The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza has a long, meandering piece on Michele Bachmann out today, making her out to be the fringiest of the fringe figures on the fringe–not so much on politics (this goes without saying), but in terms of religion.

In the course of this survey of influences on Bachmann’s faith–much of which relies on little more than book recommendations and offhand approving comments by the Minnesotan as a justification for listings of the worst things Lizza can find on Google about each individual–Lizza cherrypicks quotes and relies overwhelmingly on out of context arguments to attack several figures familiar to many in evangelical communities. Offering precious little new insight into the candidate or her politics, it’s readily evident the piece really isn’t about Bachmann at all. Lizza’s goal is obvious: it isn’t enough to depict these evangelical Christians as wrong about things–the media has been doing that for years, with little impact. For Lizza to write that these individuals are stupid or intolerant or anti-science isn’t anything new. So they have to be depicted as dangerous, too.

It’d be a waste of time to try and correct Lizza on these points (any more than it was to correct the New Yorker on their bizarre Da Vinci Code-like writings about the Koch brothers) or argue with him on the sheer level of ignorance within the piece. So let’s just look at one: a specific and clearly incorrect point that Lizza writes about Francis Schaeffer.

In an extensive portion of the piece, Lizza writes about Schaeffer and his L’Abri program (the only connection to Bachmann that Lizza notes is that she and her husband watched Schaeffer’s film series). My eyebrow rose when I read this line:

In 1981, three years before he died, Schaeffer published “A Christian Manifesto,” a guide for Christian activism, in which he argues for the violent overthrow of the government if Roe v. Wade isn’t reversed.

I personally don’t share many of Schaeffer’s views, or the views of the other figures Lizza writes about. But having read the Manifesto and extensive essays about it in the context of helping write a book on the decline of mainline Christianity and the rise of evangelicals, I find this depiction of Schaeffer’s position is just a vicious smear.

What Schaeffer called for were acts of civil disobedience if Roe v. Wade was not overturned. He repeatedly and specifically stressed that violence was not justified – “overreaction can too easily become the ugly horror of sheer violence”, he wrote. His four responses to Roe, as outlined in the Manifesto, were 1. supporting a human life amendment to the Constitution, 2. seeking the overturn of Roe and Doe in the courts, 3. bringing legal pressure to bear on abortion clinics and conducting peaceful protests, and 4. offering Christian alternatives, such as crisis pregnancy clinics, to urge women toward adoption or keeping the child instead. These responses may seem out of bounds to someone writing for The New Yorker, but they have been the responses of the pro-life cause–one which now represents the views of a plurality of Americans according to Gallup–for decades.

Schaeffer outlines his views explicitly in these remarks in 1982, based on the Manifesto–with a call for civil disobedience, based on the actions of the early Christian church:

Now, I come toward the close, and that is that we must recognize something from the Scriptures, and that’s why I had that Scripture read that I had read tonight. When the government negates the law of God, it abrogates its authority. God has given certain offices to restrain chaos in this fallen world, but it does not mean that these offices are autonomous, and when a government commands that which is contrary to the Law of God, it abrogates its authority.

Throughout the whole history of the Christian Church, (and again I wish people knew their history. In A Christian Manifesto I stress what happened in the Reformation in reference to all this) at a certain point, it is not only the privilege but it is the duty of the Christian to disobey the government. Now that’s what the founding fathers did when they founded this country. That’s what the early Church did. That’s what Peter said. You heard it from the Scripture: “Should we obey man?… rather than God?” That’s what the early Christians did.

Occasionally — no, often, people say to me, “But the early Church didn’t practice civil disobedience.” Didn’t they? You don’t know your history again. When those Christians that we all talk about so much allowed themselves to be thrown into the arena, when they did that, from their view it was a religious thing. They would not worship anything except the living God. But you must recognize from the side of the Roman state, there was nothing religious about it at all — it was purely civil. The Roman Empire had disintegrated until the only unity it had was its worship of Caesar. You could be an atheist; you could worship the Zoroastrian religion… You could do anything. They didn’t care. It was a civil matter, and when those Christians stood up there and refused to worship Caesar, from the side of the state, they were rebels. They were in civil disobedience and they were thrown to the beasts. They were involved in civil disobedience, as much as your brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union are. When the Soviet Union says that, by law, they cannot tell their children, even in their home about Jesus Christ, they must disobey and they get sent off to the mental ward or to Siberia. It’s exactly the same kind of civil disobedience that’s represented in a very real way by the thing I am wearing on my lapel tonight. [Ed. - Earlier in his remarks, Schaeffer references the Solidarity pin he's wearing - L'Abri students had sent an eight ton truck of food and supplies to Poland's resistance.]

