Now let us speak of “social issues.” Now let us show how extreme and antediluvian we are. Now let us be horribly insensitive. Now let us give “the vapors” to the coastal elites. Now let us drive the establishment media batty. Now let us win an election while sticking to our well-considered principles. In fact, now let us win an election because we stick to our well-considered principles. And then watch the heathens howl. Okay, we should take back the word “heathens.” That was just puckish alliteration. But the rest of the above litany should stand. The howling “elites” can bay at the moon all they want. We’re right substantively, and we’re right politically. Social conservatism is a winning philosophy. Majorities of Americans (or in some polls, clear pluralities) call themselves “pro-life.” Every state that has held a referendum on recognizing homosexual relationships as “marriages” has voted not to do so (or, more precisely, has voted to define marriage as being only between a man and woman). Wholesome movies regularly do better at the box office than sleazy ones do. Americans prefer being “tough on crime” to being lenient. Americans tend to like local control of schools, parental involvement and choice in education, and traditional curricula. Far more Americans feel strongly in favor of gun rights than in favor of gun control. Americans treasure families and neighborhoods, and oppose governmental intrusions into them. We don’t like governmental racial preferences. We are deeply patriotic. We far prefer conservative judges to liberal ones. And we still are a faithful people, with churches and belief in God a very important part of most of our lives. Also, we know deep down in our cores that candidates who draw a connection between family breakdown and out-of-wedlock births, on one hand, and cultural and economic ills like crime, delinquency, and lack of economic mobility, on the other, are absolutely right. Statistically, the case in favor of this argument is irrefutable. Psychologically, we know it is right. And we’ve known it is right for nearly half a century. We didn’t even need a “conservative” to make that case for it; we relied, quite correctly, on the social-science findings of the politically liberal (or center-leftist) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Finally, we believe with every fiber of our beings that voluntary associations, churches, and local associations are better at ameliorating social ills than are governments, especially the federal government. When we talk about cultural values and social concerns, we usually do not do so because we want government to impose our values on others through government programs; instead, we either want government to get out of the way of these intermediary institutions (or of the family), or else we want the government to do no more than make it easier for those institutions to act. About the only issue on which we would indeed have government “interfere” is on abortion — but that’s only if one accepts the liberal line that it is only the mother’s interest, not the child’s, which is being interfered with. “Choice” is fine, of course, unless the choice involves taking a human life. On one level, there is a simple and straightforward logic to protecting the child. If governments exist for no other reason, they exist to protect the innocent from external, physical harm. If the child in the womb is human (which, of course, it is, scientifically speaking), and if it is life (again, by definition it is), then it is irrefutably human life. The only questions involve concepts such as “viability,” “ensoulment,” and the value of human life at a pre-born stage. Those who want to forbid abortion are doing no less than protecting human life from what they regard as murder — a job (stopping murder) which is a moral imperative for every legitimate government that ever existed. Now this does not mean that the sympathies of pro-lifers can’t be with the mothers affected. In fact, it is far easier to sympathize with the mother than with the less-than-physically developed, certainly not intellectually or emotionally developed (to say the least), accumulation of living tissue fully dependent for sustenance on the mother inside which it grows. And the mothers deserve our sympathies. The very trajectory of their lives is at issue. They have a right to be scared. They have a right to have doubts. More than that, they may well have legitimate moral concerns of their own. Not all mothers considering abortion are morally serious, but some are. It’s just that their moral system of values puts more emphasis on quality of life than on “mere” existence of human life. That value system might itself be seen as immoral, but it is not an unserious or unconsidered position. All of which is why the issue of abortion is so difficult — and why the various positions on it merit more respect from all other positions, for all other positions, than just about any issue in the public realm today. It also means that