Necessary Changes To The Republican Party

Back in 2009, I did a series called Rebuilding the Republican Party in which I explained what the GOP needed to do to survive. They didn’t listen. And exit polling shows the GOP suffering from the exact same problems this time. Romney lost because of singles, youths, and minorities. This needs to change or forget ever winning again. It’s time to return to our ideological roots and promote the individual and individual freedom.

Let’s start by highlighting the problem. There is a belief in conservative circles that the country is much more conservative than liberal and we just need to win over conservative independents. This belief comes from polling which shows the country as 38% Democrats, 32% Republicans and 29% Independents, with independents leaning right. But “independents” turns out to be a meaningless category. Indeed, Romney won independents yet lost the election. What really matters are “moderates.”

In that regard, we find 35% conservatives, 25% liberals and 41% moderates. BUT, 60% of the “moderates” broke for Obama, meaning they are liberals. When you break this down, you find that 50% of Americans are conservatives and 50% are liberals. In other words, we're a 50/50 country. So forget the idea of tapping into a pool of hidden conservatives. If we want to move the needle, we need to look at the groups we lost overwhelmingly and we need to figure out ways to win back their more centrist members. Here's how...

● The Gender (read: “Single”) Gap: Women account for 53% of the electorate and Obama carried them by 11%. Romney carried men by 7%. But that doesn’t tell us what’s really going on. The real key is single people.

Romney won married men by 20% and married women by 6%. These two groups made up 29% and 31% of the electorate (60% in total). So how did he lose? He got blown away among singles. Indeed, Romney lost single men by 20% and single women by 40%! These two groups made up only 18% and 23% of the electorate, but the huge gaps made up the difference.

If the Republicans ever want to win again, they need to win more single people, particularly single women. To do that, we need to understand the problem. So realize this. First, Reagan won both groups (he won men by 28% and women by 10%). So there is nothing inherently “wrong” with singles being Republicans. Nor was there something wrong with Romney. McCain didn't face a “war on women” attack or smears about his father being a bigamist, and he did 3% worse with women than Romney. What this means is that the party has a structural problem which developed after Reagan.

When you look at polls or talk to these people, what you will hear is outrage/terror about the Republican Party’s various stances on social issues. This is particularly true with single women who are turned off by the party’s attacks on gays, its obsession with abortion and contraception, and its rhetorical attacks about “family values” which imply that only married people with kids and church-goers are moral.

The Solution: If the GOP wants to win singles, particularly single women, it needs to stop hating gays, it needs to stop conflating going to church or being married with being a good American, and it needs to stop obsessing over abortion. I recommend removing abortion from the platform or stepping it back to “safe, rare, restricted, and no government funding.” Leave the rest for churches to push, not government policy. And shoot the first person to talk about restricting other forms of contraception. . . Rick Santorum. I recommend making gay marriage a question of individual conscience (so as not to interfere with religious freedom) while putting support for civil unions and anti-discrimination laws in the platform. I recommend removing talk of the party believing in God and instead shifting to talking about protecting everyone's right to believe... in any religion or no religion. And I recommend eliminating all talk of constitutional amendments on any social issues -- that's pointless and whacky. Also stop signing those stupid fringy pledges! They're a trap.

● The Youth Vote: Romney won old people, but got crushed with the young. 19-29 year olds favored Obama by 26%. Even 30-44 year olds favored Obama by 10%. Together, they made up 46% of the electorate. The next 38% of the electorate were tied. Then Romney won oldsters by 12%. So there is a youth problem which the seniors don’t make up for.

The youth problem can be attributed to several things. On the one hand, the youth vote is the direct result of GOP stodginess and intolerance on issues like gays and abortion, and its lack of visible minorities. But more importantly, another huge turnoff is the GOP’s rhetorical attacks on college education and seeming unwillingness to help young people leave college without crushing levels of debt, i.e. without making them slaves to banks. The GOP’s attacks on internet freedom don’t help either. Nor does the GOP’s image as the party of Big Business. Indeed, many of these young people drifted to Ron Paul and then Gary Johnson and finally back to Obama because the GOP seemed to offer no hope that it cared about people rather than corporations.

The Solution: It’s time to understand that these are issues of economic freedom. I recommend the GOP come up with a genuine plan to (1) help every American go to college while (2) reducing the cost of college so young people aren’t enslaved for the first 20 years of their economic lives. Don't forget, government caused this problem. I recommend supporting total internet freedom and fighting censorship in any form. That means dropping the heinous idea of regulating the internet to promote morality (i.e. “protecting children”) or doing the bidding of corporate America through anti-piracy laws. I also recommend that conservatives stop defending big companies. Talk about people, not companies. Fight cronyism in any form. Talk about the American dream!! Our party should be focused on helping average people strive to make their lives better, to build a business, buy a house, send their kids to college... not protecting the balance sheets of multinational corporations. All of these are conservative values, so why aren't we doing them already?

● The Minority Gap: The minority gap is beyond critical. Obama won Hispanics by 44%, Asians by 45%, blacks by 88% and Muslims by 70%. Muslims and Asians only make up 2% and 3% of the public, but blacks make up 13% of the electorate and Hispanics make up 11% of the electorate, and growing. There are several glaring problems here.

● Asians are generally industrious, business-minded and education-minded, which should make them natural GOP allies, especially as liberal affirmative action is hurting Asian students in California. How did we lose them by 45%? Because the party comes across as hostile to non-whites. Moreover, the party has offered nothing in the way of education and its focus on “business” has been on oil companies, not small businesses.

The Solution: Court these voters. Also, we need to rediscover the American dream. We need to protect the little guy and not worry about the big guy. Warren Buffett and Wall Street can take care of themselves, and they don't like us anyway.

● For a party that claims to cherish religious freedom, Muslims should be natural allies. But they aren’t. Why not? Because of open bigotry by conservatives, be it accusing all Muslims of being terrorists, to careless talk about bombing the Middle East, to paranoid freak-outs about the appointment of a single Muslim judge to a meaningless municipal judgeship.

The Solution: It’s time to start mentioning Islam along with other religions when talking about religious freedom, and it’s time to stop pushing symbolic ideas like banning sharia law (which can’t be put in place under our constitution in any event).

● Blacks and Hispanics should be much closer to 50/50, but they aren’t. Again, the problem is the appearance of bigotry. Conservatives treat blacks and Hispanics like unpleasant neighbors who need to be humored every four years. They do not treat them like part of the family. They use hyperbolic speech, they are afraid to speak the truth and they talk down to these people as if they are children. They even make bizarre racial-tinged attacks on things like rap music and “ghetto culture.” When they conduct outreach, it’s a token appointment of the whitest black/Hispanic guy in the room to a meaningless position, or it’s an attempt to go along with some Democratic plan to buy loyalty.

On Hispanics, conservatives have created a serious problem with talk of deportation. Polls show that 60% of Hispanics know someone who is here illegally. That makes deportation a personal danger to them. Making this self-inflicted wound worse, talk of deportation is just gratuitous because it won’t happen. Moreover, conservatives talk in racist terms about Hispanics. They imply that all Hispanics are here illegally. They imply that all Hispanics are criminals. And they imply that all Hispanics are the same.

The Solution: Fixing the Hispanic problem will require a radical change in thinking. We need to realize that deportation isn’t going to happen, so learn to accept the idea that these illegals are here to stay. The GOP needs to go on a “listening tour” in the Hispanic community (so they get credit for acting) and then propose an amnesty – don’t wait for Obama. AND conservatives need to shut the hell up about it. The more they whine, the less credit conservatives will get for having changed. Until we do this, we are just delaying the inevitable and we’re making the wound bigger.

The GOP also needs to conduct real outreach. Every Congressman should hire Spanish-speaking staffers whose job would be to do what they do for everyone else, i.e. meet with Hispanic constituents every day of the year and help them get benefits, get permits, and get through the immigration system. They need to actively court Hispanic business owners and hook them up with their other donors. They need to encourage their friends in the banking industry to make loans to these people. They need to court mothers with children by telling them about the educational reforms they want. Start winning them over, one vote at a time, day after day in a thousand districts across the country.

They need to do the same with blacks. Even a 5-10% shift would be seismic.

