The first political question I can recall ever asking was the one I put to my father when I was seven years old. “Dad, who are we for?” I asked. “Are we for Eisenhower or Stevenson?” Dad laughed good-naturedly.
“Well, we’re not for Eisenhower, he’s a Republican,” he replied.
I must have looked baffled by the answer.
“The Republicans are for the big shots,” my father explained. “The Democrats are for the working man.”
Now my dad was an unskilled laborer who was, nonetheless, able to build a home and support a wife and children on modest wages in those pre-inflationary days. “If you or Terry (my brother) should become big shots,” he went on, “I would expect you to vote Republican, because that’s where your interests are. But if you’re working men, I would expect you to vote Democratic.”
Nowadays, I correspond with a devout Christian who rejects the hedonistic values of the sexual revolution. He has enough New England Puritan blood in him to believe if it feels good, it’s probably sinful. Yet he is repelled by the Republican propaganda and war machines and is turned off by the “raw and ugly” emotion of the Tea Party movement. If he must choose between evils, he now feels the lesser evil is the Democratic Party, which offers at least a more “benign” fascism than is offered by the Republicans, who too often sound like the unkind, ungentle Bill O’Reilly.
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Yes, the election campaign that mercifully ended last Tuesday offered plenty of raw, ugly emotion. But as I recall, at least a few of the Tea Party favorites, like Republican U.S. Senate candidates Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Joe Miller in Alaska, were dumped on with contempt and hostility by members of their own party, as well as the Democrats and all the progressives in the world of punditry. And in my state of New Hampshire, the Democratic State Committee did all it could to bury Republican gubernatorial candidate John Stephen under buckets of mud and false and distorted allegations. Many are the victims of the Democrats’ compassion.
But it does not stop in the political arena. It comes into the classroom and targets your children, teaching first graders that, among other things, a man may love another man, and they are not talking about fraternal affection, much less that agape love that the Lord Jesus Christ preached. No, it is sexual “love” or lust being taught, including that unnatural kind that causes men to burn with lust for one another. It is not just in New York and San Francisco that sex education programs teach children about sexual parts of the anatomy when they are still in the early grades of elementary school. It’s happening in the American heartland as well. And nearly everywhere it is considered enlightened policy to give children condoms in school now so they may learn and practice “safe sex.” It’s a “brave new world,” after all.
And, of course, there must be no restriction at all on abortion rights, so called. Nor any law requiring parental notification before an abortion may be performed on a minor. No, the forces of compassion do not allow for parental rights. That might impede the anti-God, anti-family sexual revolution that would free us from all forms of bondage but those forged by our own passions. Except, of course, that with the political gods as the ultimate authority, private institutions, including religious organizations, may no longer be the captains of their own ships, guided by their respective moral compasses. Thus, Catholic Charities of Boston, when instructed by the Vatican that it may not place children with same-sex foster and adopting parents, cravenly closed down its child placement program for fear it would be in violation of a state human rights law banning discrimination against persons of a different sexual “orientation.” And when same-sex marriage was deemed by the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts to be an imperative of the state’s Constitution, the Legislature, though predominantly “Catholic” and Democratic, dutifully obeyed and enacted “gay” marriage into law. John Adams, principal architect of that 1781 Constitution, no doubt would have been amazed.
And is all this truly compassionate? Is it really enlightened to teach children that it is unreasonable and impractical to “just say no”? Yet without “no,” there is no morality. Without “no,” there is no freedom in a land where, in the name of liberty, nearly every institution is being broken to the saddle of the state.
So the sophisticates sneer and scoff at Sarah Palin when she warns of “death panels” growing out of the Obama health care program. “We’re not going to pull the plug on Grandma,” the President has assured us. Well, no, not right away. But will Obama, mighty though he may be, and his successors repeal the laws of mathematics? If we are going to expand the coverage, eliminate ineligibility for preexisting conditions, and control the costs, the savings are going to have to come from somewhere. Here the roles have been reversed and the Democrats are appealing to that old black magic that produced so many Republican red ink budgets. The Reaganites were going to dramatically increase defense spending, preserve the social “safety net,” cut taxes substantially and still balance the budget. Something had to give and it was those balanced budgets. Reagan had hardly found his way to the Lincoln bedroom before his Office of Management and Budget was correctly forecasting $200 billion deficits in the out years for “as far as the eye can see.”
Now the annual deficits are in the trillions and national health care is supposed to help control the costs. And, thanks to the liberals’ enlightened policy of defending and promoting contraception and abortion, there are fewer newborns and young people who will be coming into the system to pay into Social Security, Medicare and “ObamaCare,” even as the baby boomers and succeeding generations retire. And if we ever do seal our leaky southern border, there will be still fewer people paying for the support of those social safety net and national defense, education and other programs that will weigh on both “big shots” and the working class like the world on Atlas’s shoulders.
So where will the savings be found? Are we blithely to believe that we can solve the problem by squeezing out the “waste fraud and abuse,” another mantra from the Reagan era? Is ObamaCare based on another application of “voodoo economics”? Or will we deny care to those in need, especially the elderly and the disabled, who are no longer contributors to the state?
And I have not yet even mentioned the abortion of an estimated 4,000 babies a day. May God help them and save them from the onslaught of America’s compassion. There are, of course, a number of “pro-choice” Republicans. But for the Republicans a “pro-choice” stand is just that —- a choice, an option. For the Democrats it is an article of faith, a requirement. No one may run for President without it.
This is not your father’s, and surely not my father’s, Democratic Party.
Photo: President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson shake hands on February 17, 1953: AP Images
