Womb of the Unknown Soldier
The military may want to limit civilian casualties, but Senate Democrats are doing everything they can to increase them. When they trek back to Washington next week, members will take another crack at taxpayer-funded abortions--this time on foreign and domestic military installations. If they succeed, it would be the government’s second largest expansion of abortion this year. And, like the health care law, it will be just as unpopular.
If there’s one thing liberals should have learned from ObamaCare, it’s that forcing Americans into the abortion business is a lesson in what-not-to-do before a major election. Dragging taxpayers into another debate on an issue in which their views are consistently ignored will only reinforce their bitterness about the current Congress. It will also expose President Obama for the imposter that he is. If he signs a bill that turns our military hospitals into abortion clinics, it will destroy the last scrap of credibility he has on this issue. As Bob Maginnis points out in his new op-ed, President Obama signed an Executive Order meant to reassure voters that federal funds wouldn’t be used to pay for abortions. Attaching his name to this bill would violate that trust in a very public way.
In the meantime, Democrats will try to argue that overturning the 1996 ban on military abortions wouldn’t cost Americans anything. Nice try, writes Maginnis. Apart from the actual abortion fee, there’s no telling how many hundreds of thousands of dollars would be spent outfitting the current facilities with new equipment, staffs, extra beds, transportation, office space, medicine, sanitation, and the list goes on. And since the military is a relatively conservative group, it would be nearly impossible to find personnel who are willing to perform the procedure. That’s one reason why President Bill Clinton’s abortion experiment failed after three years in the military. The armed services couldn’t identify enough people to participate in his anti-life agenda. Instead, they had to hire what were essentially abortion mercenaries, outside contractors who would provide the procedure at--you guessed it--taxpayer expense. And by expanding the policy to U.S. facilities, military hos pitals wouldn’t be bound by parental involvement laws or other pro-life laws in the state the base is located. The bottom line is that our troops’ mission is to protect all innocents--including the unborn.
Meanwhile, as the Senate tries to destroy the next generation of soldiers, President Obama is still intent on demoralizing the current ones. When Congress returns, so too will the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” debate. This week, the Pentagon emailed a formal survey to 400,000 U.S. troops, asking servicemen to weigh in on the policy and how they would feel about sharing quarters or open-bay showers with homosexuals. Other questions touched on whether the repeal would affect their willingness to serve or affect morale. On last night’s “Situation Room,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed Lawrence Korb of the ultra-liberal Center for American Progress, who said that surveying the military is “a terrible idea because really what you’re doing is giving the troops the impression that they can change the policy or a lter the policy. Also, if you go back you take a look at how the troops felt about other social changes, [like] integrating African-Americans… had you taken a survey of those things, and you paid attention to it, those things would have never happened.”
Apart from implying that 50s soldiers were racists, CAP can’t seem to understand the major difference between now and then: a little thing called the draft. This is a volunteer military, and if retention drops as a result of this social experiment, then America may have no choice but to force people into service. Sort of an important question, don’t you think?
