That Confusing Morality Thing

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for posting John Kerry's Senate speech on his blog, and giving it so much air time today ... keeping me seething much of the way to the airport this afternoon.

Kerry is continuing to refine his long, boring diatribes to create a response to that confusing morality thing that so tripped him up in November. Let's strip the anti-GOP policy stuff from the speech and look at what it has to say about the state-of-the-art of Dem-speak on addressing the morality vote:

Forces outside the mainstream now seem to effortlessly push Republican leaders toward conduct that the American people really don't want in their elected leaders ...

Rather than lead with Dem morality (we'll get to that in a bit), he's choosing to play to the amoral base by marginalizing the morality vote. Christians, Republicans and conservatives are not a significant part of Kerry's America, an America where a minorstream is really the mainstream.

... inserting the government into our private lives, injecting religion into debates about public policy where it doesn't apply.

For all their talk of the GOP exploiting Terri Schiavo's death, here's the incredibly ghoulish looking John Kerry exploiting Terri Schiavo's death. And why is it that when anti-death penalty freaks use the courts to slow or avoid a murderer's execution, it's not injecting religion into debates about public policy?

Jumping through hoops to ingratiate themselves to their party's base ....

This is off the morality thing subject, but this line reminds me of those funny photos of a very uncomfortable looking Kerry in this black church and that black church.

Will Republican senators let their silence endorse Senator Frist's appeal to religious division, or will they put principle ahead of partisanship and refuse to follow him across that line? ... Joe Lieberman's a person of faith. Harry reid's a person of faith.

This reference to Frist's participation in a program with Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship Ministries and the Southern Baptist Convention shows that Kerry is piling on the current Dem effort to build a wall between the Legislative branch and our religion. Not his religion, but our religion. Politicians speak to religious groups all the time, but Kerry's saying if the religion is not in his mainstream, then speaking to that religion is partisanship. He divides, but we're partisans.

Are we going to allow the Majority Leader to invoke faith to rewrite Senate rules to put substandard, extremist judges on the bench? Is that where we are now?

There's his "minorstreaming" of the mainstream again. "If I keep saying its small, maybe it will go away ...." In Kerry's world, judges who believe the Supreme Court erred in Roe v. Wade, who beleive the courts have overstated and incorrectly applied separation of church and state, are by default substandard and extremist, even though they reflect the majority view on abortion and a dominant view on separation of church and state.

When you have got tens of thousands of innocent souls perished in Darfur, when 11 million children are without health insurance, when our colossal debt subjects our economic future to the whims of Asian bankers ...

And there it is! After attacking our faith and being divisive by calling us divisive, Kerry rolls out what has become standard Dem-speak on that confusing morality thing. Morality is feeding the poor, universal health insurance and balanced trade. There is certainly a moral basis for feeding the poor and caring for the sick, but balanced trade?! (And why, by the way, the swipe at Asian bankers?)

Even so, this approach to answering the morality vote will only work with the amoral, because the moral know that conservative Christians are doing more in Dafur than liberal agnostics and atheists are, and that there are better ways to care for the sick than sinking America into the sort of ineffective health care that exists in the Canadian and European socialist democracies.

... no one can tell me that faith demands all of a sudden that you put the Senate into a position where it is going to pull itself apart over the question of a few judges. No one with those priorities has a right to use faith to intimidate anyone of us.

It is clear that rather than address the morality vote, the Kerry approach is to align with agnostics, atheists and Christians in name only. He thinks that by attacking people who walk the walk of deep religious convictions, he will rise up an amoral vote. Never mind that it's the Dems who threaten to pull the Senate apart because of their faith in liberal secularism. Attack! Attack! Attack!