This is, as the alcoholics refer to it, a moment of clarity. From now on, Barack Obama’s Democrats cannot complain when we refer to them as “pro-abortion.”

Even as Barack Obama claims to welcome a position of moderation on the difficult moral question of abortion, the Democratic Party has moved today under his leadership to fully embrace the Culture of Death. The newly announced Democratic Platform has tossed the old language of “safe, legal, and rare” over the side, finally rejecting the idea that abortion is a social ill.

No longer do Democrats ask that “women not have abortions unless they absolutely must.” They are reclaiming the moral imperative for the goodness of destruction. And they will not be ashamed to demand what is rightfully theirs.

For years, the merchants of abortion have struggled with the dichotomy of their political circumstance. While triumphant at the Supreme Court level, the pro-abortion movement has had difficulty convincing enough people that being “pro-abortion” is not a bad thing…in fact, many of them argue, that it has social benefits, decreasing the number of unwanted pregnancies, decreasing poverty, and perhaps, as the Freakonomics folks argued, decreasing crime.

Slate’s Will Saletan – himself a pro-choice author who argues in his book Bearing Right that conservatives have “won” the abortion wars by establishing in the minds of the public that 1) abortion is a social ill that should be avoided, and 2) no government or taxpayer funds should therefore go to support it – has confronted this split personality on more than one occasion:

Friday morning, leaders of pro-choice and feminist groups gathered at the Center for American Progress to debate the movement’s future. One of the panelists reported that the latest annual tally of abortions in this country was 1.295 million. The most recent comparative numbers, detailed in an article I brought to the meeting, indicated that our abortion rate exceeds that of every Western European nation. “Raise your hand if you think that number is too high,” the conference moderator told the 50 people in the room.I saw one hand go up. The woman next to me said she saw another. The two hand-raisers used to work for pro-choice groups but no longer do.

These leaders of the pro-abortion movement cannot accept, as most of America and Saletan do, that the act of abortion be considered “bad” – a necessary evil, in other words. They recoil when he uses the word, and react as strongly to the idea of “responsibility.”

I knew I’d get flak for using the word “bad.” But I was amazed at the group’s reaction to the word “responsibility,” which was the subject of the next panel. “Responsibility is to me a code word that has a lot of racial and class … implications,” said one participant. “I don’t like the word ‘responsibility,’ ” said another. “I don’t want to talk about responsibility unless we’re talking about the government taking responsibility,” said a third. Hoping to bring the discussion back to earth, the moderator suggested, “Is there a way for us to reclaim the idea of responsibility?” The answer was a chorus of rejection, punctuated by a “No way!” She retreated apologetically.

The new Democratic Platform is a firm reclaiming of the idea that abortion cannot be “bad,” that it never is anything but good and right and responsible. And in taking this step, Barack Obama’s Democrats have embraced an idea not just at odds with everything we know to be morally right, but at odds with what the rising generation of Americans believe to be morally right.

The Wall Street Journal headline on May 4, 2006 read: “Support for Roe v. Wade Hits New Low, Poll Shows.” The article details the latest findings with medical detachment:

“U.S. support for Roe v. Wade is at its lowest level in decades, according to a new Harris poll…The latest telephone survey of 1,016 adults indicates Roe v. Wade is supported by a slim 49% to 47% plurality, compared with 52% who favored the decision in 2005 and 57% in 1998…40% of those polled favor laws that would make it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, while another 40% say no change should be made to existing abortion laws, and 15% favor laws that would make it easier to get an abortion.”

According to Harris, the percentage of Americans who support abortion on demand—that is, the current law, which gives the right to obtain an abortion under any circumstance—has remained at a steady 24% for the past decade. That is the plateau of support that the abortion defenders turn to – and it is likely to be the only portion that will support the idea that abortion is a moral good.

