The Democrat platform on abortion:
The President and the Democratic Party believe that women have a right to control their reproductive choices. Democrats support access to affordable family planning services, and President Obama and Democrats will continue to stand up to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood health centers. The Affordable Care Act ensures that women have access to contraception in their health insurance plans, and the President has respected the principle of religious liberty. Democrats support evidence-based and age-appropriate sex education.
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. We also recognize that health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. We strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child by providing affordable health care and ensuring the availability of and access to programs that help women during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including caring adoption programs.
President Obama and the Democratic Party are committed to supporting family planning around the globe to help women care for their families, support their communities, and lead their countries to be healthier and more productive. That’s why, in his first month in office, President Obama overturned the “global gag rule,” a ban on federal funds to foreign family planning organizations that provided information about, counseling on, or offered abortions. And that is why the administration has supported lifesaving family planning health information and services.
The Republican party platform on abortion:
Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life. We oppose the non-consensual withholding or withdrawal of care or treatment, including food and water, from people with disabilities, including newborns, as well as the elderly and infirm, just as we oppose active and passive euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Republican leadership has led the effort to prohibit the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion and permitted States to extend health care coverage to children before birth. We urge Congress to strengthen the Born Alive Infant Protection Act by enacting appropriate civil and criminal penalties on healthcare providers who fail to provide treatment and care to an infant who survives an abortion, including early induction delivery where the death of the infant is intended. We call for legislation to ban sex-selective abortions – gender discrimination in its most lethal form – and to protect from abortion unborn children who are capable of feeling pain; and we applaud U.S. House Republicans for leading the effort to protect the lives of pain-capable unborn children in the District of Columbia. We call for a ban on the use of body parts from aborted fetuses for research. We support and applaud adult stem cell research to develop lifesaving therapies, and we oppose the killing of embryos for their stem cells. We oppose federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
We also salute the many States that have passed laws for informed consent, mandatory waiting periods prior to an abortion, and health-protective clinic regulation. We seek to protect young girls from exploitation through a parental consent requirement; and we affirm our moral obligation to assist, rather than penalize, women challenged by an unplanned pregnancy. We salute those who provide them with counseling and adoption alternatives and empower them to choose life, and we take comfort in the tremendous increase in adoptions that has followed Republican legislative initiatives.
The choice could not be more stark. i am continually stunned that American Catholics could support such an organisation – and of course, in other countries as well; but it seems to be more pronounced in the US.
Surely, Don, that seal for the Democrats has been doctored -“mors vincet omnia” ?
Death conquers all. I am continually stunned also Don that any Catholic could support the Democrats but many do. We might have one or two show up in the comboxes to argue that it is really the Democrats who are pro-life! The human capacity for believing what we want to believe, evidence be hanged, is infinite.
But Don, of course death doesn’t conquer all – Jesus’ victory over death tells us so. 🙂
I think the Democrat Party, leaving aside individual Democrats, and Jesus aren’t on speaking terms right now!
The Democrats have removed any reference to God in their platform. They do mention the Southside Messiah over one hundred times.
http://www.examiner.com/article/democrats-remove-god-from-dnc-platform-insert-obama-s-name-over-100-times
Ha!
It just proves once again that men who don’t worship God will worship something, or someone else instead.
since I have many family members who are democrats, I find reason to pray very hard for them..It seems that there is nothing else left to do…reason does not work!
[…] What is The American Catholic? « Compare and Contrast, or Reason Number One Why I Am A Republican […]
What I find interesting is that the Democratic platform completely dances around the issue of human life. At no point do they come out and say “We don’t believe an unborn child is a human person.” nor do they say “We believe an unborn child is a human person, but we should kill them if they are inconvenient.” They leave that question alone, and for very good reason. If they answer that it is not a human person, then they must defeat the mountain of scientific and medical evidence that says otherwise, not to mention the philosophical questions. If they answer that it is a human person, then they must admit that they are murderers. Either way, they look bad, so they pull a Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the baby behind the belly button, oops, I mean the man behind the curtain.” They avoid any language which might suggest that is an issue. They have to do that, because they have no good response.
Don stated it best. “The choice could not be more stark.” I’m always dumbfounded by people who say there is no difference between the parties.
I wish the Democrats would move in the pro-life direction. I have a sort of moderate, non-political friend who always says “I have high hopes for the Democratic Party,” meaning he thinks that at some point they’ll get over the far leftist infection and return to what they were like in the early part of last century. But he feels that way because he doesn’t follow politics; there is no evidence that they are doing anything of the sort. On the contrary, national Dem candidates are getting progressively worse on the issue.
