OPINION:
To say the left in America has gone off the rails is like saying the Super Bowl is a fairly popular football game.
It’s hard to keep up with the tsunami of cultural and economic insanity thundering through a thousand outlets every day, but here’s a try. You thought Vermont’s Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders was radical? Current Democratic leaders start with his views and go further left.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi mocks the idea of securing America’s southern border as something only a bigot like President Trump would want. Hence, she and her party oppose even a dime for any more physical barriers that would help the border patrol stem the ongoing invasion of illegal immigrants. Three more caravans on the way? Ho hum.
Openly socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, wants not only open borders but to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is charged with keeping us safe from drug dealers and violent criminals. She also backs a confiscatory tax scheme with rates as high as 70 percent, free college tuition and a “Green New Deal” mandate that would strangle industry, cause energy costs to skyrocket and make blackouts common. She’s a huge hit wherever she speaks.
New York State’s Democrats last week legalized late-term abortion right up to a baby’s due date. Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam endorsed what amounts to infanticide after birth while defending a proposed law that would allow abortion of a baby even during a woman’s labor. Commentator Larry O’Connor has dubbed Dr. Northam, who is a pediatric neurologist, “Governor Gosnell,” after the infamous Philadelphia baby butcher recently depicted in the Dean Cain film “Gosnell.”
Sen. Kamala Harris, California Democrat, wants to end all private health insurance plans and put the government solely in charge. She’s not even bothering to falsely promise, as did President Obama, that everyone can keep their health plan and doctor if they like them. She wants no escape.
Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren wants to seize and redistribute income from “the rich” and backs government control of corporations and “Medicare for all.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are deploying the LGBTQ legal agenda to criminalize conservative religious views, using transgenderism as the spearpoint. After enacting their radical, full-term abortion bill, New York legislators passed a law three days later enshrining the LGBTQ activist agenda and another bill criminalizing counseling for young people with unwanted same-sex desires. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York Democrat, signed both with fanfare.
The Empire State joins 14 other Democrat-dominated states with similar laws whose view of sexuality is like the Eagles’ song, “Hotel California.” You can get into homosexuality and transgender behavior anytime you like, but you can never leave — they will see to that.
Such laws are a totalitarian assault on free speech, client self-determination, parental rights, religious freedom and the universal understanding of male-female complementarity found in every culture and every major religion. They constitute an open attack on the Judeo-Christian morality that undergirds our country’s commitment to liberty under law.
A breath of sanity occurred this past week when U.S. Magistrate Amanda Arnold Sansone recommended a limited injunction against the city of Tampa’s SOCE (Sexual Orientation Change Effort) law barring counseling for minors.
She wrote that the city “be enjoined from enforcing” an ordinance against mental health professionals “who provide non-coercive, non-aversive SOCE counseling — which consists entirely of speech, or ’talk therapy.’” In other words, she didn’t buy into the false allegations of “electroshock therapy” and other aversive methods that the counseling profession abandoned long ago.
The judge’s ruling is a tiny pinprick of hope against a dark, lunatic campaign to stamp out normalcy. Meanwhile, the abomination of “Drag Queen Story Hours” for small children is spreading across the nation. How did it come to this? In the middle of the 20th century, cultural Marxists began to dominate the universities and produce a trickle-down effect on public schools, the professional associations and American culture. They have now taken over one of America’s major parties, as evidenced by Democrats’ embrace of culturally corrosive attacks.
The Democrat-run House Natural Resources Committee this past week drafted a new oath for witnesses that omits “so help you God.” After a Fox News story stirred a backlash, the committee backed off and voted to keep God in the oath. Similarly, during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, mention of God was removed from the party platform, then restored as delegates loudly booed.
“It is incredible, but not surprising, that the Democrats would try to remove God from committee proceedings in one of their first acts in the majority,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican. “They really have become the party of Karl Marx.”
Indeed, Marx called for extirpating religion — the “opiate of the masses.” He saw socialism, like capitalism, as merely a way station on the road to communism.
Given the unblemished record of human misery produced by socialism and communism, you’d have to be crazy to want to push our country in that direction — wouldn’t you?
• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times.
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