Dennis Campbell
May 3, 2004
Democrats strike out on the great moral issues
By Dennis Campbell

If there is one statement that summarizes Democrats from the 19th Century to the 21st, surely it is this: They consistently have made wrong choices when it comes to the great moral issues confronting us.

Perhaps it is because the liberal mind does not so much reason as feel. By approaching issues from an emotional, rather than an analytical, basis, liberals make choices that feel good but result in an awful toll of death and destruction, in the most literal sense.

An example of this emotionalism as opposed to reason is a comment made by a woman at the pro-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post reports: The woman "...said that women have long been at the wrong end of government intrusion into their bodies. 'If you control women's bodies, you control their lives.'"

There is no logic in that. Prohibiting the killing of unborn babies has nothing to do with a woman's body and everything to do with a baby's body. The government has not intruded into her body, but is protecting that of her baby.

This is why argumentation based on reason and logic fails with those who distain that kind of discourse. Their emotionalism is immune to facts and reality.

The first great moral issue in which Democrats failed was slavery. The simple fact: Democrats favored slavery; Republicans opposed it.

Consider 19th Century Democrat Sen. John C. Calhoun: "But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.

"...I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other."

Prominent abolitionist Joshua Giddings said that "there is but one real issue between the Republican party and those factions that stand opposed to it. That is the question of slavery."

The bloodiest war in our history was fought in no small measure over this, and it was a Republican president who said: "I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States . . . do order and declare that all persons held as slaves . . . are, and henceforth shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons."

In the 20th Century, the issue was abortion. Democrats supported it with no restrictions, even as medical science proved that unborn babies, far from being mere "products of conception" or "tissue masses," are every bit as human as are adults. The unborn are smaller, but no less human.

We often talk of the "slippery slope," with its imagery of sliding down a muddy mountain with ever-increasing speed. What resided at the bottom of the slippery slope of abortion?

From rare abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy, this "procedure" progressed to partial-birth abortions, a term derided by abortion proponents but marvelously descriptive. At the latest stage of pregnancy, a baby could have her life ended in the most barbaric manner, her head punctured and brain suctioned out while the abortionist gripped her writhing body as it left her mother's womb.

But there is worse. The more extreme advocate the right of parents to return a defective baby up to 28 days after birth — to have her life, now deemed worthless, ended.

Finally, the third great moral issue confronts us in the 21st Century: Homosexuality. Is it surprising that Democrats, with their history of wrongheaded choices, embrace this debasement of human sexuality and normal sexual relations?

They portray affluent, politically powerful, highly educated homosexuals, who enjoy "rights" denied the rest of us, as victims of a repressive society as they take their message of perversion into our schools to indoctrinate the youngest, most impressionable and vulnerable among us.

Conservatives who stand against the liberal's love of the wretched are routinely smeared — they are racists for opposing racial discrimination, sexists for defending the unborn, bigots for championing traditional morality.

Frequently, they are termed radical, interesting in that Republicans in the mid-19th Century who vigorously opposed slavery were termed Radical Republicans.

We may rightfully ask of Democrats: Will they ever learn? Sadly, if they have not in three different centuries, the prognosis is poor.

© Dennis Campbell

 

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