of center campaign positions – abortion on demand, curtsies to the selling of baby parts harvested from late term abortions, transgender bathrooms in public institutions, and a desperate move on the part of the children of the Woodstock Generation to legalize pot – so that at some future date they might tax it. The campaign motto of progressive Democrats in future elections should be, “Vote Democratic, For Pot In Every Pot.” Far left moral anarchists apparently have drawn a red line on the Swiftian notion that survivors in the moral race to the bottom should eat babies whose lives they have destroyed.

Jonathan Swift, who was after all the Dean of Saint Patrick’s in Ireland, was morally upright enough to satirize the brutal treatment of the Irish. But it is impossible to satirize the brutal treatment of “these, the least among us,” because the essence of satire is exaggeration, and it is difficult to exaggerate the absurd pretensions of those who make virtues out of vices they then press upon the young and the poor. How, exactly, does one satirize an objection to a bill in which the honor of parents is upheld against someone, for example, who has seduced an underage child, impregnated her and then procured an abortion for her without her parents being the wiser? Satire is made impossible by putatively “moral” legislators who lend their honor to the killing of such a measure, rather as if abortion itself were to be understood as a secular sacrament.

Terry McAuliffe, soon to be ex-Governor of Virginia and a Democratic presidential prospect, comes right out and says it: “I’m trying to run a progressive state, putting progressive values out there. At the same time, making sure everybody has an opportunity for a job. I call it more values and a moral structure than labeling anything. The values of open and welcoming: pro-women’s rights, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, anti-gun. Those are a value system. You know, that’s who I am.” These are not moral values; they are Democratic Party campaign stickers.

Managing Editor of he Journal Inquirer Chris Powell  may be the only commentator of any note in Connecticut who has outlined lucidly and at length the lethal effects that prolonged welfare dependency and fatherless households have on the culture.

Four years ago, Powell writes in a recent column, he had argued in a column that welfare-induced poverty, fatherless households and the dumbing down of education was having a predictable effect on slumping newspaper sales: “Newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households -- two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they're living in, and couldn't afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population."

Last year, Powell noted, an East Hartford superintendent testified in a court case that “his schools are hobbled because 71 percent of their students are so poor that they qualify for free or discounted lunches, 15 percent have learning disabilities, 12 percent don't speak English, many need social workers to make up for parental neglect, and many are transient and disoriented, moving in or out of town or their school district during the school year as their families, most headed by single women, lose and regain housing.”


Politics does not produce culture; it is the culture – the network of so called “social issues” – that shapes politics. It what sense is a culture moral that lauds, finances or excuses abortion, broken families, violence in the streets,  and life-long social stratification produced by a welfare system that traps people in poverty? These are matters too important to be left to columnists, the welfare state and Republicans too weary to confront in public campaigns the new morality of progressive Democrats.


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