it is incumbent on pro-lifers to do whatever is in our power to treat both mother and child humanely and to help ensure the best pre-natal care and the best post-birth opportunities for both of them. It would do pro-lifers good for us to express these concerns more openly, and to act in accord with them. One big problem, though, is that the establishment media tends to show far less respect for us than we do for the mothers. Our entirely valid moral concerns are pilloried, belittled, and even treated as if those concerns are flat-out hateful. The “elites” often show no moral reflection at all, but rather a sneering and sometimes vicious set of double standards. Newt Gingrich was absolutely right, indeed profoundly so, in Tuesday night’s debate when he said this: ” I just want to point out, you did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide. OK? So let’s be clear here. If we’re going to have a debate about who the extremist is on these issues, it is President Obama who, as a state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion. It is not the Republicans.” The lack of media attention to this bizarre and lonely “stand” of Obama’s speaks volumes about media values. It makes the establishment media into moral reprobates for refusing even to understand that this is, or should be, an area of controversy. Nonetheless, the lefty media has a big and powerful megaphone that is good at drowning us out. That’s why it is admirable that Rick Santorum has never backed off from a discussion of social issues. He knows his words will be distorted, taken out of context, and harshly criticized by the media minions of the Left. Yet very little of what he says is, in full context, the slightest bit objectionable or “extreme.” Moreover, if the economy continues to improve, even slowly, so that its weakness no longer hobbles Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, then conservatives need a presidential candidate who is willing to champion these issues and our values, and who knows how to turn his championing of them into votes. They are, after all, majority- or plurality-positions that we hold. Some of us have usually been more squeamish than not about social issues. (For decades, I always mildly agreed with “socio-cons” but was driven far more by economics and defense needs than by social issues; and indeed as a college freshman I had the temerity to tell a conservative-movement leader that I agreed with Barry Goldwater that Jerry Falwell’s moral hectoring merited a good “kick in the a$$” — even though I supported Falwell’s basic positions.) Some of us (myself included) would still prefer to talk about free-market economics and the virtues of limiting government. But none of us should fail to rise to the defense of our social-issue positions, because the only way we lose on them politically is if we act embarrassed by them and thus give credence to the leftist attacks. It is the left that wants government to co-opt, or steamroll over, the mediating institutions we hold dear. It is they who seek to impose their values on us by force of law (and thus by force of the gun, wielded by the jailer) — not we who seek to impose our values on them. Leave our families and churches and voluntary associations alone, and we’ll all be fine no matter how the less-socially-conservative people want to conduct their own private affairs. Even if we are of the evangelizing (small “e”) persuasion, our bailiwick is moral suasion in the open public square, not coercion. If this makes the leftists howl — so what? While they are howling, we’ll defeat them, fair and square.
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Social Conservatism: Winning Right
Mitt Romney’s campaign is essentially plastic and dishonest, an insuperable problem Wednesday’s debate in Mesa, Arizona, underscored yet again for disenchanted primary voters. Romney bested a rattled Rick Santorum in it, but this victory, like his others, looked hollow and dispiriting. One suspects that Romney’s low surrogates paid punks to enter the debate hall and loudly boo his opponents. Not that Santorum didn’t deserve a few. He blew it, exposing himself to repeated strikes from a Ron Paul-Mitt Romney pincer movement. Seated to Santorum’s right and left, Paul and Romney took turns needling him. If, as the saying goes, a candidate “who is explaining is losing,” then Santorum lost very badly. He kept getting entangled in the weeds of boring disputes from the past in which he had betrayed this or that conservative principle. Romney, at his most hypocritical, labored hard to present himself as more socially conservative than Santorum, noting that Rick had voted for Planned Parenthood funding. Astonishingly, Santorum missed his chance at a return upper cut. Why didn’t he mention that Romney once gave money to Planned Parenthood from his own pocket? Why didn’t he mention that Romneycare dollars go to Planned Parenthood? Romney’s sudden social conservatism invites an obvious question: How stupid does