![]() After fleeing the scene, Salvi murdered receptionist Lee Ann Nichols at the offices of Preterm Health Services on Beacon Street. The door is there, and is how it is because a man named John Salvi passed through a lesser version of that door with a rifle in 1994 and murdered receptionist Shannon Lowney. The door is all business, steel reinforced and opened remotely from within by an armed security guard, and leads to a small box and another door, also opened from within. Large, windowless, with decorative touches swirling over the front façade, the dominant feature is the main door. The Planned Parenthood on Commonwealth Avenue in Brookline, Massachusetts looks like something architect Frank Lloyd Wright might have constructed had he ever gotten into building fortresses. Out where the activists live, a new kind of campaign began to reveal itself in the very shadow of the facilities abortion seekers visited to avail themselves of their rights. The media - TV, newspapers and radio - was the main battlefield where this war was fought, but it was not the only battlefield. I vividly recall hearing fellow students argue over abortion in the halls of my high school during Reagan’s second term. And all of a sudden the argument was everywhere. Once former President Ronald Reagan embraced televangelist Jerry Falwell and the evangelical Moral Majority’s “holy” quest to obliterate Roe, there was no mistaking their intent. Those years, and particularly the decade of the 1980s, was the span when opposition to abortion became part of the lifeblood of the GOP base. That ban, in place since 1980, was only recently lifted in Biden’s latest budget proposal, but it had his active support over all the years he served in the Senate. President Joe Biden’s own track record on abortion rights is sketchy at best until very recently, Biden stridently supported the Hyde Amendment’s ban on using federal funds for abortions. Nice to see some excitement in a party that has been down in the doldrums since electing a center-right vanilla wafer whose version of soaring, motivational rhetoric involves multiple usages of “C’mon, man!” in his speeches. ‘But abortion has the potential to be a game-changing issue.’” ‘We don’t know exactly what the political environment will be,’ said Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which helps Democratic candidates for state legislature. “But in what otherwise looks to be a difficult year for Democrats,” reports The New York Times, “party strategists see the looming rollback of reproductive rights as an opportunity to galvanize key voting blocs, limit Republican gains and perhaps even pick up seats in certain states. A moment to take advantage of disaster is at hand, it seems. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the political version of a thermonuclear explosion, and Democratic officeholders today are blinking at the mushroom cloud as it screams into the sky, wondering how such a thing could have come to pass. The leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s harrowing draft decision in Dobbs. Wade, the right to choose an abortion that has been on the books for 50 years. Everything was trumped, literally and figuratively by that.”Ĭlinton lost because of abortion? That’s the best explanation Pelosi could offer?įive years later almost to the day, and the nation is still encompassing the looming demise of Roe v. “That’s why Donald Trump is president of the United States - the evangelicals and the Catholics, anti-marriage equality, anti-choice. House Speaker Pelosi went further, arguing that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost because of the Democrats’ focus on “social issues” like abortion and marriage rights. Senator Bernie Sanders and DNC head Tom Perez gave a “unity tour,” during which they suggested abortion rights were a disposable part of Democratic ideology - later, Sanders added that stumping for anti-choice candidates is the kind of thing Democrats need to do “if we’re going to become a 50-state party.” And on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added to that, telling the Washington Post that the party should be open to anti-choice candidates. “Nancy Pelosi Says Democrats’ Focus on Abortion Access Is Hurting the Party,” declared the New York Magazine headline on May 3, 2017. How in the name of tub-thumping Christ did we lose to this clown? Recriminations flew, but by springtime, blame for the defeat had lighted upon a truly strange perch. Early in the first year of Donald Trump’s bedlam tour of Washington D.C., the Democratic Party spent a good deal of time yelling at itself. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |