The question - How to lower abortion numbers, get the center left to help, while keeping religious voters interested.
"We must balance rights against wishes on the abortion issue. The right to choose is inviolable." T Cole
"Just as President Lincoln had to work to preserve the Union, we must balance rights against wishes on the abortion issue." T Cole
A questionnaire from a church group a few years ago asked our candidate to explain: What is your policy proposal on abortion? Please indicate and explain any exceptions to your policy.
So we got to work and came up with what seems to be a viable solution. It went something like this, "The left has thought this through. If you don’t like abortion, even after birth abortion, you’re against women’s rights. The left's media machine will tell women that you (candidate x) or (party x) want women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen making cookies… And for instance if a conservative and/or Christian candidate is against abortions of any kind, the left will paint them as a hater of women, a slave master, a Christian zealot spreading moral judgments upon the world. Women voters in general will respond negatively to what they see as an unreasoning and moralizing stance, a stance that negates their rights.
If a candidate says his view is to stop all abortions, the unhappy result will be the left winning, and thus there will be many more abortions with no end in sight.
And that was our opening gambit. The left has thought this out. Smarter and craftier minds then ours have spent thousands of hours on the issue of blunting any restrictions on abortions. Because this is the lefts Alamo, their Pear Harbor, their Bunker Hill. And so we brought up the Lincoln Theory.
THE LINCOLN THEORY We ask the reader to go back to 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was running for President as the first Republican. Slavery was the obvious issue dividing the nation and the Democrats were completely intrenched and unflinchingly pro slavery. While Republicans, the GOP and Lincoln were against slavery by any means possible short of loosing the Union.
Despite the abhorrence that Lincoln and the Republicans felt for slavery, they had to be judicious and cautious. The GOP succeeded in actually voting to limit the spread of slavery into new territories. And the Republicans forced the Democrats to agreed to stop to importing new slaves.The Democrats fought back ferociously calling Lincoln and the GOP the N-word Party and worse. (And note the Dems haven't changed their strategy!) The Democrats knew If slavery ended and the slaves set free that would end the Democrats free ride, ending their entire slave economy. A loss calculated at $20 Trillion dollars in todays near worthless money.
Step by step was the method because if the GOP outright banned slavery the Democrats would simply withdraw from the Union. The Democrats slavery plan was a north/south line across the entire nation, slavery sea to sea with all slave states in the south. This would have interned slavery possibly forever in our nation. Instead the Democrats finally broke with the union, attacked Fort Sumpter and the rest is political history. Is abortion slavery? No. But it was a divisive, explosive issue that nearly broke the nation.
CAGOP- A Tempered Approach to Abortion Issues.
a) CAGOP can embrace abortion as womans right. And agree that late term abortion is a sometimes necessary but limited procedure. For the life of the mother, for rape, for any serious medical reason like the baby will die, the baby is horribly deformed, the mother will die.
b) CAGOP can propose a stop to harvesting and selling of baby parts. This trade seems particularly glaring and such a stance would mollify religious/moral abortion objectors. c) CAGOP can propose an end to PAYMENTS to mothers under the Maternal & Child Health Program. These are payments by the state to unwed, unsupported mothers of $2300/mo for the first 24 months. That's $55,200. Weren't we supposed to be limiting population growth? These programs encourage unwed mothers to commit fraud and turn themselves into baby factories. Another example of big dumb government gone wild. d) The CAPGOP could support the following: Men can opt out of child support if they sign contracts with their partners before sex. Contracts agreeing that if the woman becomes pregnant, she will agree to have an abortion, or give the baby up for adoption or raise the child on her own as a single parent, all without child support from the sperm donor. Such agreements would encourage good birth control, good partner choosing, lowering the number of unwanted/uncared for children and encourage marriage, another contractual aggreement. All of this is in societies interest as good public policy.
These incremental achievements that would allow more reasonable and concerned center leftists, the JFK Dems, to come around and vote with conservatives.
And for our religious voters, perhaps even Jesus would understand. A reasoned and reasonable policy on abortion is better than demanding an unreasonable and unconstitutional ban on abortion, and loosing every election. Forcing women to carry to term by law is slavery. And so, just as President Lincoln had to work to preserve the union, we must balance rights against wishes on the abortion issue. Today we wish there were no abortions, but in CA that will never happen. And there are allready constitutional amendments in CA guaranteeing abortions.
We must face the cold reality that we cannot simply wish this problem away. And work to regain the trust of women, and thus votes. After all, 75% percent of moderate CA voters say abortion is very important to them. These are middle of the road democrats and how many are pleased with Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom and lockdowns... But still vote Democrat because of our hardened stance on abortion. And will we loose our vaunted Christian base voters? Look at these numbers.
Consider CA voting base of 29M and 20% of that are Evangelicals = 5,800,000 and 40% are Republicans = 2,784,000 and only 25% of then vote = 669,000.
Compared to the voter base in CA that = 2.4% Evangelicals actually vote for Republicans.
Even if we loose a few evangelicals, they are only 2.4% of the electorate. consider how many middle of the road Independents that will see our side as the more reasonable, the more fiscally prudent, better for our kids and switch to Republican.
We can still get the Church vote, as small as it is, and pick up the center left, the JFK and Catholic vote and thus win votes on this contentious issue. That could be our winning position today.