The key to this growing sentiment against abortion on demand is the changing attitudes of young people, who view abortion not as a right to defend, but as a nagging socially disturbing activity, a relic of the days before the pill. In 2003, a poll by CBS News and the New York Times found that Americans between 18 and 29 had drastically decreased their support for the general availability of abortion from the respondents a decade earlier—a margin that fell from 48% to 39%. And a UCLA study of college freshman at 437 universities found a similar dropoff—54% of the teenagers supported legalized abortion, versus 67% in 1993.

In April of 2007, the Polling Company released a comprehensive survey which found that, given a set of six different options—“abortion should be illegal, illegal with an exception for the life of the mother, illegal with that exception and an exception for rape and incest, legal for any reason in the first trimester, legal for any reason in the first and second trimester, and legal for any reason throughout pregnancy”—a full 54 percent choose the three generally pro-life options, and 41 percent the three pro-choice ones. A mere 12 percent supported the current legal status, the most extreme position. The results are not surprising—in fact, they are virtually identical to those of a Wirthlin poll from November 2004. But there was something more: Young adults (18-34), and especially young women, were more likely than any of the other demographic groups to choose the pro-life options.

Even Hollywood is getting into the new anti-abortion rhythm – films like Juno and Knocked Up reject the decision for abortion – not ought of a deeply held moral sentiment, but out of the basic, ingrained belief that the decision for death is wrong. We’ve come a long way from Fast Times at Ridgmont High. These movies aren’t pro-life because of faith – they’re pro-life because being pro-death is so 1973.

Taken together, the trend is a shocking one – or, as the Times described it in their 2003 headline: “Surprise, Mom – I’m Anti-Abortion.”

In 2004, Liza Mundy described the difficulty of responding to a Newsweek article on new pregnancy technology, acknowledging that “[a]n atmosphere in which pregnant women happily scrapbook those early ultrasounds—have created a real image problem for the pro-choice movement.”

As Kirsten Moore, the president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, told Mundy: the piece “kind of prompted us to realize, oh my God, our movement’s messages suck.”

The response:

“Consultants were called in, who urged abortion rights groups to ‘reframe the debate’ and ‘take back’ words like ‘baby’ and ‘mother.’”

But paid consultants can do little to change the out-of-touch nature of the pro-choice movement, and “reclaiming” words is very difficult when there was never any real ownership of them. Through foolishness, abrasive tactics, and a message that is increasingly weakened by the expansion of scientific knowledge, the abortion marketers are losing the next generation of American voters.

Essentially, a plurality of Americans now hold the Bob Dole position – that abortion in the case of rape, incest, deformity, or risks to the life of the mother ought to be protected, and that abortion rights as they currently stand are far too liberal. This is a position that is borne out by the polling data, which Ramesh Ponnuru describes here:

Twice in three days—in Slate and the New York Times —I have run across the claim that 75 percent of the public favors legal abortion. That seems incredibly high. The source for the Times claim, and the apparent source for Slate too, is a CBS/NYT poll that is currently at the top of the Polling Report’s abortion page. The question asked is whether abortion should be “generally available,” “available. . . under stricter limits,” or “not permitted.” The latest results: 39, 37, and 21. You can spin that to mean that 76 percent of the public thinks that abortion should be “available,” or that 58 percent of the public wants “stricter limits.” Or you can conclude that the poll is not terribly well designed.

More on the numbers here. The only way the abortion proponents can achieve a lasting political majority is by embracing the “safe, legal, and rare” triumvirate – by convincing enough people in that 37 percentile who believe abortion to be nasty but necessary in cases of rape and incest to go along with the idea that it ought to be an unlimited legal right. They have done this for most of the past two decades.

Now, Barack Obama’s Democrats are rejecting this idea and embracing the zealotry of their most pro-abortion constituency. They affirm the goodness, the rightness of their destruction. They insist: “We deserve to kill our babies without being ashamed – you will not just tolerate our decision as legally protected; you will accept it as morally right.”

Of note is the cast of characters who influenced this decision, which includes one Doug Kmiec.