But if they did move toward Life it would push the Republicans in a pro-life direction. The country as a whole has been moving in that direction as the horror stories about the evil of abortion pile up in the hearts and minds of Americans. The people know it’s wrong. But the Dems rely on the monetary proceeds from it. It will take a miracle for them to shake that monkey off.
To clarify, when I said “.., would move Republicans in a pro-life direction” I meant in an even more pro-life direction and would give them more boldness and bipartisan clout to the movement rather than just the same old expectation of being obstructed on every pro-life initiative.
@Pauli, I’m sure your friend is a lovely person, but you might consider getting him a history book. The Democrat party wasn’t a very kind and gentle group of folks in the early 20th century.
And with that in mind, I have to say how impressive (and depressing) it is that the Democrat party seems to have set out in the last quarter century to ignore their reprehensible past and proclaim themselves the party of civil rights and so many people actually buy it. Slavery, segregation, the KKK, Jim Crow, why do I feel like I’m the only one left who remembers those were all pushed by the Democrats? And now they’ve got the honor of being the party of envy and death. Lovely folks, they are.
the “Democrats are the party of slavery and Jim Crow” is silly because it ignores that politics used to be much more coalitional. before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 where Goldwater opposed it on constitutional grounds, civil rights were basically bipartisan, it’s just that the Democrats tolerated Southern segregationists to hold electoral votes in the South from people who were nothing like future McGovern Democrats on other issues. once that coalition broke those people gravitated toward the GOP in national elections because they didn’t have anything in common with the increasingly left-wing nature of the Democratic Party.
note that this isn’t a “GOP won the South because of racism” argument. Nixon did try to get votes from Wallace people but you could argue they regardless of segregationist views they might’ve held in the past, they were more in tune with the GOP on other issues anyway.
i basically view the Dixiecrats:today’s Democrats analogy as flawed in the same way as if you tried to compare Rockefeller Republicans to today’s Republicans. demographics and ideology have shifted over time.
if anything is wrong with the modern Democratic Party on the race issue it’s that they’re too ANTI-racist. by which i don’t mean that racism is acceptable, but that it has consumed them to the point where they’re blissfully ignorant of any potential cultural problems that could arise from unchecked immigration, and they buy into all the multicultural slush.
“i am continually stunned that American Catholics could support such an organisation”
As Lord Macauley observed, “We know through what strange loopholes the human mind contrives to escape, when it wishes to avoid a disagreeable inference from an admitted proposition. We know how long the Jansenists contrived to believe the Pope infallible in matters of doctrine, and at the same time to believe doctrines which he pronounced to be heretical.”
Reagan on Democrat platforms:
“if anything is wrong with the modern Democratic Party on the race issue it’s that they’re too ANTI-racist. ”
If twere only true! Actually the Democrat Party has always been fine with government discriminating against people based on their race. The colors have shifted over time, but the principle has remained the same. The Republicans on the other hand have remained remarkably true to the principle that government must not discriminate against Americans on the basis of race.
Thanks for the Reagan clip! He certainly has a way of telling a punch line.
As for the Democrat Platform – so called “social justice” has won out. Thank you Cardinal Bernardin – and the U.S. bishops and half the clergy who remain registered in the pro-abortion party even still today.
well even affirmative action, which obviously does not treat individuals equally, is based on the Dems’ “equality of outcome” philosophy. it’s in keeping with their idea that blacks are still horribly oppressed in this country and the government must give them a leg up. AKA, an overcorrection to past racism.
it’s also why for all the optimistic talk about how blacks are more socially conservative than whites, the Dems’ combination of affirmative action and successfully painting the GOP as the party of those eeeeeevil white flyover states aren’t gonna have black people voting GOP any time soon.
Affirmative action is not just for blacks in the Democrat universe but also for Hispanics and native Americans. Asians can go hang. Interesting how for the Democrats’ favored skin colors always come in the shade of useful voting blocks for the Democrat party.
@JDP, my point was not that the Democrats are exactly the same now as they were then. Only to point out that this idea of a time when the Democrat party represented everything wonderful in the world is a fantasy. The fact is the party has a very dismal history, demographic shift or no.
Oh, well, Donald, as I have stated times without number, Obama is the High Priest of Satan. He is determined to divide, and hopefully destroy the Catholic Church. But I have news for him……even if you Americans commit suicide by re-electing him, God will hit back, and viciously, too. May each and everyone in your country who calls themselves Catholics, and all people of goodwill, jump into the trenches and vote this Monster out.