Finally, they need to appoint a LOT of Hispanic, black, young and female Republicans to prominent positions. Right now there are basically none. I also think the next Republican presidential ticket must include a dark-skinned Hispanic and a youngish woman. This will help with minorities, with single women and with the young.

Conclusion

The GOP can turn this around, but they need to take decisive action. I'm not saying to become libertarians. Their obsession with drugs, conspiracies and their inability to recognize a proper role for government make them too far gone. But we need to offer people something better than the message of: (1) we fear minorities, (2) we want to control single women, (3) we only like married Christians, (4) we hate college kids, and (5) the American dream is to be a slave of corporate America.

Conservatism needs a reboot. It’s time to talk about personal economic freedom, the freedom to build the American dream on a level playing field. It’s time to fully include minorities in that dream. And it’s time to stop undercutting that message by acting like the morality police. It’s time to give people a reason to support us, not fear us.

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Democrats Prove Smarter At Platform Making

The platform issue has been frustrating, if truth be told. The Republican platform, as always, was a mess. It was fringey and utterly obsessed with social conservative issues. The Democratic platform is not a mess. Yes, their ideology is horrible, but they are much smarter about how they present it.

The Democratic platform begins with a whole bunch of misleading points. Apparently, under Obama, your taxes went down $3,600 despite the constant tax increases as well as Obama’s repeated attempts to repeal the Bush tax cuts. And Obama wants you to know that Romney wants to raise your taxes! Obama also helped small businesses by giving them tax breaks to buy healthcare under Obamacare. He made Medicare “stronger” by “saving” $4,200 per senior by cutting $700 billion from Medicare. Not to mention, he fixed the doughnut hole in coverage (which was fixed under Bush). And don’t forget, he saved the auto industry! They even claim he “restored fiscal sanity” by reducing the deficit by $4 trillion. . . total lie.

Obama signed free trade agreements and told China to stop manipulating their currency. Never mind, the Democrats stopped those treaties until the Republicans forced the issue and China laughed Obama off. He also ended lobbying. . . although leftist Politico just ran an article talking about how nothing has really changed for lobbyists.

The platform also makes a slew of promises to each interest group they have. It promises money for HIV/AIDS research to help black and Latino men. Obama’s wants to hire 100,000 new teachers and spend more on Head Start. He “saved” $60 billion for the student loan program by pushing banks out of the process and he “invested” some of that money in Historically Black Colleges and he wants to increase the amount you can borrow under student loans -- thereby making the problem of affordability worse, rather than better.... but college kids are too stupid to realize that.

He wants the Federal government to hire 100,000 Americans with disabilities by 2015. He wants to buy biofuels to get the votes of farmers, and he mentions that he’s brought them record profits (forget the harm this has done to consumers). He supports the government working with faith-based organization, which he identifies as “critical allies in meeting the challenges that face our nation and our world – from domestic and global poverty, to climate change and human trafficking.” Obama also wants to stop voter ID laws which he claims stop blacks from voting. He wants to give companies incentives to hire wounded veterans. He wants civil rights laws for gays, gay marriage, and equal pay laws for women, and he wants free “prenatal screenings, mammograms, cervical cancer screening, breast-feeding supports, and contraception” for women.

But more importantly, the platform is written in code so that each interest group can see the promises they are getting, but the overall statement sounds very reasonable to the uninitiated. Here are some great examples:

● For the environmentalists, he wants an “all of the above energy plan” based on new emission rules and fuel efficiency standards to make alternative energies more profitable. In other words, he claims to love all forms of energy while promising to make oil and gas so expensive no one wants to use it.

● He wants to “out-build” the world on infrastructure and talks vaguely about “standing up for workers” through the National Labor Relations Board. Again, if you don’t know what he’s talking about it, it sounds like he’s concerned with all workers, but he’s only talking to unions.

● He promises to stabilize the housing market to punish “irresponsible lenders [who] tricked buyers into signing subprime loans” by allowing every “responsible homeowner” to refinance. Forget that no one got tricked into these loans and the people who need refinancing aren’t responsible homeowners. This is a bribe hidden as protection from predators.

● Consider the issue of abortion. Here is what the platform says:

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. We also recognize that health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. We strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child by providing affordable health care and ensuring the availability of and access to programs that help women during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including caring adoption programs.

Notice how reasonable this sounds. The word abortion is only used twice here, as compared to the Republican platform which couldn’t stop talking about it. Notice also how rather than talking up abortion, this very much reads like it seeks to curb abortion and notice how it ends with an insistence on protecting women who choose to have a child. This isn’t consistent with their normal rhetoric at all or their voting records, but it certain comes across as reasonable, not-obsessed and not extreme. Do you see the words "government financed"? No, huh? It's in there under "regardless of ability to pay."

● Guns are similar. How often have we seen Democrats try anything they could to take away gun rights. Look at liberal cities that even banned guns. Yet, the platform says “We recognize that the individual right to bear arms is an important part of the American tradition, and we will preserve Americans’ Second Amendment right to own and use firearms. We believe that the right to own firearms is subject to reasonable regulation.” Again, this sounds quite reasonable and never hints at their obsession, unless you know the idiosyncratic meaning of the words they are using.

● Internet freedom is another good example. Whereas the Republicans spoke of censoring the internet for the children, the Democrats talk about defending internet freedom and “opposing the extension of intergovernmental controls over the Internet.” Forget that they are the driving force behind interjecting the government through net neutrality laws and they joined all the anti-piracy SOPA stuff.

● Finally, we come to immigration. The Democrats have been the party of open borders, of sanctuary cities, of amnesty, of benefits to illegals, and of opposition to anything that might integrate immigrants into America. Indeed, even suggesting that immigrants learn English is enough to be branded a racist by the Democrats. Yet, they say this:

Democrats know there is broad consensus to repair that system and strengthen our economy, and that the country urgently needs comprehensive immigration reform that brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and requires them to get right with the law, learn English, and pay taxes in order to get on a path to earn citizenship.

That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Too bad, this isn't the Democratic position.

As I said above, these platforms have been an exercise in frustration. The Republicans couldn’t stop talking about abortion and taking extremist positions whenever one was available, and the Democrats’ platform is packed with lies and distortions. But I have to hand it to the Democrats that their platform sounds reasonable. . . unless you know what each word really means when translated into policy.

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The Republican Platform: Fringey Stupid

Oh boy. I’ve gotten a look at the Republican platform and let me tell you, while the common sense folks of the Tea Party are making progress all over the country, the fringers who make up the inner sanctum of the Republican cult remain safely ensconced in their bunker. . . untouched by reality. Check this out.

● Priority Number One: The Economy! Well, no. Of the 18 “ideas” listed, not one of them involves improving the economy. Why? Because the retarded chimps who put this platform together don’t care about the economy. What do they care about? Read on.

● Priority Number One: Repealing Obamacare! Well, no. That’s number six on the list, after such high priority issues like “making the internet family friendly.” Yes, you read that right. These dipsh*ts think it is more important to let people know that the Republican Party wants to censor the internet than it is to repeal Obamacare.

● The Homosexual Menace: So what is the first priority listed? This year’s most important priority, apparently, will be stopping gays from marrying. Why? Because “studies” show that children from married couples stay off drugs, get married and don’t commit crimes. Ergo, gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry. Don’t worry if that makes no sense, just accept the idea that Jesus hates gays. By the way, this same group of the self-righteous is opposed to civil unions too because gays are yucky.

● Fix Welfare. . . Somehow: Next our slow friends have decided that welfare doesn’t work, especially because Obama wants to discourage people on welfare from working. So they want someone, somewhere to fix the current system somehow to encourage people to work. . . which it already does.

● Internet “Freedom”: Apparently, the platform will include some highly technical sounding, yet utter nebulous plan to support internet freedom. Reading the definition will make your head spin, but the lawyer in me had to laugh at all the caveats and interest group sops already obvious in the definition. It sounds like the Republican “internet freedom” platform will be about protecting ISPs (who support Republicans) over net companies (who support Democrats). Any freedom resulting from this will be purely coincidental.