Every appropriate legal and political governmental means must be used. “The final bottom line”– I have invented this term in A Christian Manifesto. I hope the Christians across this country and across the world will really understand what the Bible truly teaches: The final bottom line! The early Christians, every one of the reformers (and again, I’ll say in A Christian Manifesto I go through country after country and show that there was not a single place with the possible exception of England, where the Reformation was successful, where there wasn’t civil disobedience and disobedience to the state), the people of the Reformation, the founding fathers of this country, faced and acted in the realization that if there is no place for disobeying the government, that government has been put in the place of the living God. In such a case, the government has been made a false god. If there is no place for disobeying a human government, what government has been made GOD.

Caesar, under some name, thinking of the early Church, has been put upon the final throne. The Bible’s answer is NO! Caesar is not to be put in the place of God and we as Christians, in the name of the Lordship of Christ, and all of life, must so think and act on the appropriate level. It should always be on the appropriate level. We have lots of room to move yet with our court cases, with the people we elect — all the things that we can do in this country. If, unhappily, we come to that place, the appropriate level must also include a disobedience to the state.

Schaeffer’s position takes far more from MLK’s letter from a Birmingham jail (“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”) than it does from any crazed individual bent on violent overthrow of the government. Is there really no distinction between the support of civil disobedience, legal political action, and non-violent protest–the elements of nearly every social justice movement in the history of the world–with “the violent overthrow of the government”, in Lizza’s words? Or does that distinction only vanish when the movement in question is aimed at abortion, as opposed to some other cause?

One final note: given that Lizza quotes Frank Schaeffer in the piece–who has spent much of his life urinating on his father’s grave–and who has made this false claim before, it’s possible he’s just repeating it without having read the work in question. But I’m sure Lizza wouldn’t do something so unprofessional before writing something this provocative.

[tweetmeme]

The indispensable Tim Carney at the DC Examiner shares a new CRP report, and makes a point about abortion and political donations that I suspect few conservatives recognize:

Many people don’t realize this, but — compared to other single-issue groups — pro-choice money is consistently one of the biggest, while pro-life money is nearly non-existent.

Indeed, it’s really not comparable. Open Secrets provides a handy comparison illustrating the wide gap between the two sides in political donations. Single-issue pro-choice donations in 2008 totaled around $3.25M, while pro-life donations totaled $1.35M.

One truth, of course, is that pro-life funding has gone more to the social space than the political over the past several years, which is one reason why the numbers have moved so much on the issue. Political spending is not, however, reflective of that reality.

[tweetmeme]

While it’s hardly surprising to learn Elena Kagan donated to a group which supports unrestricted abortion, it is noteworthy that her opinion is no longer one held by the majority of Americans. Gallup reports on the trend:

While the two-percentage-point gap in current abortion views is not significant, it represents the third consecutive time Gallup has found more Americans taking the pro-life than pro-choice position on this measure since May 2009, suggesting a real change in public opinion. By contrast, in nearly all readings on this question since 1995, and each survey from 2003 to 2008, more Americans called themselves pro-choice than pro-life.

The most interesting aspect of this latest poll is the fact that it shows significant increases since 2005 in the number of young people and women who describe themselves as pro-life — there’s only a one point difference between men and women on the subject:

All age groups have become more attached to the pro-life label since 2005, with particularly large increases among young adults and those aged 50 to 64 years in the latest period between 2007/2008 and 2009/2010.

More proof the abortion movement lost the messaging war.

Follow Ben Domenech on Twitter.

[tweetmeme]

Laura Bush tells Larry King she’s pro-choice. Oh, and she’s good with same sex marriage, too (though that’s less of a break — the Cheneys, of course, support it too), but it’s noteworthy because it places her to the left of both Barack Obama (“I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” quoth the One) and probably Elena Kagan.

The First Lady’s abortion position was known within the Bush White House, but may come as a surprise to leaders of the pro-life movement. Every First Lady stretching back to Pat Nixon has taken the same position in favor of abortion on demand — despite the fact that opposition to legalized abortion has risen significantly since the early 1990s.

According to Gallup, 51% of Americans consider themselves “pro-life,” while 42% consider themselves “pro-choice”; 23% of Americans believe abortion should be completely illegal, 53% say abortion should be restricted but legal in certain cases, and only 22% support the current unrestricted status.

An interesting question for Mrs. Bush would’ve been whether she supports taxpayer funding of abortion, given its recent prominence within the health care debate. But this was Larry King.

Follow Ben Domenech on Twitter.

[tweetmeme]

More and more folks seem to think that Obama will choose Diane Wood for the Supreme Court opening in the next week or so. It’s a choice which will make abortion the number one issue during her confirmation hearings, as opposed to a pick less outspoken on the subject.

One possible political explanation for this rationale is that Obama doesn’t particularly care about making the left happy — despite their frustrations with the White House, where are they going to go? — but does care about making “teabagging racists” mad as heck, ensuring they will be extreme and yell and stuff, scaring away the moderates and anyone who isn’t white.

With the Sotomayor nomination, Obama’s choice had a political benefit on ethnic grounds. This time, his pick could come down to Wood and a fight over abortion, or making a choice to mend fences with the gay rights crowd. But what if Obama doesn’t particularly care about the catcalls and protests? What if he sees far more political benefit to angering his enemies — in picking Wood so he can show the world what nasty intolerant people pro-lifers are?

It’d be the Chicago way.

Follow Ben Domenech on Twitter.

[tweetmeme]

On Capitol Hill, the Rules Committee is meeting this morning to run through some last minute amendments to the health care legislation. You can read those here. But they’re irrelevant — it’s clear the final standoff on Capitol Hill in the eleventh hour of the health care debate will be over Rep. Bart Stupak’s small band of fellow Democrats who oppose taxpayer funding for abortions.

The mere fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is conversing with Stupak behind closed doors at this late moment is a sign that she remains short of the vote total needed to pass the Senate bill, even after the imposition of the so-called “Slaughter strategy” to give political cover to members. There are still many concerns among Blue Dog Democrats that the bill in question will not sufficiently address the cost problems of the health care system, and the latest exchange with the Congressional Budget Office has done little to assuage their worries.

It is Stupak’s small coalition, which once numbered 12 but now seems closer to 3, who could decide the entire issue.

CNN reports today on the latest news, and progressives at FireDogLake have the language in question, which would be attached to the legislation via a “tie bar” which would require Senate approval.

Yet therein lies the challenge for Stupak: he is well aware that there are at most 45 votes for his provision on the Senate side, so an addition at this moment would be functionally meaningless. In reality, it would only give him and his small group the cover they need to support the legislation, even knowing that their views will not be honored.

Pelosi continues to work to flip votes in favor of the legislation, with several notable successes. But HCN’s unofficial whip count still has her behind by five votes as she heads toward the Sunday showdown.

crossposted at Health Care News.

[tweetmeme]

President Barack Obama maintained in his speech on Wednesday and in a letter to Capitol Hill (see PDF) his intention to reach out across party lines, a token effort to make his health care legislation more bipartisan before ramming it through reconciliation, by adding four ideas of note from last week’s summit at Blair House. A closer look at the actual details of these ideas, however, shows that the White House has done very little indeed – and while it would be nice to say otherwise, the reality is that what President Obama is offering to Republicans is not an olive branch, but a rather insulting joke. And in the case of one additional topic, both he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi continue to repeat a clear and verifiable falsehood.

Here’s what President Obama wrote in his letter – keep in mind that we have yet to see legislative language on these reconciliation-based “fixes” to the Senate bill, so we have only his own words to go on:

1. Undercover waste/fraud/abuse investigations: “Senator Coburn had an interesting suggestion that we engage medical professionals to conduct random undercover investigations of health care providers that receive reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid, and other Federal programs.”

