https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/04/cawz-a04.html
Excerpt:
Presented as the “Value Them Both Amendment,” the initiative was backed by the Catholic Diocese in Kansas, which spent $5.4 million campaigning for it, as well as numerous evangelical Christian groups.
Tuesday’s vote underscores the fact that the American population is well to the left of the political establishment, including both of its political parties—even in a relatively rural and “conservative” region like Kansas, where some 850,000 voters are registered Republicans, compared to around 500,000 who are registered Democrats.
As the New York Times grudgingly admitted, “abortion rights performed better than Mr. Biden, and opposition to abortion performed worse than Mr. Trump.”
The Times noted that in Wyandot County, which includes Kansas City, Kansas, the smaller portion of the city, Biden received 65 percent of the vote in 2020, but 74 percent voted in defense of abortion rights. In the most populous county in the state, Johnson County, Biden won in 2020 by 53 percent, but 68 percent voted yesterday for abortion rights.
Yesterday’s vote disproves all attempts to justify the Democratic Party’s failure to wage an aggressive struggle to defend democratic rights with the claim that the American people are “conservative.” On the contrary, it is the Democratic Party that is holding back the population. If the Biden administration and the Democrats made a genuine effort to mobilize popular sentiment in favor of the defense of abortion rights—which they have no intention of doing—such an effort would meet with an overwhelmingly positive response.
Given this expression of popular sentiment in Kansas, where a greater proportion of the population lives in rural areas than the national average, one can infer that a referendum defending abortion rights would win by an even greater margin in any of the large urban metropolises in California, Texas or New York.
Within Kansas, the urban population centers rejected the initiative by huge margins. In Douglas County, where the main campus of the University of Kansas is located, the initiative was voted down by a staggering 81 to 19 percent. In Shawnee County, which includes the city of Wichita, the initiative was defeated by 66 to 34 percent.
Wichita was the site of a right-wing terrorist attack on May 31, 2009, in which physician George Tiller was murdered by anti-abortion fanatic Scott Roeder. Tiller had been the target of relentless and vicious personal attacks by right-wing media, with Fox Newscalling for him to face “Judgment Day.”
No comments:
Post a Comment