And just in case some freedom should accidentally result, the platform makes sure you can't misuse your freedom because it includes a nifty little section on censoring the internet to make it “family friendly.” See, the internet is EVIL. Apparently, “millions of Americans suffer from . . . pathological gambling” and “the Internet must be made safe for children.” So it’s time to shut down gambling sites, ban sex offenders from the internet, and force ISPs to save the children. . . all “while respecting First Amendment rights.” No, I’m not making this sh*t up.

● Americans with Disabilities: Forget the economy, it’s more important that we make sure Americans with disabilities are included in all aspects of our national life. Well, not all aspects. In fact, all we really care about is two things: (1) we need to force insurers and doctors to treat people with disabilities (I’m told doctors in particular like to tease the disabled with fake cures), and (2) when will somebody finally stop the government from taking children away from people with disabilities? Seriously! This national crisis just dominates the news and it's time someone had the courage to address this! Be brave Platform monkeys, be brave.

Oh, we should also support some nebulous sounding employment programs which we didn’t have the time to examine, but their titles sound nice.

● Repealing Obamacare/Abortion: Finally, we come to repealing Obamacare. Why repeal it? Well, because it’s not right. Also, “Through Obamacare, the current Administration has promoted the notion of abortion as healthcare. We, however, affirm the dignity of women by protecting the sanctity of human life. Numerous studies have shown that abortion endangers the health and well-being of women, and we stand firmly against it.” Yep, they talk about repealing Obamacare because it promotes abortion.

● Fixing Our Healthcare/Abortion: So how do we fix the nation’s healthcare? Simple: “health is an individual responsibility” and people need to take better care of themselves. That means you fatboy! “Chronic diseases [are] related to lifestyle [and] drive healthcare costs.” So we need to “promote healthy lifestyles.” No doubt, these will be based on being abortion-free and internet porn free. And lest you think I’m joking, two paragraphs into this one, they call upon states to stop “subsidies for abortion.” I guess abortion makes you fat.

Then they give the usual sop to insurance companies (big Republican contributors), which is the worst thing we could do other than what Obama did, and they want science to save us by making record keeping cheaper. Maybe we should ban 16 oz. drinks?

● More Abortion: Then we do two more “healthcare” related points – “supporting” research and protecting individual conscience in healthcare. The first involves banning stem cell treatments and stopping abortion, and the second involves stopping abortion. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

● Reforming the EPA: Oops, sorry, the EPA is cool. . . everybody likes the EPA. We need to reform the FDA. Why? Because drug companies are Republican contributors and they are having a hard time with the current EPA.

● Oops, forgot, more Healthcare: Yes, we’ve mentioned healthcare several times, but we forgot to mention that we want to reduce costs through tort reform. That should fix everything, even though Andrew pointed out that tort reform will only cut a couple billion dollars in a multi-trillion dollar system. Yep. . . problem solved! (Especially once we stop fat people from getting abortions.)

● Education: We’re opposed to “the crippling bigotry of low expectations.” Hell, who isn't?! So how do we fix that? We want reform! But we don’t believe in one-size-fits all, so we can’t really tell you what we want, but it must involve traditional values.

● “Fixing” College Costs: College costs suck. They are “unsustainable.” We should get private companies to issue student loans (fyi: they already do) and we should tell people more about what they are paying (fyi: they already know). Also, maybe not everyone should go to college? Problem solved!

● Prison Reform: Yes, this issue which just dominates the nation’s headlines day after day after day finishes this amazing platform. Basically, we support what we’ve been doing because liberals oppose it and that makes it reform. Yay reform!

● Other Points: Also, while we're at it, let's keep them dirty Mexicans out and let's think about the gold standard because the 500% inflation in the price of gold in the past decade sure makes gold seem awfully stable!


There you have it. A declaration of idiocy. This is the kind of document I would have written if I wanted to lampoon the Republican Party as being dominated by cultists. Gays, abortion, abortion, abortion, some stuff nobody cares about, abortion, stupidity and the status quo described as reform. Not only has this gang of fornicating monkeys completely missed the issues of the day, they’ve proven that (1) they remain obsessed with gays and abortion, (2) they are obsessed with controlling everyone’s private lives, and (3) they know NOTHING. At least they didn’t include Islamophobia or suggest that women get pregnant and stop taking jobs that belong to men. I guess that's something.

It’s time to purge the party of its moronic fringe and force the party hierarchy to at least join the 20th Century, if not the 21st. Fortunately, Romney doesn’t believe any of this crap and is more likely to wipe his butt with this document than he is to read it.

As an aside, if you want to know what the platform should have looked like, how about this:

1. Replace Obamacare with free market healthcare.
2. 10% across the board cut in federal spending and federal wages.
3. Flat tax.
4. Strict anti-lobbying/graft laws.
5. Repeal of all regulations not necessary for public safety.
6. Comprehensive immigration reform.
7. School choice using vouchers.
8. Internet Anti-Censorship Law plus Privacy Rights.
9. Banning government funding for abortion, imposing reasonable restrictions and otherwise leaving this decision to the individual.

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Republican Wacko Should Resign Now

This is going to be a nasty article and some of you won’t like it. I don’t care. I’m finding myself really pissed off at the retard who will be representing our side in the Missouri Senate Primary. His name is Todd Akin and he seemed pretty decent until his dogma shut down his brain. He needs to resign.

Akin was asked this weekend during a television interview about his view on whether or not abortion should be allowed in the case of rape. His answer was this:

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

By which he meant that victims rarely get pregnant from “legitimate rapes.” He then stated that he thinks abortion should be banned in the case of rape.

Uh... f*ck you.

First of all, what is a legitimate rape? And what kind of piece of sh*t would believe that rape comes in degrees of legitimacy? I hate the word “insensitive,” but I can’t imagine a better use for it than the way Akin just smeared rape victims. This is so reminiscent of Texas gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams, who obnoxiously said about the rain: “It’s a lot like rape. As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

That a human being would utter either of these statements is frankly incomprehensible to me. How f*cked up do you need to be to believe that only certain rapes matter or that rape is something women should enjoy? Where does the Republican Party keep finding these sex-obsessed troglodytes?

Secondly, what is this crap that somehow the female body “has ways to shut the whole thing down”? Where does this medical quackery come from? If a doctor said this, they would lose their medical license for incompetence. If a teenager said this, we would laugh at them for being stupid. Yet here a grown “man” says this? This is dogma, this is not science. This is a man who believes in witchcraft, who sees women as unclean deceivers, and who fears the atheists under his bed. This is not a man whose judgment can be trusted. This is the kind of crap which gives Christians a bad name.

Akin, of course, apologized for this obscenity, but this is one of those moments where you can’t un-ring a bell. We now know what he believes, and this is not a man I would want near any female I knew and I sure as heck don’t want him in a position to represent my side of the aisle on women’s issues. He is unfit and needs to resign.

And let me say, this is exactly why young professional women will never vote Republican, but that’s not even what bothers me here. What bothers me is that a man with a Fourteenth Century understanding of sexual relations could be chosen to serve in the United States Senate. He needs to resign. If he doesn’t, I will support McCaskill.

Conservatives need to rid themselves of these people.

And while I’m at it, let me say that if you believe women should be forced to carry children to term when they’ve been raped, then you are wrong. There is no legal or moral justification for your position. You are suggesting sexual slavery. You are suggesting that you have the right to victimize these women every single day until they give birth because you think your religion tells you to use the force of law to control others. You are wrong.

UPDATED: It is now being reported that Akin will resign. Good. But there's one more bit to add to the story. The mouth-breathers at the Family Research Council have been giving strong support to Akin throughout the day. Their president Tony Perkins claims this is nothing more than an attempt to distract from the record of that unclean woman Claire McCaskill and Satan’s workshop at Planned Parenthood. Pathetic. Seriously, if you don't see the problem with this, then there is something wrong with you.

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My Advice To Social Conservatives

I said last week that social conservatives have not done a great job winning over the public on social issues. There are some minor advances here and there, but for every advance there is full retreat in some other area. I think a change of strategy is called for on all fronts.

