After The Election

A lot of pundits are pondering the meaning of the election. I agree most with the Wall Street Journal. Miguel Estrada for the Supreme Court. Carolyn Kuhl and Janice Rogers Brown for the 9th Circuit. At a minimum. To people like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who, torn between his liberal values regarding social issues and his strong support for the war in Iraq, I say, please take another look at those social values. There is, indeed, a halfway point on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Abortion has never been about the right of a woman to control her own body. It is about that other person that grows inside her. Her baby. 80 percent of the American people, when they have the procedure explained to them, are opposed to partial birth abortion. The extreme position demanded by NARAL of any politician who wants national Democratic Party support, is killing the Democratic Party. What do I mean by extreme? Democrats, by their votes, assert that a woman has a right to engage a doctor to kill a baby which would be able to breathe, eat and cry on its own absent a pair of scissors inserted into its brain stem to kill it. They assert the right of a woman to engage a doctor to do this act for any reason the woman finds compelling. They refuse to acknowledge the reality of that baby's human being. They voted against the Lacy Peterson act, finding two victims when the woman is pregnant because it implicitly acknowledges the personhood of an unborn infant. The problem with partial birth abortion issue is that anyone who has ever had a baby or who has ever held a newborn baby knows that a day or a week before, if this infant had had to be delivered fromm even a dead mother, it would have lived. They know that this is a fully formed human being capable of life outside the womb by, at the outside, the sixth month. NARAL doesn't just want to protect Roe v. Wade, they insist on extending it. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court set the boundary of when the states could legislate protection for the unborn at the point where an infant could survive outside the womb. That is not enough for NARAL, they insist on an interpretation that allows a mother to have a doctor kill a baby which has partially emerged from the womb, its legs and body, hands and arms.

On the issue of gay marriage, again, the Republican majority can probably be talked into laws regulating domestic partnerships, if such laws are not cast in sexual terms. In California, for example, we have statutes concerning auto sales contracts, landlord and tenant arrangements and a host of other, essentially, contractual relationships. These laws require some contract terms, disallow some others and create a model contract in some cases, for those who do not have the money or time to construct their own. Similarly, there is a model will for the same reason. There is nothing inherently wrong in a state saying that it recognizes that persons who are not husband and wife may wish to enter a contractual relationship concerng their living situations and providing a model contract for that purpose. This could include, for example a grandmother and her grandchildren living with her. There is no reason for limiting a domestic partnership to persons maintaining a sexual relationship. Afer all, the claim made by homosexuals is that they are not able to have the defined obligations of marriage. But why shouldn't a man and woman who want to live together, for example, be able to enter a domestic partnership/

AS for marriage itself, I think that institution. to the extent it is recognized legally, must be reserved for a man and a woman, for the reasons I have set forth before.

On these two issues, Mr. Friedman and others who feel as he does, there is room for reasonable people to resolve their differences. If they are willing to budge one inch off of their positions.