Posted by
Craig Freeborn on Friday, February 23, 2007 2:57:22 AM
I wrote a piece last week about “Choose Life” license plates in Illinois and how the so-called “pro-choice” crowd was going to extraordinary, hypocritical, and – as it turns out – Illegal lengths to squash the pro-adoption specialty plates.
But this little temper tantrum is just one more rabid Pavlovian response by the Left to anything they can even tangentially label as “anti-choice”.
Take for instance the Child Custody Protection Act (S-403). This law would have stopped adults (read statutory rapists) from legally taking underage girls across state lines for abortions without their parents’ approval.
A little background. Most expectant teenagers – girls in junior high (ages 13 to 15) and high school (ages 15 to 18) – are impregnated by substantially older men. The majority of these men are older than 25 (in some cases much older) – which belies the spurious rationalization of “young love”. In case you missed it, most of these men are more than 7 to 13 years older than the girls they’ve impregnated. It’s called statutory rape. It’s immoral. And it’s against the law.
Over half the states right now have parental notification laws. These laws assure that parents become involved in a potentially life-altering decision, by a frightened young girl, in a woman’s body, who’s being pressured by a lecherous man a dozen years older than she, to snuff out the evidence of his lascivious behavior.
The problem is that after sexually exploiting these girls, these same men often circumvent state laws – and the girls’ parents – by driving them to a neighboring state where an abortion can be obtained – no questions asked.
The Child Custody Protection Act would make it a federal offense to take “minors across State lines in circumvention of laws requiring the involvement of parents in abortion decisions”.
That’s why over 80% of Freeborn Americans supported this bill – these bills actually, because they’ve been passed by the House and killed by the shadowy use of Senate procedural rules in every Congress for the past ten years.
Even those who support “pro-choice”, as they prefer to call it, say they would like abortion to be legal but rare. Well, abortion in this country is anything but rare – we kill more human fetuses in America every day than the radical Islamo-fascists in the entire Iraq war. In spite of what they say, abortion advocates will go to any length to stop reasonable attempts to actually make it rare.
So Democrats, it seems, have a dilemma. They want to appear to that 80% that they’re on their side, but they’re loath to vote on their side.
Enter Harry Reid (D-NV) who actually voted for S-403 before he voted against it! During the last (109th) Congress when he was Senate Minority Leader, Reid gave the go-ahead for his fellow Senate Democrats to vote in favor of the bill for the benefit of the folks back home.
Thus the Senate overwhelmingly voted 65 to 34 in favor of the “Child Custody Protection Act”, just as the House had overwhelming voted 270 to 157 for its version called the “Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act”.
But on the very same day as the vote, the Democrats – under Harry Reid – objected to the naming of a House-Senate conference committee to reconcile differences between the two bills. By the end of the Congressional session, they objected two more times, killing the legislation. Thus the Democrats got to have their cake and eat it too – too bad it didn’t gag them! They could publicly proclaim that they voted in favor of the Child Custody Protection Act, and their trusting constituents would never suspect they aborted it behind the scenes.
While the Democrats tell us they stand for “open and ethical” government, they’re helping statutory rapists cover up their crimes!