The Democratic Party has destroyed its chances for success by barring pro-life candidates, according to a pro-abortion author analyzing November’s election.
In an op-ed in the online journal Paste earlier this month, Stephen Markley, who “believes in the autonomy of a woman’s body and her prerogative to do with it as she wishes,” declares that Democrats have been shooting themselves in the foot by silencing pro-life voices within the Party.
Markley says that while most liberals recognize that Democrats must reach out to working class whites whom they have alienated, they have ignored “the primary cultural issue that keeps most of those voters incapable of even contemplating anything but a Republican vote,” namely abortion.
Those who spend their time within the liberal bubble easily forget that “there are hordes of single-issue voters who view abortion with the same moral urgency that Leonardo DiCaprio views climate change or Bernie Sanders views income inequality,” Markley states.
Especially in the case of the important evangelical voting bloc, Markley argues, pro-life voters “rightly determined that if Clinton won, any chance at overturning Roe v. Wade would be lost for a generation, if not forever.”
If Donald Trump won, however, “he would likely appoint the fourth and fifth votes to overturn Roe,” evangelicals reasoned. And so they voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Markley’s analysis is corroborated by critical statements from Catholic leadership, as well. During the final stretch before the election, a number of key prelates spoke up on the issues characterizing the two major candidates, underscoring the importance of the abortion question.
In a targeted statement, Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila drafted a point-by-point comparison between the two parties, noting that the “most important” change to official party platforms in 2016 was the Democrats’ push to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which “prohibits federal taxpayer money from being used for abortion.”
The Democrats’ platform is “aggressively pro-abortion, not only in funding matters, but in the appointment of only those judges who will support abortion,” Aquila warned.
According to Markley, Democrats have bought into a storyline with several fatal flaws, and in so doing, have alienated large numbers of Americans.
For example, the “idea that women monolithically believe in access to abortion is one of the more counter-productive myths,” he writes, and “one that women who disagree with abortion find enraging.”
Not only are women mixed between pro-life and pro-choice, Markley notes, at several different points in time, women have been found to identify as pro-life more than men have.
Politically, Democrats’ ignorance of the real concerns of U.S. citizens has been devastating, and their refusal to allow pro-life voices within the Party has destroyed their chances for victory in large swaths of the country, he contends.
Markley notes that, historically, the Democrats “have never held a majority in either chamber of [C]ongress that did not include pro-life members,” which should alert leaders that something is deeply amiss in the modern configuration of the party.
“If the Democratic Party wants to be a big tent,” Markley concludes, “it has to be big enough to support and elect pro-life candidates. That is political reality.”
With Democrat leaders intimately allied with Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, however, such a tent seems a distant possibility, if not a pipe dream.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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