Two weeks after the Democrats’ joyride with rock star Obama hit a very jarring bump on the road, many members of the nation’s oldest political party are no doubt wondering what hit them. I here suggest that in addition to the public’s general disdain for big government solutions to government-created problems, what hit the Democrats was a backlash from voters who are tired of their assault on decency in the name of compassion.
To my father, being a Democrat was easy. The Republicans were for the "big shots"; the Democrats were for the workingman. End of discussion. My, how times have changed.
A devout Christian friend is disgusted by the temper of today’s politics, which has come a long way in vindictiveness since the comparatively civilized Kennedy v. Nixon campaign in 1960. 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, the Fox News commentator whose understanding and appreciation of the Bill of Rights begins and ends with your right to remain silent.
Well, there has been plenty of nastiness on both sides and here in New Hampshire we have seen the Democratic State Committee defend Gov. John Lynch with buckets of mud and wheelbarrows full of false and misleading allegations against Republican John Stephen. But the politics does not stop in the election campaigns. 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 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. 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.
There must, of course, 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 passions. Except, of course, that with the political gods as the ultimate arbiters of good and evil, private institutions, including private religious institutions, 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 found in violation of a state human rights law banning discrimination against persons of a different sexual "orientation." And since same-sex marriage has been determined by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to be an imperative of that state’s Constitution, the Legislature 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.
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.