he think primary voters are? Romney’s con job here depends upon the amnesia of his audience. Here’s a politician who pled fealty to Roe v. Wade , voted for Democrat Paul Tsongas, and competed with Ted Kennedy as a champion of “gay rights.” By the way, Romney’s social conservatism didn’t even last for the whole debate. In the second hour of it, he indicated his support for women in combat. Meanwhile, an unmolested Newt Gingrich, freed from the pressures of “frontrunner status,” resumed his role as the commanding, Olympian overseer at GOP debates. He told CNN’s John King off again, demanding to know why he was peppering Republican candidates with gotcha questions about “birth control” when he and his pals in the press had never asked Barack Obama about his support for the killing of infants as a state senator in Illinois. After that scolding, a rebuffed King didn’t even bother to recapitulate the dumb question that he had initially teed up to the candidates. Newt’s tack here is exactly right. Why let a media of secularist bigots and the ghoulish party of Planned Parenthood dictate the terms of this race? Go on offense in the culture war, GOP. Remind Americans that the Democrats are the party of killing the unborn, some infants, the annoyingly disabled, and the inconvenient elderly. Remind Americans that Obama wanted elementary school students subjected to the sick sex ed propaganda of Planned Parenthood. Remind Americans that Obama is not at war with radical Islam but with orthodox Christianity. Isn’t it telling that the only time the Maureen Dowds speak of “mullahs” pejoratively is when they affix that label to Christians like Santorum? They speak darkly of conscientious Christians as “dangerous fanatics.” Never mind that most of the violence in America is coming from the abortion mills liberals champion and finance. Feminists on their second or third abortion are a lot scarier to me than homeschooling Christians. But let’s get back to the debate. Even as Romney took his mittens off and suckerpunched Santorum for earmarks Mitt himself supported — Romney remains the smarmy apple polisher who likes to narc on his misbehaving classmates — one could almost see strings attached to the reinvented Republican’s back. Romney is the semi-reformed RINO dummy of high-priced ventriloquists — a dummy whose words and robotic jerks come from the pushing and pulling of scummy strategists and pollsters who crawl along a corrupt corridor from Boston to D.C. His “Fortune 500″ campaign makes me sick. Is the GOP really going to nominate this fraud? The cheapness and inauthenticity of his campaign is too depressing for words. One small example of this dismal charade came early in the debate when Romney made an utterly random reference to “George Costanza.” Apparently, one of Romney’s oh-so-clever strategists told him to dispel his image as a nerd trapped in the 1950s by spicing up his answers with “hip” references. So what does Romney do? He cites, for no apparent reason, a character from a sitcom that went off NBC’s schedule over a decade ago.
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The Mittens Come Off in Mesa
The utter fecklessness of Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick is becoming more apparent by the day . Last week she decided that a proposed Virginia law, one that the Republican governor has suddenly gone squishy on, is the equivalent of rape because it could conceivably require something be “inserted into the vagina, and then moved around.” Since then we’ve discovered that not only did Lithwick simply lie about what the law required and we’ve found that Virginia Planned Parenthood requires two ultrasounds with each abortion. Presumably to insure they only kill half their patients. To hear Lithwick tell it, a trans-vaginal ultrasound is a horror tool invented by rich, white, elderly Republicans to enslave and defile women who only want to be left in peace to dismember their unborn child. The truth is quite different, and in the context of this artificial kerfuffle, and quite ironic. From LifeNews: Abortion advocates in Virginia have come under heavy criticism for equating the ultrasound legislation there would allow women to see before an abortion to rape. Yet, while abortion backers say having an ultrasound is like getting raped, a 2003 study shows 99% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities do them beforehand. Apparently, in 2003 the medical journal Contraception reported on a survey conducted of abortion providers in the United States ( article hosted by LifeNews ). The finding, 99% of abortion providers either always or frequently used vaginal ultrasound for surgical abortions. 92% of the sites providing mifepristone induced abortions did vaginal ultrasound. Based on the evidence thus far, the worst that can be said of the proposed Virginia law is that is recognizes the standard practice used in 99% of abortion facilities. The best that can be said about Lithwick is that she’s a mendacious know-nothing.
