Timothy O’Malley hit his breaking point with the Dems

and left.

A political party with a sense of human dignity, that doesn’t cheer for abortion or mass deportation of women and children into dangerous situations – that doesn’t throw people away so easily. Is that too much to ask?

Had a long conversation yesterday with a lefty who has suffered enormously at the hands of “prolife” conservatives.  She has family members with enormously expensive medical issues and has heard for years from “prolife” Christians that if her children be like to die they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.  Not surprisingly, years of this kind of treatment from the Best Christians on Planet Earth has induced rather a lot of cynicism when she hears them brag about being the Party of God and the Champions of Life and so forth. And so she just could not believe that abortion is really an issue of conscience for millions of people.

So I found myself in the position of arguing with her about the need to distinguish between the manipulators in the GOP and the Right Wing Noise Machine and the manipulated in the rank and file.  Somebody had remarked on how much of the Dem platform appealed to them: the desire to help families in her position, the desire to help families earn a living wage, the empathy for refugees, the empathy for the poor.  Lots of prolife people have a consistent ethic of life and recognize that these things are not the opposite of caring about the unborn.  And then the Dems drag out somebody to gin up the party with the rallying cry “Abortion!  Hell yeah!” and it is a genuine moral crisis for them just as it is for O’Malley.  She couldn’t (understandably) hear that through the years of rage at the GOP struggle to kill her family by denying it the health care it needs–and the conservative Christian who labor to rationalize that as court prophet for the GOP.  But it remains true, nonetheless, that there are a lot of Timothy O’Malleys out there.

Democrats for Life are the most shat-upon demographic in the Dem party.  They have the patience of Job.  But nobody has infinite strength except God.  The Dems would never lose another election if they would just stop treating prolifers like scum and hear their legitimate cry on behalf of the least of these.