It is one of the favourite clichés of the secular left to accuse the so-called “religious right” of being fixated on personal morality issues, such as abortion and homosexuality. “You guys are so hung up on personal morality. Why don’t you concentrate on what’s really important.”
I hear this all the time from the secular lefties – and even the religious lefties. They think they occupy the high moral ground here, and think they can pooh-paw anyone who differs from their version of events. But no one watching the two recent national political conventions in the US can ever fall for this baloney again.
One political party was talking all about the economy, about jobs, and family, and about the nation. And the other party spent all its time talking about abortion and homosexual marriage, and especially seemed to be fixated on God – albeit in a most negative manner.
The former was of course the Republicans, while the latter was the Democrats. The Dems seem to be obsessed with personal morality issues nowadays. There was barely a speaker in the entire DNC who did not drag up the abortion issue. That and their insistence on destroying the institution of marriage were the two main themes of their convention – along with denying God three times.
Their ugly misotheism I have already spoken about – see here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2012/09/06/democrats-death-and-deicide/
But the incredible thing is, even many of your run-of-the-mill secular lefties expressed concern about their fixation on things like abortion. For example long-standing hard-core lefty Cokie Roberts said just recently that this was really all rather excessive.
In a panel discussion on TV she said the following: “I think this Democratic convention was really over the top in terms of abortion. Every single speaker talked about abortion — and, you know, at some point, you start to alienate people. Thirty percent of Democrats are pro-life.”
And they complain about Republicans being only interested in abortion. As Robert Knight has just written, this is a role reversal of major proportions. The Republicans were focused on jobs, on the debt crisis, on health care, while the Dems were strung out on their radical leftist personal morality issues.
His opening paragraphs are worth reproducing here: “If the November election is solely about the economy, why did the Democrats boot God and Jerusalem from their platform at the Democratic National Convention only to panic and then rig a vote to put them back in?
“It’s well worth a couple of minutes to watch hapless Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on YouTube fail three times at the podium to get a two-thirds majority to put God and Jerusalem back in the platform and then declare, Soviet-style, to a cascade of boos that the motion had carried. The mayor’s stunned look after the first couple of failures is priceless.
“If the economy is the only issue that matters, why did the Democrats feature a parade of speakers who thundered support for abortion? It was so over the top that The Washington Post’s pro-life Democrat (an endangered species) Melinda Henneberger’s column on Friday was headlined ‘Democrats and their obsession with abortion.’ If the Republican Party is supposed to be the party obsessed with social issues, why were they barely mentioned by the GOP but everywhere in evidence at the Democratic convention?
“Instant celebrity and contraceptive freebie advocate Sandra Fluke warned darkly in her ‘war on women’ speech at the Democratic convention that if the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected, Americans will ‘have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die in preventable deaths in our emergency rooms.’ The dastardly GOP pair also will cause cancer deaths, but we’ll leave that to once and future Obama ad campaigns.
In between claims that the economy is humming along nicely and President Obama is still our savior, speakers also rammed home the message that marriage as God created it is so over.
“Democratic National Committee Treasurer Andrew Tobias spent more than half of his nearly four-minute speech talking about homosexual rights, including a hurrah for Rep. Barney Frank’s recent ‘wedding — to a guy!’ If it’s the GOP that is in the grip of religious fanatics, why did the Democrats at first refuse to have Cardinal Timothy Dolan give the closing prayer as he did at the GOP convention or have liberal Roman Catholic nun Sister Simone Campbell give the pitch for more big government? Vashti McKenzie, the first female bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, gave the party’s credentials report while assuring us with a straight face that Mr. Obama had ‘pulled our country back from the brink’ of economic ‘collapse’ and was the ‘one person with the plan to return this country to prosperity’.”
Yes, the entire convention was quite a spectacle alright. They might as well have held it in Havana or Caracas. What a bunch of hot-headed lefty activists. So leftwing was it that some future potential Democratic leaders had to keep their distance – literally. As Knight explains:
“The important thing is that Mrs. Clinton was halfway around the world while the Democratic convention was going on in North Carolina. You’d think someone who might aspire someday to be the presidential nominee would show up at her party’s most important event.
“On the other hand, it will be easier in 2016 to pretend to be a moderate, middle-class-loving, normal American politician if she keeps her distance from a crowd that lionizes Barney Frank and Sandra Fluke, embraces Marxist economics and is divided over whether God and Jerusalem are fit for inclusion in the party platform.”
Yes quite so. So what was that about being hung up on personal morality again?
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/this-weeks-cokie-roberts-dnc-really-over-the-top-on-abortion-risks-alienating-pro-life-dems/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/7/democratic-convention-presents-the-new-normal/?page=1
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