The Brody File is told that people like Pastor Joel Hunter, (registered Republican) Jim Wallis, (President of Sojourners) Pastor Tony Campolo and conservative Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec all helped in the drafting of this new language. The Obama campaign has obviously been involved quite a bit too.

It’s a fitting cast, of course. Last night, in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, former Reagan appointee Prof. Kmiec reiterated his belief that Obama is a candidate who will emulate the Gipper (?) in reaching out to all political sides on the issues, and finding “common ground” with those who do not share his views.

Kmiec, the most prominent of the apparently mythical Obamacons, has infamously argued that Obama is secretly open to the pro-life viewpoint, that he is a moderate on the issue – even as outlets like the New Republic advance the bizarre theory that John McCain is a “pro-life zealot.” Of course, when Doug Kmiec speaks to Barack Obama about abortion and finds common ground, it appears that Obama primarily leans on the common ground that both of the people in the conversation adore him.

Indeed, it has become clear in recent weeks that it was Obama who lied repeatedly about the most important votes he’s ever made on the abortion issue, votes that put him in the most extreme camp of all: favoring the abandonment and death of born victims who survive the horrors of abortion and emerge from the womb alive.

Obama’s cover story had been that the bill did not include protections to prevent the anti-infanticide measure, targeted at an Illinois hospital (named, in one of those little ironies which make your heart break, Christ Hospital) which was repeatedly engaging in the activity, from affecting legally protected abortions. But in fact, the bill DID include this protection. Obama voted for them, and they were added to the measure by a unanimous vote in committee, mere minutes before he voted against passage and killed the bill to defend the young, helpless survivors of their mother’s attempts at destruction.

Documents obtained by NRLC now demonstrate conclusively that Obama’s entire defense is based on a brazen factual misrepresentation.The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the “neutrality clause” (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

…In the record of the vote taking on March 12, 2003, the amendment was adopted unanimously by Chairman Obama’s HHS subcommittee. That added the neutrality clause to the bill — which then went down to defeat on a party-line 6-4 vote, with Obama voting against protecting infants born alive during abortions.

They have a Comfort Room in Christ Hospital, where you can say your goodbyes to all those inconvenient lives. I’ve stood in a Comfort Room like it before - other hospitals have them as well. One wonders if, now that abortion is declared by The One’s Own Disciples as a social good, there will be any need for such a room. The whole of society will supply it, instead.

There is no sound in the Comfort Room. It is a deafening sort of quiet. It is sterile. There is a scent of chemicals. Time hangs suspended. There is no glimpse, however brief, of the world as it might have been – no, there are no small footsteps in the hall – if all the broken, fragile lives snuffed out in this room of quiet death had lived to see the sun.

It is a room of nothingness, filled with the silence of the life not lived, and whispers of the breath not taken.

Barack Obama’s Democrats will no longer be silent about their mission to make America one vast Comfort Room. Abortion is a moral good that you must respect. And they will not be ashamed to demand what is rightfully theirs.

crossposted from redstate.

>> My latest post at RS is about South Park on Abortion: “The Ultimate Cheat.” The text is just great: “Abortion is the ultimate form of cheating! You’re cheating nature itself! Why do rich white girls get ahead in life? Because they get abortions when they are young. They get pregnant but they still want to go to college, so whatever, they just cheat. They cheat that little critter in their belly right out of a chance at life.”

For some people, especially those who live and work in the District of Columbia, there is no aspect of life untouched by politics. It surrounds them like a cloud. This leads some of them to constant overanalysis of life, pop culture, and even shopping trends through the harsh lens of partisan politics. They tend to be the same people attracted to the constant unrelenting snark that the internet thrives on, and — if you said it to the subject’s face — is the sort of thing that in the old days would end with pistols and paces (as it should be, Thomas yells somewhere).

I have no idea if Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect is one of these people. But her latest written work of political analysis over at TNR just goes so far over the edge of any guidelines of respect or decorum, it exemplifies what happens when partisan political views warp the prism through which one views the world.