Let me start with three broad principles:

● Principle One: It’s time to get rational about the goals social conservatives want to achieve and how to achieve them. This means putting an end to pie-in-the-sky ideas like constitutional amendments to force change. Not only is that easily lampooned in light of the conservative claim to states’ rights, but it’s pointless because there is simply no way to get any constitutional amendment through the Congress and then passed by enough states. It is impossible, and talking about it wastes time and diverts resources from better causes. Moreover, talking about changing the constitution, scares the public, who will automatically see this as extreme and dangerous. So drop the idea of trying to solve everything with one shot and learn the art of incrementalism, i.e. achieving your goal little by little. This isn’t sexy, but it’s the only effective way to achieve controversial goals under our system.

● Principle Two: Drop the harsh rhetoric. The fiery pulpit speeches may work well in church, but the public sees them differently. To the public, they are evidence that social conservatives are hateful people who can’t deal with the modern world and who want to judge everyone else. This is a self-inflicted wound.

● Principle Three: You can’t win with religion-based arguments. Those simply don’t work with the modern public because the vast majority of the public doesn’t see the Bible as the thing which runs their day-to-day lives. Indeed, while 90% of the public claims to believe in God, only 40% claim to go to church “regularly” (there is reason to believe the real number is closer to 20%). And even of those who go, there is a disconnect between what the churches teach and how people live their lives -- the classic example of this are Catholics, who love the Pope, but ignore his rules. And even then, different denominations and different religions have different views about what their religion tells them, e.g. some accept gay marriage, some don’t. So premising arguments on religion is a bad start because you lose most of your audience. Moreover, in making these arguments, social conservatives end up bypassing the stronger arguments they should be making.

Ok, now let’s look at specific policies.

● Abortion: Abortion is an area where social conservatives are largely doing it right because they’ve adopted incrementalism. In the 1980s and early 1990s, abortion opponents kept looking for the home run, and it never came. It wasn’t until they learned to take the issue step by step that they began to make progress. The goal right now should be to entirely eliminate public funding, which is what keeps the abortion lobby alive, and to impose restrictions which the public will find reasonable.

One thing that needs to be dropped is this ridiculous idea of extending 14th Amendment rights to fetuses. Not only does this scare people, and thus is counterproductive, but it cannot pass, and it is almost the classic example of unintended consequences. Give fetuses rights and they can sue pregnant women if they don’t stop smoking or drinking or otherwise fail to follow doctor’s orders. This is a Pandora’s box of legal insanity which liberal interest groups will gleefully use to invade families. Think twice people.

● Gays: The gay marriage battle is lost. Yes, it won’t gain any more support in conservative states for the moment, but this issue is inevitable because the younger public really doesn’t see gays as a threat. Indeed, gays have pretty much proven there is nothing to fear from gay marriage. So so-cons better find proof fast to refute this.

A better strategy would be to switch over to a religious freedom argument. Right now, social conservatives have let themselves by placed on the wrong side of the gay marriage debate because gays have argued they are the ones seeking “freedom.” The reality is they have freedom and they are really seeking to use government power to impose their beliefs on others. But so-cons aren’t arguing that. Instead, they talk about “morality,” which is a loser. What they need to do is argue the religious freedom aspect, i.e. that gays are seeking to take away freedom by forcing others to accept them. Americans always vote for whoever is offering the greater freedom, so-cons need to learn to explain this better.

I also recommend giving serious thought to getting the government out of the marriage business entirely, as I discussed HERE.

● Drugs: Social conservatives are losing the drug war, particularly marijuana, because they’ve adopted the wrong argument. They’re arguing that drugs are bad for you/society. But that’s a nanny state argument. And indeed, the pro-pot people have merely had to argue that pot isn’t that bad to slowly win over a near-majority. The better argument involves civil freedoms. If we allow people to take drugs, then we either need to change negligence laws dramatically (in ways people really won’t like), or we will end up imposing huge costs on employers, employees and the economy because of the need for widespread drug testing. Why? Because any company that makes any product or provides any service which can injury someone (i.e. any company) will need to take steps to ensure that their workers are not high when they are working. That means widespread drug testing of everyone with a job. Right now the argument is “should the government be allowed to stop Person X from smoking pot at home.” But the argument should be, “are YOU willing to undergo constant drug testing to protect your employer from lawsuits just because the government decides to legalize drugs for the few who want it?” That’s a very different matter. I’ve discussed this HERE.

● Religious Freedom: This one’s a can of worms. A lot of social conservatives are going down a very dangerous path with the idea of religious freedom laws. Specifically, they are pushing bills which prohibit employers from stopping employees from engaging in religious practices or wearing religious items, e.g. crucifixes. This should send up huge red flags for conservatives. For one thing, conservatives have opposed employment-discrimination-based lawsuits almost across the board when it comes to gays, blacks, women and disability. Why make an exception for religion? Shouldn’t a private employer be entitled to impose whatever restrictions they want on the people they pay to be their employees? Can’t the employees just go elsewhere if they don’t like it?

Further, there is an obvious flaw here which social conservatives are overlooking because they tend to equate the word “religion” with their brand of Christianity: our Constitution doesn’t allow discrimination amongst religions. Thus, if you give people absolute power to act out their religious beliefs at work, that would include things like the wearing of the Islamic veil or separation of men and women, the handling of snakes, the smoking of peyote and whatever other crazy ideas these fringe religions can dream up.

This also applies to things like prayer in schools. If you seek legislation to allow that nice Protestant Principal to say a prayer each morning, except that your kids may also find themselves forced to sit through an Islamic prayer or Buddhist ritual or even an atheist’s speech. Unless you want other religions forced upon you and your children, it is best to always keep in mind that any new power you give yourself can be used by others as well.

Frankly, the best bet here is to vote with your feet and your wallets. Don’t support businesses which are hostile to your religious beliefs. Do support friendly ones. Stop seeing movies, watching television shows, or buy videogames with bad messages in them. Use the power of boycott. Send your kids to religious schools and volunteer to make sure those schools are the best (a shining example). In this regard, support legislation which lets federal money follow the students to whatever schools they choose -- trust people to make the right choices rather than trying to use the government to force the right choices upon them. Remember, you have to win people over, you can’t force them to believe what you want them to believe.

The big takeaway here is that social conservatives need to learn to speak to people who don’t share their religious beliefs -- framing things in religious terms simply will not work for anyone who doesn’t agree with your religious beliefs. They need to learn that a thousand small victories are better than the false hopes of complete victory in fell swoop. And they need to think more about the unintended consequences of the policies they propose and they need to realize that others will get to use the same powers they create in the law.

Thoughts?


P.S. Don't forget, it's Star Trek Tuesday at the film site.
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Democratic Wedge Issues

I said a long time ago that the Democratic Party really isn’t a political party anymore. It’s become a collection of tribes held together by some common interests. The thing is, their common interests are really quite narrow and they glossed over significant disagreements in forming the coalition. Recent events, such as Obama’s embrace of gay marriage against the wishes of blacks and Romney’s discussion of education with Hispanics highlight this more than ever. It’s time for conservatives to start driving wedges into this coalition.

Conservatives need to spot the disagreements that were glossed over and start pointing those out relentlessly. The idea would be to cause enough friction within the Democratic alliance that the party ruptures into ineffective smaller groups. Here are some thoughts on where those disagreements might be and how to attack them.

1. Gays v. Feminists: At one point, gays should have been natural allies of conservatives. Conservatives believe in less government and individual rights, and the problems gays faced until the mid-1980s were sodomy laws, which made gay relationships criminal. But now that those laws have been struck down, the gay agenda has switched to forcing others to accept their lifestyles. That puts gays at odds with conservatism. Feminists similarly are at odds with conservatives because they too favor big government schemes to reshape society. So neither groups is likely winnable for conservatives. But that doesn’t mean we can’t drive a wedge between them.

The big issue for feminists is abortion. And as I mentioned the other day when discussing sex selection (something Planned Parenthood just got caught promoting), abortion means the end of homosexuality once genetics locates the “gay gene.” It would behoove conservatives to keep pushing this idea to the gay community that abortion = gay-genocide, and suggesting they seek to limit abortion.

