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Redstate
Faith,
love, and children
By John Hayward
April 26th, 2013
President
Obama became the first
sitting president to address Planned Parenthood on Friday. Not surprisingly, he
didn’t have anything to
say about Kermit Gosnell, or the wave of medical emergencies at
abortion
clinics, or the sex-selection abortions Live Action discovered at
Planned
Parenthood. Obama
didn’t even use the
word “abortion” in his speech. Abortion
is so wonderful that even the most strident abortion radical ever
elected to
the White House can’t bring himself to say the word.
If
the abortion industry didn’t
enjoy the nearly religious devotion of the Left, it would be Occupy
Wall
Street’s favorite example of a big business that pays big bucks for
political
influence, so it can operate with ridiculously lax oversight, weak
safety
standards, and lavish subsidies. Kermit
Gosnell preyed relentlessly upon poor black women, while treating his
assistants like sweat shop labor.
The
excuses offered by Planned Parenthood when its staff is caught
flaunting the
law on undercover video are reminiscent of tobacco company executives
trying to
claim that smoking isn’t bad for you.
The Democrat Party has expressed a
willingness to shut down the entire
government to protect Planned Parenthood subsidies.
When a prominent charity, Susan G. Komen
for
the Cure, tried to decouple from Planned Parenthood, the response was
straight
out of “The Sopranos.” You
are required
to fund this organization, and you are not allowed to stop. They’ve got a lot of
money, political clout,
and media influence available to enforce that directive.
“Planned
Parenthood is not going
anywhere,” Obama declared in his speech.
”It’s not going anywhere today, it’s not
going anywhere tomorrow.” Well,
of course not. It’s
a billion-dollar corporation with $90
million annual profits that gets over $540 million in taxpayer funding
that
spent $12 million on highly effective political action during the last
election. And
really, as long as it’s a
properly supervised business selling legal goods and services, there’s
no
reason it should “go anywhere.” It
just
shouldn’t be propped up with funds extracted by the government from
people who
don’t support its activities, especially since much of the dissenters’
money is
recycled into political activity against them.
The
abortion industry thrives
politically by associating its politics with human identity. Opposition to Planned
Parenthood is
caricatured as hatred of women, even when the corporation’s critics are
themselves
women. That’s a
neat trick, if you can
pull it off: equating dissent with hatred.
It’s not easy to lose a debate, if you
can establish those ground rules.
And
yet, the abortion lobby seems
increasingly worried that they might be losing the national debate. Some of the panic is
artificial, and
profitable, folding neatly into the “progressive” narrative favored by
the
liberals who have been taking America over the edge of a cliff. ”The fact is, after
decades of progress,
there’s still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more
suited to
the 1950s than the 21st century,” warned Obama.
Haven’t liberals lately been telling us
that we should return to the tax
policies of the Fifties, because they were prosperous despite the high
nominal
tax rates that nobody actually paid?
Isn’t Obama’s Attorney General, Eric
Holder, relentlessly determined to
ensure the 21st century remains saddled with the voter identification
systems
of the 1950s?
But
with those little spurts of
nostalgia out of the way, we’re back to the “progressive” ideology that
insists
the failed economic policies and social degeneration of the Left are
inevitable
and irreversible, so any attempt to change course is “turning back the
clock.” There is no
reason to take this
idea seriously. ”Change”
can move in
many different directions, including the rediscovery of ideas we might
realize
were abandoned in error. The
modern era
could be right about some things, wrong about others, and the same can
be said
of previous decades. Why
does anyone
accept the notion that the only alternative to embracing every single
“progressive” failure is hopping into a time machine and returning to
the days
of Ozzie and Harriet? Let’s
allow for
the possibility that the past sixty years saw both triumphs and
mistakes. We are
not cursed to live with the mistakes
for eternity…
Read
the rest of the article at
Redstate
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