Several weeks ago, Gov. Mitch Daniels set off a firestorm when he suggested calling a truce in the culture wars in order to focus the nation on addressing economic and security issues.
Needless to say, that suggestion did not sit well with the Religious Right, since fighting culture war issues is their main priority. But eventually the story ran its course and the attacks on Daniels subsided as everyone involved moved on to other issues.
Or so we thought … but apparently the Family Research Council is still upset about it since FRC Senior Fellow Robert Morrison just wrote an op-ed attacking Daniels once again that ran in the Indianapolis Star.
Daniels’ supporters had been defending him on the grounds that he has a solid pro-life conservative record and thus he could get away with calling for a truce because nobody could question his credentials. But it looks like that is not the case, as Morrison slams Daniels for allowing Planned Parenthood to host a fundraiser in the Governor’s mansion and slams his “blinkered view [of] prosperity [with] no moral foundation”:
What Mitch Daniels missed in his call for a “truce” in the culture clash — a call he has adamantly repeated in recent days — is that we can no more be quiet about the slaughter of innocents than we can about the plundering of the next generation’s hopes for prosperity.
Planned Parenthood hosted a fundraiser in the Indiana governor’s residence. No pro-life governor would allow that. If we accept that, how can we complain when Gov. Kathleen Sebelius invites the grisliest of partial-birth abortionists to her governor’s mansion? Is it somehow OK because Daniels is a Republican?
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The Republicans have ever been a party of enterprise. This is not wrong. Abraham Lincoln believed passionately in “the right to rise.” He unleashed great engines of wealth production in the form of new inventions and a trans-continental railroad. Even with the tragedy and destruction of the Civil War, American industry and agriculture prospered.
But what saved Lincoln’s new Republican Party from being dismissed as advocates only for “Golden Calf” politics — a soulless worship of great wealth — was its basic commitment to human dignity, to the right of every man to eat the bread his own hands had earned.
Daniels misses all this. He does not understand that human life is the basis for all wealth. President Reagan’s Mexico City Doctrine was not just a cutoff of federal funds from the death-dealing minions of Planned Parenthood. It was importantly that, but much, much more.
Reagan’s Mexico City Doctrine boldly declared that human creativity and human procreativity were the indispensable sources of all wealth. Every farmer knows you cannot prosper if you eat the seed corn … We know that where there is no vision the people perish. With Mitch Daniels’ blinkered view, the perishing will continue apace, and prosperity will have no moral foundation.