2. Blacks v. Feminists: Blacks have very much tied themselves to the Democrats by making themselves wards of the state. Through either direct money transfers to poor blacks or race-based preferences in loans, housing, schools and jobs for middle and upper-class blacks, blacks as a group have come to rely on the government. So they are unreachable as a group. But as I pointed out the other day, abortion is killing blacks in massive numbers compared to all other races. Conservatives need to beat this drum that abortion = black-genocide to separate them from feminists. It would also be smart of conservatives to start pointing out that affirmative action has by far benefited upper-to-middle class white women more than it has blacks. This has the potential to set up a bloody fight between feminists and blacks over how to divide the spoils of affirmative action.

3. Blacks v. Gays: Blacks as a group are socially conservative when it comes to gays. Conservatives should push the message to blacks that the Democratic Party, which is dominated by the gay lobby, is looking to force the gay agenda on them and their churches.

4. Hispanics v. Everyone: Hispanics are an odd group to be jammed into the Democratic coalition. They are socially conservative and largely Catholic, yet the Democratic Party hates religion (atheists) and is dominated by the gay lobby (gay marriage) and feminists (contraception). Moreover, they are the second biggest victims of abortion, so they should be uneasy with that too (feminists). Unions have worked hard to keep them out of the country, to keep them from getting jobs, and have kept them out of the well-paying union jobs. Further, as Romney noted, the teachers unions are hurting their kids. They run a large number of small businesses, who find themselves attacked by unions, who are unable to obtain financing from the Democrats’ Wall Street friends, and who are crushed by environmental and labor regulations. Each of these issues should be made clear to them.

5. Bankers v. Socialists: By and large, the Democratic rank and file hate business, hate capitalism, and HATE banks. They despise Wall Street. Yet, most of the money the Democrats get comes from that very same Wall Street. And right now, Wall Street is upset at being vilified by the Democrats. Conservatives should keep pushing the Democrats on this point. They should force elected Democrats to make a choice, support Wall Street or do the bidding of the rank and file, by bringing up legislation which splits this coalition, such as elimination of banking fees. The more the Democrats are made to dance, the greater the chance they will lose one group or the other.

6. Environmentalists v. Farmers/Miners/Workers: Since the days of FDR, the Democrats have done their best to buy farmers, coal miners, and skilled-labor workers with government handouts. But in the past thirty years, as ivory tower intellectuals and white-collar professionals have come to dominate the Democratic Party, they’ve adopted environmentalism as a religion, and with it they’ve put in place insane rules which cripple farmers, miners and workers. It’s time for Republicans to push this issue hard. They need to point out to auto-workers in Detroit and coal miners in West Virginia how much regulation the Democrats have imposed on their fields and what the cost is and why this lets China steal their jobs. Also point out how Democratic friends like GE are shipping their jobs overseas. Similarly, Republicans need to become fluent in the regulatory burden imposed on farmers and they need to go farm by farm explaining to these people how the Democratic agenda is crushing them.

7. The Elderly v. the Poor: The elderly are abandoning the Democrats already, and Republicans need to help push that along. Republicans specifically need to talk about Medicare. Fewer and fewer doctors are willing to take Medicare because it doesn’t pay enough. Despite this, Obama plans to steal another $500 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare and its subsidies to the poor. Republicans need to make this clear that the Democrats are stealing from the elderly to hand out the money to other groups.

8. Jews: The Republicans have had little success winning over Jews. There are two reasons for this. First, many Jews are simply scared of the Religious Right starting a second inquisition. I know that specific outreach has begun on this issue and that needs to continue. More importantly, as I mentioned with Hispanics the other day, Republicans have wrongly been treating Jews as a single-issue people, with that issue being Israel. But Israel clearly isn’t that strong of a pull. A better approach would be to talk to them about issues like Medicare (which resonates in Florida), the attacks on Wall Street (which resonate in New York), and this: the Republicans need to establish a counterpart to the Anti-Defamation League to focus exclusively on all the anti-Semitism coming from the left these days. We’ve seen this at Media Matters, at OWS and just generally from the left.


If Republicans do these things right, they can create tremendous friction within the Democratic alliance, perhaps even enough to shatter the party. The way to do this is to relentlessly point out the issues above. Do that through targeted advertisements, in speeches, on webpages/blogs and through media stunts by having our talking heads demand explanations from the Democrats on these wedge issues. Further, the Republicans should start crafting legislative proposals which put the groups above on opposing sides and forces the Democrats to pick sides.

At the same time, as I said the other day, Republicans needs to start reaching out to each of these groups on the issues that we have in common. Even taking away 5% of Democrats would guarantee a permanent Republican super-majority.

Thoughts?

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So Is Abortion A Right Or Not?

We’re told abortion is a right. It’s no big deal. You’re just removing a collection of cells. . . a tumor. And to force a woman to have a child she doesn’t want is an outrage! It’s a violation of her human rights! Right? Then why do liberals want to restrict abortion now in certain cases?

The liberal position on abortion has been that abortion is a right. Indeed, they’ve argued since the 1960s that abortion is both a fundamental human right and an absolute right guaranteed under the Constitution. And when something is a right, that means you can exercise it without permission because if you needed the government’s permission to exercise a right, then it wouldn’t be a right, it would be a privilege which could be revoked at any time.

So riddle me this. How do we square the liberal position that abortion is a right with the newly-developing liberal position that women must be stopped from aborting fetuses for sex-selection reasons? Here’s the deal:

When people are given the chance to abort their babies, they do so for a variety of reasons. Those reasons include prejudices, like the preference for boys. This has been going on in China and India and other parts of Asia for decades now and has resulted in millions of missing girls. In China alone, 40 million women are missing from the current generation. That means there are 40 million men who will never find wives because they simply don’t exist because they were aborted. (LINK)

Well, now it’s happening in Canada and probably the United States. Indeed, many of these dirty foreigners who have come to these enlightened lands of abortion have apparently not given up their evil ways. Thus, a recent study in Canada found that while the ratio of first born children in Canada’s immigrant population was similar to what nature creates, the second child skewed significantly toward males and third children skew overwhelmingly toward males. In response, Canada made it illegal to obtain an abortion if the reason is sex selection -- otherwise there are no limits on abortion in Canada. The Economist and many liberal groups are now urging a similar law in the United States to prevent those dirty Canadians from sneaking across our borders to have illegal abortions. Oh the irony.

Think about this. If abortion is a right and you can have it for any reason, then how can the government decide that you can’t have one if you are trying to off a girl? Does this make sense to you? Either abortion is a right or it is not, and if the government is going to tell you that you can have an abortion for any reason whatsoever except reasons they don’t like, then it’s not really a right anymore, is it? And if forcing a woman to have an unwanted child is akin to slavery, as many liberals have argued, how is it any less slavery just because you don't want them to get rid of girls? Is there really "good slavery"?

The reality is that liberals don’t see abortion as a right, they see it as a tool for social engineering to help women economically. And when that goal clashes with other liberal social engineering goals, abortion must give way to the cause. Maybe, it’s time we called them on this and demanded that they clarify how this can be a right if they can restrict it when they don’t like how it gets used?

Moreover, perhaps it’s time to point out other problems with abortion to our liberal friends to split their coalition. For example, as I told you a long time ago, once science locates the gay gene, that will be the end of gays because the combination of abortion plus being able to identify gay children will mean parents will eradicate gay children. Other traits will probably follow as well as we learn to identify unwanted traits. Perhaps we should ask gays how they feel about this?

Similarly, I suspect that blacks will soon catch on that they are the biggest victims of abortion. There have been 50 million abortions in the US since 1973. And while 60% of those have been whites, blacks are disproportionately more likely to have an abortion. In 2004, for example, there were 50 abortions per 1,000 black women, 28 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women, and 11 abortions per 1,000 white women. So blacks were five times more likely than whites to be aborted. At some point, blacks will realize what this means and they will call this “genocide.” At that point, it would be easy to see calls to ban abortion for certain ethnic groups, wouldn’t it?

Perhaps the time has come to ask liberals to explain themselves on this issue?

Thoughts?


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“Post-Birth Abortion”. . . Seriously

Let’s talk about a shocker from the British Medical Journal. In a recent BMJ edition, Oxford University’s Francesca Minerva, a medical ethicist, and Alberto Giubilini, a bioethicist from the U. of Milan, argue in favor of “post-birth abortion.” Specifically, they advocate a right to kill newborn babies if they are disabled, unwanted, or if they would be too expensive for the family. Yes, you read that right.

