MGB:_Baloney. If Abortion is an issue it is an indicator of gullability to Republican propaganda. Voters do not need me to say that. They see that there has been nothing done on the issue and that nothing is proposed on it for the future. If it indicates anything else, it is an indicator of sexism and a refusal to increase the child tax credit enough to have families not need abortions, that doing so would reward women for having sex. A large number of these people stayed home in Alabama. That is not a bad thing.
Will this loss slow down Bannon or Trump. Their kind of fascism cannot be slowed by losing an election. The loss of three Senatorial candidates because Tea Party extremists were nominated should have ended this movement in 2012. It did not. While it did slow down, it was the ground work for the Alt-Right.
This is a huge win for the Democrats. They ran a pro-choice candidate in Alabama. While the opponent ran one of the worst campaigns ever, it does not negate the get out the vote effort that is a model for the entire South. Having Trump as the President did help and it appears that even after Trump, the GOP is addicted to the same brand of idiocy he represents, which means Democrats will keep on winning.
Polling has been a problem for the GOP. Rasumussen is universally regarded as propaganda. If you use it in a poll average, the average will be wrong. Biased polls need to be excluded, period. As long as the GOP believes its own press, it is doomed. The exit polls were better. Note that if they are true, pro-life voters who believed in criminality opposed Moore anyway and voted for Jones. It is no longer the bellweather issue because voters will no longer be fooled that it is an issue at all. The pro-lifers have no plan and they don’t deserved the votes they would get for having one.
Moore will soon have his seat. Whether he keeps it or not is on him and partially on who he runs with and against. The old coalitions are falling apart and dying off and the old tricks, like pro-life sentimentality without a plan, will no longer work.
MSW is correct on how being pro-life is a stand in for many other issues, like resistance to gay marriage. Like abortion, however, this issue is settled in the civil law. There will never, nor should there ever be, state-by-state solutions to either issue, nor is the right to privacy, aka the right to private affairs beyond the reach of government, to be discarded lightly. Social conservatives dislike that and have developed a persecution culture based on it, which fits nicely into their creationism or the view among Trads that Modernists are destroying the Church.
ReplyDeleteThere is a second piece to this puzzle. Pro-lifers are not only social conservatives, they are also economic libertarians. As such, they don’t believe in a seamless garment of life that includes economic support for families with children. Their morality is transactional. Taking innocent life should be punished, however guilty murders should be executed, not because they are dangerous but because they are evil. They cannot fathom that some pregnancies are dangerous, either physically or economically, to the mother, and that reducing the danger is the answer to abortion, even if that means some late term abortions are necessary.
As economic libertarians, they like the idea of forcing women to keep their babies for they believe that this adversity will spur them to seek a better life, the less social safety net the better. It is amazing what you find out when you listen to the trolls and understand them. That their libertarianism does not make sense is not their problem, because it also gives them the right to not hire that unwed mother or her baby-daddy, especially if they are less skilled or have a criminal record (or bad teeth from using meth).
These new parents are supposed to be able to improve their literacy on their own and go to college and law school if they want a middle class lifestyle for their newly born children. The reality is that without intense remedial education, college or vocational training (paid) and a child tax credit at every stage, the economic libertarian agenda is a recipe for multi-generational poverty, which is just fine if you need low skill workers to staff your local Walmart. The Alt-Right messaging of Bannon, Moore and Trump will keep everyone in their place. (Of course, this assessment is from a social libertarian/social liberal point of view, but it is closer to reality and a seamless garment of life than any pro-lifer supporting Roy Moore will ever get. It is also closer to reality than the social-conservative, social liberal views of the seamless garment believers, including Michael Sean).