Namely, “Baby on Board” accuses the McCain campaign of “using [his adopted daughter] Bridget as a political football” thanks to a mailer depicting Cindy McCain with baby Bridget in her arms, standing beside a beaming Bangladeshi nun.

The text of the mailer reads in part:

“Cindy cradles little Bridget, a baby she and John adopted in 1993 from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget has been a great blessing to the McCain family. Today, Cindy and John work together to promote adoption and to help women facing crisis pregnancies.”

In these three small sentences, Goldstein finds “code words” and “symbols” of the “religious right” and “anti-choice activism.” She goes on to take several shots at Mother Theresa, and to actually suggest that the Catholic Church and pro-lifers as a whole are blissfully unaware of all of the difficulties associated with adoption. She suggests this is all an effort at playing race-based guilt politics (I’d suggest she take a look at what happened in New Hampshire on the other side of the aisle if she wants to see racial politics at its worst). And she finishes up with the idea that promoting adoption of children born in the Third World, in worlds of terrible poverty, and (in Bridget’s case) with physical disfigurement that makes one an outcast, as “the ugliest rhetorical practices of the pro-life movement.”

McCain has seven children in all, including an older daughter, Meghan, who is rather prominent. But Bridget’s interactions with the press have been careful and limited, sensitive to her. In this campaign as in others, she hasn’t been paraded about or held up as a totem. And if talking to the kids at such a prominent place as Scholastic makes one a political football, well…but let’s leave that accusation to the dustbin it deserves.

In truth, it’s not worth raising a response to the political hackery of Dana Goldstein, whose pro-abortion views clearly tint her view of the world. The response is Bridget McCain herself, who today is safe, and healthy, and loved by a family, because a woman was brave enough not to merely react with hands-off sympathy, but to gather this frail infant up in her arms and never let her go. I can venture this much: Politics was the farthest thing from her mind at the moment she held this ten week old child in her arms.

Cindy took one look in Bridget’s beautiful eyes and said, “That’s my baby, if I leave her here she’ll die.” I don’t think Cindy ever put her down.

My little sister Florence is a few years younger than Bridget. She is thirteen, and she is adopted from DC social services—not exactly as daunting a task as the McCain’s faced in their long struggle with the Bangladeshi adoption services, but still, it took long days of expense and effort.

A few months ago, she got into a conversation about abortion, of all things, with her friends at ballet practice. It’s the sort of thing 12 and 13 year old girls talk about all the time these days.

Florence, without any prompting whatsoever - and never having had a conversation about the issue with my parents, siblings, or me - listened to her friends for a while. And then she interrupted:

“So let me get this straight: you all think someone should be able to make someone like me not exist?”

I love my little sister. I love her not as a “political football,” as a “code word,” as a “rhetorical practice.” I love her because of the girl she is, and the woman she will be. And every day, Florence reminds me that we are loved not because of where we were born, because of who raised us, or because of how we grew up—and that there exists within each of us a spark of the divine, worthy of dignity and meant to be cherished as a gift.

In the real world, not everything in life is political. Dana Goldstein should try visiting it sometime.

crossposted at redstate

Su-Chin: I’m having a little trouble concentrating.
Juno MacGuff: Oh, well, I could lend you some of my atoral if you want?
Su-Chin: No thanks, I’m off pills.
Juno MacGuff: That’s good. I heard this one chick took like way too many behavioral meds and she went to the mall, ripped off all her clothes, dived into the fountain and was all like “ARGH I’M A KRAKKEN FROM THE SEA!”
Su-Chin: I heard that was you.

There comes a point in every moviegoer’s life where you meet a character on the screen who is so real to you, so tangible, and so familiar, that you cannot help but fall in love with her right in that moment—as if running into an old friend for the first time in a long while in a public place, and feeling surprise and joy that this is not someone who just happens to look like that friend, but really them. The world has turned again, and here you are. Let me buy you a drink.