Here is their argument:

1. Like an unborn child, a newborn has yet “to develop hopes, goals and dreams.” Thus, while the newborn is human, it is not yet “a person – someone with a moral right to life.”

2. In the case of disabled children. . . while the child may be happy, it will not reach the full potential of a normal child: “To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole. . . On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an (at least) acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion.” In other words, if you aren’t perfect, your don’t have a right to live.

3. Parents, siblings and society have goals that could be affected by the arrival of the child, and those goals should take precedence over the child’s rights. Therefore, “post-birth abortion” is justified if the mother “no longer has the time, money or energy to care for” the child.

Wow, chilling.

The abortion movement has always hidden behind the idea that fetuses aren’t “alive.” Ergo, aborting a fetus is not like killing a child and abortion is no big deal. This argument has worked to the extent we have been unable to define when life begins. That’s why many people are indifferent to early-term abortions, but oppose late-term abortions because the more the fetus looks like a human the more likely it is to be alive. That’s also why partial-birth abortion was such a disaster for feminists because no one could help but grasp that this was a child being killed.

But now Minerva and Giubilini lay bare the real thinking behind the pro-abortion position. They don’t care if the child is alive or not. All that matters to them is the economic progress of the mother.

Moreover, the mental gymnastics Minerva goes through are stunning. First, she redefines life to have value only if a person has “hopes, goals and dreams.” But that’s not really her test because babies have hopes, goals and dreams, as does my dog. What she’s really saying is life only has value when people have “hopes, goals and dreams” which she considers worthwhile. That is a justification for mass murder of undesirables.

And while she limits this to newborns to make her theory seems less dangerous to readers, the fact is her logic does not account for an age limit. Indeed, what difference does it make using her test if someone is 6 weeks, 6 years, or 6 decades old? If they don’t have the right “dreams”/goals to be considered human, then logically there is no reason they couldn’t be exterminated using her same justification. The sick, the infirm, those on welfare or without useful skills, or even old people who are beyond trying to achieve their goals could all be exterminated using her logic.

She also really twists herself to dismiss adoption as an alternative. Indeed, if the mother doesn’t want the child, why not just give it up for adoption? Well, Minerva says we can’t do that because adoption could cause undue psychological distress to the mother. Think about that. There is no psychological distress with killing your child, but there would be psychological distress in letting someone else have it. How sick is that?!

What she’s really worried about is that unless the doctor exterminates the child, the mother might want to keep it, and that would expose the atrocity of her theory once the mothers realized that these newborn things actually turn into people that matter.

Not surprisingly, our Hitlerian genius Minerva was shocked at the negative reaction, which included death threats. Boo hoo. She claims that her argument has been “taken out of its academic and theoretical context” and that she’s not advocating this policy. But the fact is, she is advocating this by issuing a paper in which she claims this is an ethically/ philosophically correct position. Whether she likes the backlash or not, she has tried to justify infanticide and she even provided the euphemism: “post-birth abortion” (as if you could abort something that has already happened).

Remember this the next time some abortion advocate tells you they only support abortion because “it’s not alive.”

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Rick Santorum’s Abortion Hypocrisy

I’m sick of talking about Santorum. He’s a sleazy socialist hiding behind religion. But if Republicans want to ensure that Obama gets a second term by picking him, then there’s not much I can do about it. Nevertheless, one of our readers has sent me two articles worth discussing. Why? Because they show just how hypocritical Santorum’s being on the pro-life issue.

The two big attacks on Romney by conservatives are his support for RomneyCare and that he’s supposedly soft on abortion.

As you all know, the beef with RomneyCare is that it included the same individual mandate as ObamaCare, which violates conservative principles. However, the attacks on Romney for RomneyCare are highly hypocritical because (1) he’s stated he will repeal ObamaCare, i.e. he’s not proposing to bring RomneyCare to the rest of the country, and (2) all of the conservative contenders who claim his support for RomneyCare makes him suspect (i.e. Gingrich and Santorum) not only supported the same individual mandate as a “conservative” idea until 2009, but they also supported massive expansions of the government’s role in the healthcare system including the creation of new medical coverage entitlements. In other words, they did the same and worse.

But today’s issue is the second issue, Santorum on abortion.

Romney claims to be pro-life. He wasn’t always. He says he became pro-life as a matter of conscience. Specifically, he states that after he got into office as governor, he was faced with an embryonic stem cell bill and decided, “I simply could not sign on to take human life.” He vetoed the bill, which would have authorized embryonic cloning, would have defined human life as beginning at implantation rather than fertilization, and would have made the morning-after pill available without a prescription. He thereafter promoted abstinence education and vetoed a bill which would have required Catholic hospitals to offer abortion-inducing drugs to rape victims.

But that’s not enough for Rick Santorum. Rick argues that Romney can’t really be pro-life because he wasn’t always pro-life. . . forget that Reagan and George W. Bush both claimed similar conversions on abortion. Think about the illogic of this: unless you are pro-life your entirely life, then Rick would forever tar you as pro-choice and therefore untouchable to Republican voters. That’s wrong and self-defeating on a great many levels. Indeed, how in the world can such an approach win anyone over when you’re telling people you will always view them with suspicion?

More importantly, let’s take a look at Rick’s own history on this issue.

On October 28, 1990, the Pittsburgh Press put out an article about young Rick Santorum, who was running for the House of Representatives. Rick was about to be elected in a huge anti-incumbent wave which wiped out people who supported the Bush/Darman budget ("no new taxes"). To fuel his campaign, Rick relied on religious conservatives to whom he promised he would outlaw abortion. So he was always pro-life, right? Actually, no.

Prior to the campaign, Rick put out a campaign manual in which he described himself as a “progressive conservative” who took no position on the issue of abortion. And a few months before that, Rick put out a paper in which he said that his opposition to abortion was limited only to the final three months of pregnancy, when the fetus was considered viable. That paper was quietly withdrawn when Santorum changed his mind. Said Rick: “For me, it was just a lot of education, a lot of soul-searching.”

In other words, he had a Romney moment. So why should we trust Rick any more than Romney? And how in the world can he argue that Romney’s conversion isn’t genuine?

There’s more.

In 1998, Bill Clinton tried to appoint a pro-abortion liberal activist to the Second Circuit. This appointment was considered important because conservatives believed it would put this person on the fast track to the Supreme Court. Indeed, Rush Limbaugh noted that Clinton was “putting her on a rocket ship to the Supreme Court.” Consequently, conservative Trent Lott delayed this person’s confirmation vote for more than a year, hoping to get the votes needed to block her. That ultimately failed when only 29 Republicans voted to oppose the nomination. These 29 include all the usual conservatives, including people the Tea Party now hates like Mitch McConnell and John McCain.

Ricky. . . staunchly anti-abortion Ricky. . . supported the Democrats and voted to confirm this person. That’s right. He went against the conservatives in the Senate to support a pro-abortion liberal activist, knowing she would likely end up on the Supreme Court. Who was Ricky’s friend? Sonia Sotomayor, who now sits on the Supreme Court as a reliable leftist -- just as conservatives predicted. Call me crazy, but I think Ricky would be beside himself with (self)righteous indignation if Romney had been the one supporting Sotomayor.

And Rick’s pro-abortion credentials aren’t finished there. In 1995, Rick endorsed pro-abortion “Republican” Arlen Specter in his run for President. Significantly, Specter made being pro-abortion a centerpiece of his campaign. Indeed, he referred to pro-life activists as a “fringe” group who had hijacked the Republican Party. Yet, Rick endorsed him in the primaries.

Rick then endorsed Arlen Specter again in 2000 against Tea Party conservative Pat Toomey. Ricky even did television ads for the pro-abortion, pro-big government, soon-to-switch parties Specter.

The point here is simple. Rick is a hypocrite. He’s denigrating Romney’s beliefs on a basis which applies equally to Rick himself, and he’s doing it so he can keep people from seeing the real sleazy, insider, influence-peddling, Big Government progressive that is Rick.

Support him if you want to, I won’t.

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I'm Not Second Guessing Your Repugnance!