[UPDATE: I'm informed by someone very much in touch with the Virginia political scene that the root of the problem is the Bob McDonnell's staff are, at the best, pro-life squishes and they are presently negotiating with themselves over the best way of selling out.] Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Romney supporter and leading contender for the VP spot on a Romney-headed ticket , demonstrated his complete philosophical alignment with Romney yesterday by flipflopping on a bill he has championed and in the process hanging VA GOP delegates out to dry. For those who haven’t been paying attention, Virginia’s legislature has been going after the abortion industry root and branch. Last year they passed a law requiring aborttoirs to be regulated as if they did what they do: perform a surgical procedure which can be life threatening. This year a bill is being finalized that requires a woman seeking an abortion to see ultrasound pictures of the baby . Somehow this bill, which does not require any medical procedure the woman was not going to receive in the first place , has the pro-abortion lobby in a tizzy. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has predictably styled this as rape. Up until yesterday, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell had unconditionally supported the bill . Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is backing off his unconditional support for a bill requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion, focusing new attention on one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in Virginia’s General Assembly this year. Until this weekend, McDonnell (R) and his aides had said the governor would sign the measure if it made it to his desk. McDonnell, who strongly opposes abortion, will no longer make that commitment. As the political damage has already been done to the GOP senators who have taken a courageous stand on this issue, one may rightfully ask why a governor who is barred from running for re-election wouldn’t stand behind the very people he encouraged to take up the bill in the first place? “Something is happening,’’ Jessica Honke, a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, said hopefully. Yes, indeedy. Something is happening. There is only one explanation that fits all the facts. McDonnell wants to be Mitt Romney’s choice for vice president should Romney almost certainly win the GOP nomination. The ultrasound bill is causing too much controversy and probably has Romney’s handlers wearing brown trousers at the thought of having to actually take a pro-life position in a general election campaign. McDonnell takes to opportunity to look moderate and abandons ship. In fact, McDonnell’s actions are really a great metaphor for Mitt Romney’s political career. So, again, we are on the verge of having a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory by someone who appears to be more concerned with what people who will never like him are saying rather than doing the right thing. In a way, it is sort of fitting that this story breaks on Ash Wednesday. Maybe McDonnell should swear off political games for the next 40 days.
Last week I posted on the egregiously dishonest line of attack being made on a proposed Virginia law requiring all women who are seeking an abortion to be given the opportunity to see an ultrasound picture of the baby before dismembering. The left, led online by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick , who seemingly has the same grasp of medicine and human reproduction that she has of the law, has mounted one of the most transparently fraudulent assaults since anything they perpetrated on George W. Bush. Her claim was that Virginia was RAPING WOMEN!!1!!!! because an ultrasound was being required before a surgical procedure was undertaken. Today the story descended into farce. Commentary Magazine apparently called Virginia’s leading purveyor of abortions, the Virginia League of Planned Parenthood, on their abortion services hotline. They got this recorded message: “Patients who have a surgical abortion generally come in for two appointments. At the first visit we do a health assessment, perform all the necessary lab work, and do an ultrasound. This visit generally takes about an hour. At the second visit, the procedure takes place. This visit takes about an hour as well. For out of town patients for whom it would be difficult to make two trips to our office, we’re able to schedule both the initial appointment and the procedure on the same day. Medical abortions generally require three visits. At the first visit, we do a health assessment, perform all the necessary lab work, and do an ultrasound. This visit takes about an hour. At the second visit, the physician gives the first pill and directions for taking two more pills at home. The third visit is required during which you will have an exam and another ultrasound.” So to get an abortion in Virginia a woman would have to get at least two ultrasounds. This would be at least three times in which, to quote Lithwick’s own words, something was “inserted into the vagina, and then moved around.” What we’ve learned here isn’t a surprise. Before you undergo a surgical procedure there are tests. In the case of someone trying to procure an abortion to rid themselves of a troublesome “mass of cells” it is only logical that even the moral cripples who work in that business would want to be sure the patient was, in fact, pregnant, and that there weren’t other medical complications. Ultrasound, whether done externally or by something “moving around” inside the vagina is a logical choice. The defenders of abortion are rightfully feeling beleaguered. Polls have shifted in the past years making approval of abortion a minority position. As more and more states take aim at the abortion industry, the supporters of infanticide, like Lithwick, are becoming more and more shrill… if that is possible… and unhinged.
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Dahlia Lithwick’s Sonogram Lie Implodes