I can speak only for the men in the room who love movies, because I’ve never encountered a woman who felt this way—all the ones I know fall for actors or rockstars as people, and love them in all their roles after and cut out pictures of them from magazines or buy posters of them shirtless or kissing some girl, looking resolute or pissed off or just plain awesome. They say things like “In real life, I think Leonardo DiCaprio is a really good guy, he’s not just dreamy.” I guess some guys do that too—I’m sure, were she still alive, I could be content just watching Grace Kelly clean her ears—but even more than women, the ones I know fall for characters, regardless of the actress. It becomes one more item of comparison. So friends end up comparing the new girl to Anna Paquin from 25^th Hour, or maybe she’s more like Kirsten Dunst from Elizabethtown, or maybe she’s Jordana Brewster from The Faculty, or maybe she’s Elizabeth Banks in every dang role she’s ever had. You get the idea: it’s a solid and immediately recognizable shorthand, and it’s easier to make this kind of recognizable comparison then talk about every quirk a woman has, since most guys don’t really want to hear about that anyway. I certainly don’t unless you’re buying the bourbon.

So maybe you, dear reader, will understand this, maybe you won’t. But if you do love films, and the characters in them born of screenwriter and actor and director, then you will understand what I mean when I say, without any qualm: I love Juno MacGuff.

I don’t consider myself a film buff. I haven’t honestly seen that many films older than the 1970s. I’ve seen a lot more of them than a lot of my peers, yes—but they all tend to be movies of a certain type, or with a famous director. I haven’t even scratched the surface of influential dramas or directors, leaning more toward the popular big names, creators like Hitchcock or Kubrick and talent like Stewart and Grant. When you’re talking foreign films, I’m almost a complete blank, with a few exceptions. I can’t analyze films the way some people can—I enjoy the good ones too much to pick apart what’s being done in them, as a director or an editor. When you get right down to it, I know more about Steve McQueen than Francois Truffaut, and I damn well like it that way. But never in all my years of watching films have I found a character who I recognized so well immediately, and felt so touched by in such a novella of a film.

[As a total aside: What I do have, I’ve discovered, is a slightly disturbing talent to recognize faces of minor character actors and That Guys—a few weeks ago, I recognized the daughter from Signs in a random preview, and the ref from Dodgeball (it’s truly a layered movie, as Ben Stiller says) on a trashy TV show, and ... it’s just odd, I know, but I retain that kind of totally useless information. It makes me good to have for six degrees of separation games, and basically just a useless meatbag at everything else.]

Anyway: as Colleen Carroll-Campbell pointed out recently, there were three amazingly pro-life movies in the space of the past year: Knocked Up, Waitress, and Bella. Having seen them all now, I can safely say they are all funny and genuinely sweet movies, and worth watching (for more on Judd Apatow’s work in particular, read Ross Douthat’s posts here and here). I say “amazingly” not because of the power of the films, but because they aren’t explicitly focused on being pro-life, but convey the basic anti-abortion tenet through good and well-told stories, with humor and occasional grace.

It’s important to note that being anti-abortion means just that in this context—not a statement about Roe, or government funding, or stem cells, or cloning, or anything else. It is anti-abortion in the way that those GE sonogram commercials are (and the party of death can’t even stand those!). It merely means accepting the idea that childbearing is a good thing—that the life growing in a womb is unique and real, a gift and not a curse—and that abortion is, on balance, a bad thing that should be avoided if at all possible.

This is not some rabid pro-life view, or at least is not presented as such—it is merely an idea that, despite NARAL’s best efforts, has overtaken the plurality of the American people and the majority of young people if the polls are to be believed: that abortion is a social ill at best, and should only happen in cases of rape, incest, or when a mother’s life is threatened.