Slow Joe is at it again. Last time he was calling Tea Party supporters terrorists. Before that he was calling women lacrosse players “gazelles” and complaining that “the wrong people end up collecting the women” in the financial crisis. Now he's praising China’s “repugnant” forced abortion policy.



Starting in the 1970s, China introduced a policy that limits families to one child per couple. This includes criminal sentences and forced abortions for parents who violate the policy. Ostensibly, this was done because China was facing an over population problem -- although China’s population was actually declining at the time the policy was put into place.



As an interesting consequence of this policy, China is now facing two of the world’s most extreme demographic problems. First, the elimination of several generations of young has left China with the world’s worst retirement problem, as China’s elderly population far outweighs its productive population (4 retirees per worker) -- this is much worse than in the United States (3 workers per retiree). Secondly, because the Chinese prefer boys over girls, this meant that mostly girls were aborted or killed as infants. Thus, China is about to face the problem that there are 40 million more eligible bachelors than there are wives. To get a sense of how large this problem is, consider that this is the same number of marrying age males in Britain, France and Germany combined. It is also the entire population of California.



China’s single-child policy is largely responsible for both of these problems and there is serious pressure to end the policy. Even China’s official press is questioning the policy, which is highly unusual. Moreover, last month, one entire province demanded a waiver of the policy. It seems that the policy will soon end.



So what does this have to do with us?



American liberals were initially big fans of China’s one-child policy. Why? Well, the 1970s was the age of the next Global Ice Age, the Population Bomb, and fantasies of global famine. We were all going to starve by 1992. And let’s face it, liberals have always loved Eugenics.



But at some point, most liberals realized that forced abortion was not a very defensible thing. So they decided that China’s policy was not something they could publicly praise, even though many continue to support it in private. Indeed, even now, you will occasionally find liberals who openly defend the policy. For example, there was a laughable AP article last month that claimed that girls had it better under the one-child policy than they did before. Of course, that’s only the girls who aren’t killed as children or fetuses and aren’t imprisoned or forced to abort their own children. Moreover, the article failed to grasp that economically, the whole premise of its argument was crap. But hey, these are liberals, what do you expect?



Enter Slow Joe Biden.



Biden is in China for reasons unknown, possibly to get him out of town until the election or maybe as collateral for our bonds or maybe he just got lost on his way to see Santa? And let me tell you, the Chinese are not pleased. They have already had to cut off one of his speeches because it was too idiotic to be translated. Then they asked him what he thought about China’s one-child policy. Here is what Joe said:

“The Obama administration strongly opposes all aspects of China's coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization. The vice president believes such practices are repugnant. He also pointed out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable. He was arguing against the one child policy to a Chinese audience.”

Oops, sorry, that’s what Biden’s spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said (and no, I did not make that name up). Here’s what Biden actually said:

“Your policy has been one which I fully understand--I'm not second-guessing--of one child per family.”

Feel free to compare the quotes, you may find a slight discrepancy. Either Barkoff is lying or Biden is “not second-guessing” China’s “repugnant” policy. . . or both. Who keeps letting this idiot out of his rubber room? Seriously, if I were Obama, I would have Biden shot to the moon and then get Huntsman to run as my VP.



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There Will Be No Gays In The Future

Oh boy, look at that title. People are going to go ape sh~t. Add in that this post touches upon abortion and maybe it’s time to head for the old bunker? No. It’s cold down there, and the television reception stinks. Let’s just plow ahead. When we started this blog ten months ago, one of the first articles I posted dealt with the reasons I felt that gays should be very cautious about joining hands with pro-abortion groups. In light of some recent statistical evidence out of China and India, it’s time to revisit that discussion.

At the start, let me say that I’m not talking today about the morality of abortion or homosexuality. So let’s leave those issues for other days. What I am talking about here is the intersection between political decisions today and the world of tomorrow. All I want to do is ask the question of whether or not there will be gays in the future.

Gendercide: The Parental War On Girls

In nature, there are around 105 males born for every 100 females. These numbers have been constant all over the world for many decades. Indeed, these numbers are so constant that scientists are now sure that this is nature’s way to ensure a 1 to 1 ratio at the time of puberty because males are more likely to die than females before reaching puberty.

But China and India are turning nature on its head. In China and India, there is a distinct preference for males. This has led to what has been called “Gendercide” in both countries. Girls in China and India are often considered too expensive to keep. They require a dowry to marry off and they are perceived as “leaving” the family to marry, whereas sons stick around to take care of the parents as they age. Thus, for a long time now, baby girls have often been murdered at birth or left to die (not coincidentally, this resulted in an abnormally high suicide rate among young mothers).

Until recently, however, the effects of this were not very pronounced on the population numbers. Indeed, as late as the 1980s, the sex numbers were only slightly skewed above the 105 to 100 ratio. But in the past decade or so, the effects have become shockingly obvious as the numbers have spiked. In China, the ratio of males to females in the younger generations now averages 124 to 100! In some provinces, this number is as high as 130.

To give you a sense of the magnitude of this problem, the China ratio will translate into 40 million surplus males (or missing females) of marrying age in 2020. That is equal to the total number of expected males of marrying age in Germany, France and Britain combined in 2020. That is also the same number of marrying age males expected to live in the United States in 2020. That’s really bad news for China, as single males mean crime and upheaval. And it could be even worse for China’s neighbors, as war is a great way to thin the male population and bride-napping is becoming big business in some parts of the world.

And before you blame China’s one child policy, that does not appear to be the problem. Indeed, India has a similar ratio, but no similar policy. South Korea hit 117 to 100. The Philippines hit 109. Even somewhat western countries like Serbia (108), Macedonia (108), Armenia (117), Azerbaijan (117), and Georgia (111) have reached unnatural levels. And lest you think this couldn’t happen here, there is evidence of similar ratios starting to appear in Asian-American communities.

So what has caused this sudden surge? Ultrasound equipment. The introduction of ultrasound has coincided with the spike in sex-selection based abortions. Indeed, this is borne out even within these countries, where abortions are much more prevalent where ultrasound machines are introduced. India has tried to combat this by making it illegal to abort a child to choose the sex of the child. But women have gotten around this by getting ultrasounds from one doctor and then having another abort the girls.

What all of this tells us is that people find early term abortion much more palatable than infanticide. We can conclude this because the preference for males has not changed in these countries, yet the number of abortions spiked with the introduction of ultrasound gear. That means that parents are much more willing to abort a fetus than they are to kill a child after it is born. Moreover, the massive numbers indicate that a shockingly large number of parents are willing to make this decision, perhaps as many as a third.

Gendercide Round II: The Coming Parental War On Gays

So what does this have to do with gays? Everything.

First, I accept the idea that homosexuality is genetic. I don’t accept this because gays claim to feel born that way. Indeed, our own justifications mean nothing when it comes to explaining human nature, because humans are inherently self-delusion and are extremely good at justifying their own behavior to themselves. What convinces me is the ever-more-proven fact that most of our impulses, especially when it comes to sex, are genetic in nature.

In fact, over the past few years, scientists have discovered that despite our culture’s obsession with skinniness, men and women do not prefer skinny partners. They prefer partners who have the “appropriate” proportion between hips and waist -- no matter what the size of the body. These results transcend culture, race and age, and, apparently, we don’t even consciously realize that we are using this as a search criteria. Similarly, a link has been found between race preferences and body fat percentage when people engage in interracial dating. Other recent studies have shown that all humans, again regardless of culture, find near-symmetry beautiful in humans (but not perfect symmetry, which we find disturbing). They have even found now that the biggest indicator of what will attract mates is smell, which may clue us in regarding the “genetic distance” and health of a potential partner. Interesting.

What all of this tells me is that our sexual impulses are hardwired by our genetic code, and that we are not even consciously aware of why we act the way we do. Thus, I have no reason to think that homosexuality isn’t anything more than a genetic variation.

Now here’s the catch. If this is true, then we will soon find the “gay gene.” If the gene can be repaired, then I have little doubt that parents will have it fixed before the child is born. Why? Because as genetics takes greater leaps into remaking the human being, we are already seeing parents opt for a variety of preferences. If it becomes common to remake children to be stronger or smarter or change their eye color, it will certainly become common to remove genetic defects that lead to diseases or other negative hereditary conditions -- like baldness or stuttering, for example. Under such circumstances, it is simply inconceivable that parents would leave in place a gay gene that gives the child impulses that run counter to what 97% of the general population possess.

