Has the GOP Caught the Car?

 This occurred to me just this morning: Have the Republicans inadvertently become the proverbial dog who caught the car?

For the past 50 years, the GOP campaign has relied on primarily two issues to drive their base to the polls: abortion and guns. It has worked because the voters for whom those two issues are important (and they are not necessarily always the same voters) are, for the most part, one-issue voters. For the misnamed pro-life crowd, if a politician was opposed to abortion and supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it didn't matter what else he or she supported. Nothing else mattered. For the strident Second Amendment supporters, if the politician would vote against even the most reasonable gun control measures, nothing else was important.

Well now, at least for the abortion issue, the fight is over. Roe v. Wade has been scrapped. There's no longer anything to drive those one-issue voters to the polls, at least in federal level elections. (There may still be states where the issue will remain a controversy in the legislature or in governor's races, but on the congressional and Presidential levels, it's a done-deal.) So, can the GOP still count on those folks as committed Republican voters? Hell, can they can count on them to vote at all? They've won the only fight they cared about, why would they bother?

Does this mean a serious diminution of Republican power at the ballot box? I think it might.

Roe is Us

 I needed a day to process what I was going to say on this.

Yesterday, I was glad I never had daughters, but saddened for my brother, who has two, my nephew who has three, and all my other relatives and friends who have daughters and granddaughters. I will never face (unless one of my sons begets a girl) what each of them may now someday deal with--a loved child or grandchild who cannot get the medical care she needs.

I know how even the best birth control can fail. My first son was conceived while my wife was "on the pill". I know how complications can arise in even a well-cared-for pregnancy; my wife had to go on bed rest for the final trimester of her first pregnancy and underwent an emergency C-section when the doctors could not get an adequate response from the monitoring equipment during labor. (Fortunately, there was nothing really wrong--just my recalcitrant son lying in an odd position in the womb.)

No patient should have their legitimate options in such a situation curtailed by a legislature's or judge's view of when "life begins." That should only be between the parents (and primarily the mother), their doctor, and their religion (whichever one, if any, that may be). I am not, personally, in favor of "abortion-on-demand"...but that is my personal belief and it should not be imposed on anyone else, anymore than my personal belief that liver is unedible. (You like liver? Go for it--just don't expect me to join you. And if I decide an abortion is the right choice for my situation, I won't ask you to participate.)

One last thing--pay heed to Justice Thomas's dissent, in which he suggests that other rulings (such as the ones in favor of contraception, criminalization of gay sex and gay marriage) based on much the same interpretation should be re-examined. (I note he does not include the long-standing decision on inter-racial marriage--also based on that interpretation. Perhaps it strikes too close to home?)

Values Aligned

 There seem to be only two topics on the news today--the aftermath of Hurricane Ida and the aftermath of Texas' new abortion law.

For the first, it seems to me all we can do immediately is clean up, provide assistance to those who need it, and prepare for the next storm--because there will be a next storm. In the long term, we can fight for better laws to deal with climate change...because this kind of weather is increasingly tied to the changes in our atmosphere caused by human-engendered global warming.

For the second, the immediate response should be to assist those Texan women who desire abortions to get out of the state so they can exercise their constitutional choice. Long term, we should, first, strive to make sure our own states do not pass similar legislation and, second, support federal and state candidates who will defend Roe v. Wade.

Generally, the politicians who will support the fight for environmental protection are the same ones who will support the fight for reproductive choice--and the politicians on the opposite sides of those issues are generally the same ones, as well.

Because "conservative" in the modern era has come to be defined as what best supports the powerful.

More Abortion Hypocrisy

 Here's the text of a letter I sent to my local paper, the Delaware County Times, this morning:

Once more, in her column on Sunday, Christine Flowers takes on abortion and again reveals her rank hypocrisy--and for that matter the rank hypocrisy of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In that column, Flowers writes in support of the bishops' call to deny communion to any Roman Catholic politician--and most notably President Joe Biden--who supports the legal right of a woman to have an abortion. Please note their objection is not to those politicians having actually participated in an abortion, but in their support for the repeatedly affirmed right for any woman to have an abortion, within certain limits.

Why do I call this hypocrisy? Because the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion is part of what it calls its "seamless" defense of the right-to-life, including an opposition to capital punishment. But the bishops--and Flowers--have never suggested that a Roman Catholic politician who supports capital punishment (also repeatedly affirmed as Constitutional) should be denied communion.

How many such politicians are there? It's tough to find an exact number, but here's a rough idea. The Republican Party platform has, since at least 2000, consistently supported capital punishment and opposed all efforts to have it curtailed or abandoned. There are 66 Roman Catholic Republicans in the House and Senate and it must be supposed that all of them support their party's platform in full.

So why have not the bishops--and Flowers--called for them to be denied communion?