2. Additional grants to states for tort reform: “I am open to including an appropriation of $50 million in my proposal for additional grants. Currently there is only an authorization, which does not guarantee that the grants.”

3. Increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates: “At the meeting, Senator Grassley raised a concern, shared by many Democrats, that Medicaid reimbursements to doctors are inadequate in many states…I’m open to exploring ways to address this issue in a fiscally responsible manner.”

4. Strengthen high deductible provisions: “I believe that high-deductible health plans could be offered in the exchange under my proposal, and I’m open to including language to ensure that is clear.”

If you’re keeping count, one of these four proposals is relatively insignificant; one is already in the bill; one is undercut by other parts of the bill; and the other is something impossible for the federal government to do. As a whole, these four points do not in any way change the direction of this overarching tax-laden government-run package.

1. Everyone agrees that we should reduce waste, fraud, and abuse – well, everyone except the ripoff artists. But while Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) idea of sending “secret shopper” patients in to evaluate suspected offices is an innovative idea, it is one that is strongly opposed by the AMA, as well as libertarians like the Galen Institute’s Grace Marie-Turner and the Cato Institute because of concerns about the effect on good doctors. In any case, a program of this nature cannot be considered significant, nor will it be able to prevent the upwards of $90 billion in fraud and abuse paid for by taxpayers every single year.

2. We don’t need more demonstration projects on medical malpractice reform. We already have one: it’s called Texas. Since 2003, the state has seen the astounding business and health insurance benefits of reasonable, straightforward tort reform. The Congressional Budget Office has said that serious federal liability reform could save taxpayers $54 billion over 10 years. The president’s proposal doesn’t even come close, and what’s more, the Senate bill already contained $23 million in these token grants – he’s just tacked on some more money, and nothing that will offend the John Edwards’ of the future.

3. The president agreed with Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that raising reimbursement rates in Medicaid ought to be considered to prompt more doctors to participate in the program. But states set those reimbursement rates, not the federal government. The statement Sen. Grassley made was in the context of pointing out that the Senate bill adds another 15 million people into Medicaid, a program that is already a strain on state budgets. As Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) pointed out during the summit, Medicaid is already on the path to insolvency, growing at a rate of 21% each year. Raising reimbursement rates, even if the president could do it, doesn’t do anything to solve the cost problem or bend the curve in the right direction.

4. Perhaps the one legitimate offer from President Obama was an indication that he’s open to including health savings accounts coupled with high-deductible health plans as choices in the government-run insurance exchanges within the Senate package. That’s certainly a good thing, since those are the plans that appeal overwhelmingly to young, healthy Americans who currently choose not to buy insurance. But the coverage requirements set for participating in those exchanges under the Senate health care bill are so burdensome, independent observers agree the premiums for such plans would likely be far too high for the young people who want them. In other words, President Obama’s own legislation will do away with the whole reason for high-deductible plans in the first place.

As a senior Republican Capitol Hill staffer told me last night: “It’s laughable that the president considers adding these proposals including real substantive Republican ideas when they’re nothing more than lip-service or half-measures. The bottom line is, as Leader McConnell said this morning, tacking a few good ideas onto a bill that reshapes one-sixth of the economy, vastly expands the role of government, and which raises taxes and cuts Medicare to pay for it all, is not what Americans want. They’ve been abundantly clear that we should scrap this bill and start over.”

Set aside these four ideas for a moment, and let’s get to the outright lie, which is, I should add, not a predictive falsehood. It’s wrong to say that President Obama’s repeated claims about you being able to keep your own coverage, that costs will come down, that the bill will have a positive effect on the deficit, etc. are lies – perhaps the president believes those statements to be true, even though they are at odds with what is predicted by the CBO, the president’s own chief Medicare actuary, and any number of other independent observers. No, I’m speaking of what the president said last week and what Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said today: both maintain that this legislation does not change America’s longstanding policy on using taxpayer funds for abortions.

“Let me say this: This is not about abortion! This is a bill about providing quality, affordable health care for all Americans,” [Pelosi] said, more eager than ever to stay on message as her legacy becomes increasingly tied to what happens in the next few weeks…

“I will not have it turned into a debate on (abortion),” she said, when asked a follow-up question about Stupak. “Let me say it clearly: we all agree on the three following things. … One is there is no federal funding for abortion. That is the law of the land. It is not changed in this bill. There is no change in the access to abortion. No more or no less: It is abortion neutral in terms of access or diminution of access. And, third, we want to pass a health care bill.”