In other words, even leaving morality out of this, it is inconceivable that parents would leave in place genes in their children that limit their chances of finding a happy mate to less than 3% of the population (a percentage that will shrink continually as other parents make similar choices).

More importantly, even if no fix is ever found for the gay gene, just being able to locate it will be enough to start the cascade of abortions that will eliminate homosexuality. Indeed, if parents think nothing of eliminating baby girls because they want to control the sex of the child, there is no reason to think that they would be any more troubled in eliminating children with the gay gene, especially if devices like ultrasound allow for the clearly more palatable choice of early term abortion.

Thus, it is likely that parents will start to eliminate homosexuality from our species through these practices, and I suspect that there will be no significant amount of homosexuality within a few generations.

Can this be stopped? Probably not. If you make abortion a right, then you can’t really say “except where we don’t like your reasoning.” Indeed, as I noted in my first article on this, Sweden has now ruled that if abortion is to be a right, then the state cannot prohibit sex selection as a motive. And even if you did prohibit abortion based on the presence of the gay gene, how do you keep parents from doctor shopping as they do in India?

Should this be stopped? I guess that’s up to you. But if you’re gay, then you might want to reconsider who your political friends are. Maybe helping to make abortion a right is not a great idea. In fact, as China and India are demonstrating now, maybe letting people select the “options” their kids will have is not a great idea for anyone?


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Senator Exposes Himself!

Ever since Reagan swept the land, the Democrats have done their best to hide their agenda. This has included trying to disguise their agenda behind false market economics, trying to create new labels for failed ideas, and sometimes flat out lying about what they believe. One trick of which they are quite fond is a trick that Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska just pulled on his voters. . . the old, “I really am against what I’m supporting” trick.

The backdrop: As you know, the Democrats are struggling to get the Baucus bill out of the Senate. They need sixty votes and they are stuck on two issues: abortion and the public option. The reason these two issues are presenting such a problem is not that the Democrats don’t overwhelmingly agree on both issues, it’s that they need the support of 60 Senators to move the bill forward for a vote. With Republican opposition firm, and Joe Lieberman joining the Republicans in opposing a public option, the Democrats cannot pass the bill if it includes a public option. At the same time, since the Democrats literally cannot afford to lose one vote, the opposition of any Democrat would prove disastrous. That’s where abortion comes in.

Sen. Ben Nelson claims to be an opponent of abortion. Thus, he introduced a bill that would impose the same limits on abortion under the Baucus bill that currently exist under PelosiCare. Basically, he introduced his version of the Stupak Amendment. The Stupak Amendment (or in this case the Nelson Amendment) would prevent insurers from indirectly paying for abortions through the use of accounting fictions whereby money is separated into supposedly separate pools. Said Nelson: “Segregation of funds is an accounting gimmick. The reality is federal funds would help buy coverage that includes abortion.”

This was a make or break issue Sen. Nelson told the people of Nebraska -- though few intelligent people believed him because he’s a Democrat and they will sacrifice their deepest held beliefs without a second thought whenever those beliefs stand in the way of “progress.” The doubters were right.

When he introduced this amendment, Sen. Nelson made it clear on several occasions that he would not support any bill that did not include this language.

“As written, the Senate health care bill allows taxpayer dollars, directly and indirectly, to pay for insurance plans that cover abortion. Most Nebraskans, and Americans, do not favor using public funds to cover abortion and as a result this bill shouldn’t open the door to do so.”

The amendment lost 54-45. So here comes his statement of conscience, his principled stand right? What? Why are you laughing? You think a Democrat can’t take a stand on principle? Well. . . apparently, you’re right. Right after the vote, Nelson (as predicted) did not reaffirm that he would oppose the bill, no. . . he only stated that this “makes it harder” for him to support the bill. He added, “We’ll just have to see what develops.”

Translation: “People of Nebraska, I will never compromise my principles until they are actually put to a vote.”

This, by the way, is after Nelson participated in a huge fraud to begin with. He let the Democrats threaten the insurance industry with the loss of their anti-trust exemption (Nelson is partially owned by the Nebraska-based insurance industry and partially owned by the ethanol lobby). He then graciously accepted a withdrawal of that threat in exchange for his vote on Baucus -- allowing him to sell his “reluctant support” to the people of Nebraska as being in their own interest. Shameless.

But Nelson wasn’t the only one to be exposed. Harry Reid too lies to his constituents. He claims to be anti-abortion, but he said this of this health care bill:

“This is not the right place for this debate. . . No one should use the issue of abortion to rob millions of the opportunity to get good health care.”

Translation: “People of Nevada, I really am anti-abortion, just like I’ve been telling you. . . I just think we should allow public funding of abortion.”

Of course, they aren't the only ones who have exposed themselves. You know about Landrieu accepting a $300 billion pay off for her vote. Blanche Lincoln has made it clear she will act against the overwhelming interests of her constituents, as have many others like fellow Arkansas Sen. David Pryor. The AMA was exposed. It supported this monster, despite two-to-one opposition from doctors. AARP supported this even though the elderly overwhelmingly oppose it -- they were bought off with a promise to eliminate Medicare Advantage, which will lead to nine million more elderly needing AARP-sponsored insurance. In fact, the entire left-wing lobby has been exposed. . . the list goes on and on.

The issue of the public option also took a strange turn yesterday, and may have exposed more senators. Supposedly moderate Democrats like David Pryor agreed to "drop" the public option in exchange for non-profit plans administered by the Office of Personnel Management. Hmm. That sounds a lot like a public option to me. . . and it does to Harry Reid too:

“It is a consensus that includes a public option and will help ensure the American people win in two ways. One, insurance companies will face more competition, and two, the American people will have more choices."

The cries of the little socialists as Huffpo not withstanding, it's clear that the public option still exists. So can you name a senator who swore that he would never support any plan that included a public option or could lead to a public option? That's right, it was Joe Lieberman. Guess what Joe said this morning? Joe indicated this morning that he may be willing to support this new public option: "I am encouraged by the progress toward a consensus."

Why am I not surprised.


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A Word of Advice To The Gay Community: Rethink Your Friends

Before we get into this, let’s be absolutely clear about one thing . . . I am NOT taking a stance on abortion or on homosexuality in this post. I may in the future, but not today. So DO NOT start arguing about whether abortion/homosexuality is right or wrong. Capiche?

Many of you may have missed it, but the other day Sweden became the first country in the world to decide that the government (and doctors) may not stop women from using abortion to select the gender of their children. This practice is already wide-spread in India and China, where the number of males now far exceeds the number of females, even though both governments have made the practice illegal. In Sweden, it is now a right.

As India and China have shown, and as Sweden is now demonstrating, a great many parents are willing to go to fairly extreme lengths to get the “perfect” child. Indeed, many fear that as genetic manipulation becomes more prevalent, parents will begin selecting specific traits for their children. Want an athlete, add the strength and speed gene. Want a scientist, give them the brainiac gene. Want a natural leader. . . Khhaaaaaan!!! Pushed too far, we could even end up with multiple strands of humanity -- the athletic, the intelligent, and the rest of us.

Why should this bother gays? Most gays firmly believe that they are gay because their genes have made them so. The jury is still out on this, but it’s certainly highly possible. And if this is true, then it is only a matter of time before that gene can be found.

Now let’s put two and two together. If parents will abort a normal healthy child because they don’t like its gender, or because it has some genetic disease or an unfavorable genetic trait, how do you think they will act when they discover that their child carries the gay gene?

So does it make any sense for gays to align themselves with the abortion rights crowd? Isn’t that like helping to build the gallows from which you will be hung?

I could understand the position of gay groups if they thought it was going to be illegal to abort children because of their homosexuality, but Sweden tells us that it won’t be. If Sweden won’t protect fetuses based on gender, how can they protect children based on sexual orientation?

Moreover, even if such a law could be put in place, the Indian and Chinese experience tells us that parents will find ways around it.

So as a word of advice, you might want to rethink your allies.
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