Something reasonable to think about — albeit also a little emotion-charged — on the subject of tolerance and bipartisanship in this fraught election season – a post by Princeton Professor and scholar Robert P. George, always a voice of reason and principle: He’s aiming it at conservative Democrats.
He writes:
Here is a short list of six things (we could easily expand the list) pertaining to sexuality, marriage, and the sanctity of human life that you are not allowed to believe, or admit you believe, if you want to be a person in good standing in today’s Democratic Party–with a comment at the end.
1. There are two sexes: male and female.
2. Marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife.
3. A child’s having Down Syndrome is no justification for killing him or her by dismemberment or saline in utero.
4. Elective abortion is a violation of the principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. There should at least be SOME restriction of elective abortions (forbidding late-term abortions and sex-selective abortions, for example).
5. Catholic and other religiously affiliated foster care and adoption agencies ought not to be made ineligible for funding or forced by government to shut down for having a policy of placing children only in homes with a mom and dad.
6. Orders of nuns who care for the poor, the elderly, and the dying ought not to be forced to pay for contraception and abortion coverage and ought not to be subjected to harassment suits by public officials to pressure them into paying for such coverage.
Comment: According to what has swiftly become progressive and Democratic Party orthodoxy, if you believe any of these things you are not only “wrong,” you are a misogynist, a bigot, a homophobe, a transpobe, a BAD PERSON. Such beliefs reflect hate, nothing but hate–so your holding them means that you are not a reasonable person of goodwill. Thus, you have no place in the Party. Just ask Pete Buttigieg–as Kristen Day of Democrats for Life recently did at a forum in Iowa. Ask him if the Party is willing to acknowledge that reasonable people and good Democrats can, for example, be pro-life. He’ll (eventually) tell you–perhaps after dancing an oily little dance for a few minutes to avoid revealing the depth of his and his Party’s intolerance of dissent from the new orthodoxy.
Is it any wonder that a dedicated, conscientious, committed life-long Democrat such as Charles Camosy, after struggling for years to secure a place for pro-life progressives such as himself in the Democratic Party, finally threw in the towel and left?
My comment: There are, according to the above-mentioned Kristen Day, some 20 million Democrats who call themselves pro-life. Want to beat Trump? Work to pull the Party back from its abortion absolutism. The same goes for all those hot-button gender-related issues and matters of religious freedom.
The ship of our Republic could easily break up on the rocks of this long-raging culture war, touching as it does on fundamental nature of the human person. Let us reason together….
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