Yet anyone who actually bothers to read the legislation will find that, as Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan points out, the Senate language is essentially a shell game with funding, with none of the protections passed by the House last year. As many as 12 Democrat House members who previously voted in favor of health care legislation in the House would be ready to switch according to Stupak.

“If that is the one [the Senate health bill] they are presenting in reconciliation to the members of the House of Representatives, I’ll bet you that won’t even come close to passing,” Stupak said yesterday.

Again and again, the differences between what the White House claims about this bill and the reality of the legislative language is just jarring. Over at National Review, the editors liked the sound of the bill Obama was talking about. If only it actually resembled what’s on the page.

Crossposted at Health Care News.

Sometimes, when it comes to an issue like abortion, people slip up and say what they mean. It’s seldom a point deemed appropriate for public discussion, but on occasion someone will point out that a hugely disproportionate number of abortions are executed upon black and Hispanic children. Occasionally, a pro-life person will even go so far as to wonder whether, for many supporters of legalized abortions, this fact is a feature of the system, not a bug. Supporters of legalized abortion at this point, offended by the idea, will typically recoil in horror at the suggestion, insisting that no responsible supporter of legalized abortion feels that way. Most abortion proponents will then insist that the disproportionate numbers of minority abortions is an unintended (and surely undesirable!) consequence of this nonetheless important social policy.

Thankfully, we have people like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg around to remind us what an insidious lie this is, as she does in this weekend’s New York Times:

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. [Emphasis mine]

There is no way to interpret this statement that does not expose the ugly underbelly of a significant part of the legalized abortion movement. After all, the statistics are unambiguous–the “populations” that are effectively culled by abortion are overwhelmingly blacks and hispanics. One could expand Justice Ginsburg’s statement to its furthest charitable limit and say that Justice Ginsburg didn’t think that blacks and hispanics shouldn’t have their populations kept down, specifically, but rather that just in general we don’t want to have too many poor or unwanted people hanging around. This argument would have much in common with that found in the bestselling book Freakonomics, which used crime statistics to argue that abortion filled a communal need by casting out the “weak” to ensure the “strong” survive, with a coldly calculating description of ethnic cleansing.

Yet even if we suppose that Justice Ginsburg was not proceeding from the Freakonomics perspective, and was instead totally uninformed about the statistics of abortion today, there is no escaping the fact that she believes that there is an identifiable group of people that society “[doesn't] want to have too many of.” And by “[doesn't] want to have too many of,” she means “they should be killed in utero,” disposed of with medical precision before they are allowed to take a breath.

Eliminate the fact that this is an elderly woman, a Supreme Court Justice who has received the fawning praise of the left for decades: There is no identifiable “population” you can plug into that statement and reach any conclusion other than that the person who would say such a thing is, morally speaking, a monster who deserves to be shunned by polite society.

Of course, the problem is not merely confined to one of the leading lights of liberal, pro-abortion legal thought. Over the years, it has become clear that Ginsburg’s assessment of the situation is essentially correct: the leading crusaders of the abortion movement wanted abortion legalized not because they believed fundamentally in the freedom of women to kill their children in utero, but rather because society had too many undesirables who needed culling from the herd. As explained by Ron Weddington, the abortion lobby’s counsel in the Roe v. Wade case, abortion is a very useful tool to “eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor section of our country.” And in case President Clinton, the recipient of his statement, needed further hints as to whom Weddington was referring, the abortion attorney was happy to oblige: “for every Jesse Jackson who has fought his way out of the poverty of a large family there are millions mired in poverty, drugs, and crime.” Ah, so it’s them you want to do away with.

Today, the Senate is about to take up another nomination, and another nominee in Sonia Sotomayor who sees a surprising number of issues in unequivocally racial terms. If history has taught us anything, it is that unchecked power — placed in the hands of a person who sees the world as ever-defined by ethnicity, who makes judgments based on the color of a person’s skin in any capacity — always yields disastrous results. While I personally support Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation, and believe she is qualified to sit on the court, these are questions she must answer and answer fully. Will our Senate learn from these lessons of history, or rather blithely doom us to repeat them? Will they heed Justice Ginsburg’s dismissal of these comments as irrelevant, or will they ask Judge Sotomayor to answer the questions that have been raised about her repeated statements regarding “inherent physiological differences” measured across ethnic lines? We shall see.