But it also brings to mind this illuminating comment, also from a few years back:

Some of these came to light last summer, when a Newsweek article on the “fetal rights” movement pointed out that the latest reproductive technologies—providing, as they do, the ability to see embryos sooner and cultivating, as they do, an atmosphere in which pregnant women happily scrapbook those early ultrasounds—have created a real image problem for the pro-choice movement. As Kirsten Moore, the president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, put it, the piece “kind of prompted us to realize, oh my God, our movement’s messages suck.”

Not everybody recognizes that truth yet. Despite what TNR argues in its pompous, dismissive tone, this movement toward favoring life marks a generational sea-change in how films deal with pregnancy as a storyline. Start with Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that hasn’t aged well generally, which came out the year that I was born, 1982: in it, abortion is an afterthought, taken for granted, with scars that do not last or haunt. In 1987’s Dirty Dancing—a stupid movie that I really, really hate, and I can’t stand the girls who just plain love it—the legendary back-alley abortionist rears his ugly head again, with dire results (that’ll learn ya, anti-Roe fascists). In 2000’s High Fidelity, abortion—while viewed as a negative, in general terms—is glossed over and discussed only in passing (this is a John Cusack comedy, after all). And as recently as three years ago, the most significant film about abortion to meet with critical success was the gung-ho abortionist-vindicating epic of 2004’s Vera Drake—and a host of other productions kept the pro-abortion drumbeat going in recent years, including The Cider House Rules, Citizen Ruth (come on Laura Dern, at least Teachers was watchable), and the If These Walls Could Talk mini-series.

If you asked me to name the most prominent pro-life scene in any major studio movie in 2005, I’d say it was probably in Godfather II, and you’re supposed to feel genuinely conflicted there, anyway. Not any more.

Now we have Knocked Up, Waitress, Bella and best of all, Juno. I can’t even communicate the kind of affection I feel for twenty-year-old Ellen Page’s character. I swear she reminds me of every girl I adored before the age of 18, quirkily smart and devilishly cruel and relentlessly funny, and with a warm goodness that radiated through in spite of the shell they built around themselves. That point she makes about the jocks—that they secretly crave “girls who play the cello and read McSweeney’s and want to be children’s librarians when they grow up” more than the skinny too-perfect forced-to-be-ditzy cheerleaders—is true of the ambitious political geeks, too. Of course, when I went to college, I found out those girls all turned into potheads working at the dull-ass radio station in the basement of the University Center and who had fickle, starved, conflicted hearts. But in this moment, at this age, I recognize Juno MacGuff as an old friend, and it hits me right in the chest.

The moment of truth that comes as Juno seeks her “hasty abortion” is just astounding and unambiguous—one of the reasons the single-issue folks at choiceusa are among the very few who actively dislike it. Let’s leave it to World’s Lynn Vincent to describe the scene:

That seems to be the case with Juno, the film in which a spunky teen (Golden Globe nominee Ellen Page) changes her mind about abortion after hearing about her baby’s fingernails. Inside the clinic, as Juno fills out the necessary forms, she suddenly becomes conscious of all the women waiting with her—nervously tapping their nails, clicking their nails, biting their nails. As the disparate sounds gel into a kind of heartbeat, Juno suddenly realizes her fetus is a human being.

When she bursts out of the clinic, a teen pro-life picketer outside cries, “God appreciates your miracle!” Astonishingly, the pivotal, life-affirming moment passes without a flicker of condescension.

I can’t offer anything more about the film that critics haven’t already said ten times over. The movie has met with the most critical success of any of this crop of intrinsically anti-abortion films—Roger Ebert actually chose it as his top movie of the year, astoundingly. So let me just say that I wish it, and all the young women who see themselves in Juno MacGuff, all the best that life—in all its challenges, tears, laughter and wonder—has to offer.

Juno MacGuff: [yelling through the house] Uh, dad?
Mac MacGuff: Yeah?
Juno MacGuff: Either I just wet my pants… or…
Mac MacGuff: “Or”…?
Juno MacGuff: Or… THUNDERCATS ARE GO!