...during the campaign. It's no longer available on the web, so I'm posting the whole thing. If this is unacceptable mods, I'll be glad to edit the post. But it's powerful in its entirety:
Against abortion? Vote Kerry
By R.J. Taylor
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 11:54 PM CDT
The Arkansas Daily Citizen
The political marriage between moral and fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party has not been an altogether holy one. Election after election, the controlling fiscal elites have deceived the well-meaning with empty campaign pledges on issues such as abortion.
The truth is that Republicans created - and have preserved - the Constitutional right to abortion that many, including myself, deplore. The striking down of the state sodomy laws in 2003 was also quite Republican, but that topic is for another day. The federal judiciary has been appointed by Republican presidents for 24 out of the last 36 years. Seven justices of the United States Supreme Court are Republican, while only two are Democrats.
Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee, wrote the Roe v. Wade decision which gave Constitutional protection to certain abortions in 1973. At the time, Governor Ronald Reagan of California was an ardent abortion supporter, as was the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George Bush (the former president).
In case after case, the 77 percent Republican Supreme Court has upheld abortion. Why? Republican elites know that if millions of unwanted children were required by law to be born, the government's welfare liability would explode.
When parents hate their fetuses so much that they want to kill them, they are not fit parents for those children, if born. If unwanted children are required to be born - not because they have loving parents, but rather as a function of government policy - then the government must assume financial responsibility for their care.
Parents who would kill their own children simply cannot be trusted. The cost of raising the estimated 45 million aborted children per generation would be astronomical. The very thought makes Republican elites tremble at the knees.
Whenever I ask Republicans how much their taxes would be raised to support all the unwanted children if Roe were overturned, they always respond that they would not be willing to pay one extra penny. This is a moral bankruptcy in itself: They want the government to force children to be born to infanticidal parents, but then they do not want the government even to pay for milk for the babies to drink! The central problem is that no one wants to pay for the mistakes of others, not even when the lives of the innocent are at stake. If we abortion opponents were to mobilize to demand the expansion of the welfare system to care for the unwanted children after Roe, our position would be morally consistent and we might save millions of lives. But in my entire life I have never met a Republican who was willing to mushroom welfare spending, whether to benefit children or not.
For whom should moral conservatives vote in the presidential election on Nov. 2? We should vote for the candidate of the party with a track record for curbing abortion. In response to questionnaires filed at abortion clinics since Roe, women reveal that their motives are heavily economic. It is not surprising that during the high "misery index" years of Reagan/Bush I, the number of annual abortions topped 1.4 million.
Under Clinton, abortions fell more than 200,000 per year and the abortion ratio dropped to the 1974 level. While Clinton's Welfare Reform Act of 1996 cut welfare benefits, his economic policies promoted employment for people at the bottom of the food chain so that they could take care of their families. Although abortion statistics under George W. Bush have not been released, I fear for fetuses now more than ever.
Bush's policies have contributed to the largest loss of jobs and health coverage during my lifetime, while concentrating the benefits of aggressive taxcutting on the wealthiest one percent and ballooning the national debt. During his first two years as president, the poverty rate in Arkansas surged from 17 to 19 percent, harming the lives of thousands of our state's families.
John Kerry proposes to create economic opportunities so that ordinary families can take care of their children, born and unborn. It is high time for moral conservatives to seek an amicable separation from the Republican Party.
R. J. Taylor lives in Searcy.
http://www.thedailycitizen.com/articles/2004/10/28/news/opinion/opiniontaylor.txtNGU.
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