As for Justice Ginsburg, she will of course never be shunned in polite company for her recent statement. As a lifetime appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg speaks from an unassailable position can say any monstrous thing she wishes to say, and no one will take her seat or her power from her. Though she would perhaps do well to remember this bit of writing from Cormac McCarthy:

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing this and the right wing that. I ain’t even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I don’t have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m going to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

They call him Dr. No, Senator Trainwreck, The One Man Gridlock Machine. But Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn may be about to add one more title to his enumerated pseudonyms: Former Senator.

In Washington D.C., there is palpable concern among conservative leaders. As the 2010 midterms loom, Republicans are already beset by retirements in several key districts and states. But the loss of Coburn would present a massive loss for grassroots conservatives, even moreso than for the party as a whole. Coburn is one of the most outspoken opponents of pork barrel spending in the chamber, as well as one of the Senate’s most prominent pro-lifers.

While Coburn is friendly with many members of the right, he doesn’t generally confide with movement leaders about his intentions, making any attempt to assess his intentions all the more difficult. On the money side, it doesn’t look good: Coburn has less than $60,000 on hand in his campaign coffers, putting him worse than some GOP members, such as Sen. Jim Bunning (he’s wavering) or Sen. Sam Brownback, who have already announced they aren’t running for reelection.

While Coburn has demured from presenting a decision in his public comments, according to one longtime Coburn supporter, the Senator is strongly considering stepping down next year.

“Politics has never been Tom’s first love,” this supporter says. “He does it because he feels called to do it, not because he likes doing it. He’d much rather be back here delivering babies than dealing with his fellow Senators. And when he leaves D.C., which I really think he might next year, he’s going to leave without any regrets.”

Besides being one of the most outspokenly conservative members of the Senate and a hardened fighter on social issues, Coburn makes a habit of more than occasionally bucking the guidance of his party’s leadership. His 2003 book Breach of Trust is notable not just for Coburn’s disgust with career politicians, but the fact that he was perfectly willing to slam members of his own party who still held positions of power. He even tangled with leadership in both parties within months of his 2004 election, sparking an extended battle over whether he could continue to deliver babies in Oklahoma (for which he took no payment) as he stayed in the Senate.

Unlike some of his colleagues, it’s not the prospect of his time in the minority that likely drew Coburn to this point of indecision. In a 2007 profile in GQ magazine, Coburn famously said that his role after the midterm losses would be essentially unchanged: “It will be my first time in the minority party, but I’ve been in the minority the whole time I’ve been here.”

With a reputation for gliding toward controversy like a moth to flame, just this week Coburn engaged in the kind of passionate braggadocio that inspires his fans and earns the derision of his critics. In the wake of the announcement that President Obama intended to roll back the conscience exemption protecting federally funded nurses and doctors from being required to perform abortions in violation of their faith or conscience — a necessary first step before the anticipated piecemeal passage of FOCA — Coburn said he would absolutely violate the law before agreeing to participate in such procedures.

“I think a lot of us will go to jail,” Coburn told CNSNews. “Let’s see them prosecute the first one of us for not doing that.”

The bespectacled Oklahoma doctor may look like a mild-mannered figure, but these comments indicate the undercurrent of rogue crusaderism that inhabits his being. In many ways, Coburn’s motivations parallel the writings of German theologian and would-be Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who urged the church to take on the government in defense of the weak and defenseless: “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Despite his occasionally overheated comments, Coburn remains one of the most popular elected officials in Oklahoma. He has no significant Democratic challenger at this time, and if he announced tomorrow that he was planning to run for reelection, he would likely receive only token opposition.

When introduced at a recent speech, Coburn was asked by an audience member whether or not he was going to run again.

“I feel like if you’re in this business, you have to feel like you’re called to do it,” Coburn responded. “I’m just not sure any more that this is the best way I can make a difference every day.”

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.