The Party of Death

At last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference, controversial conservative commentator Ann Coulter said, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards."

She later said that it was a joke. She wouldn't insult gays by comparing them to Edwards.

Both conservatives and liberals are attacking her loudly.

A few days earlier HBO's Bill Maher said on Real Time, "I'm just saying that if he (Vice President Dick Cheney) did die, other people, more people would live. That's a fact."

When Barney Frank commented that some people were saying that the bomb that killed numerous people in Afghanistan but missed Cheney was wasted, Maher said, "That's a funny joke."

Would he have thought it was a funny joke if said about some Democratic congressman or senator or someone running for the presidency? If Coulter's comments were out of line, why wasn't everyone as incensed about Maher's calling for the death of the current vice president? Unless it's because the Democratic Party has become so entrenched as the party of death that it isn't even controversial?

Death as a solution is nothing new to the Democratic Party. It was their answer to runaway slaves in the 1800s. If the slave tried to escape, beating, branding, selling into the living death of being sent "down the river," or killing were common answers to the problem.

At the threat of Abraham Lincoln's being elected and putting a stop to the expansion of slavery, they cried for the death of the union and tried to kill it.

From Reconstruction into the Civil Rights period, the Ku Klux Klan kept the Negro in line. One former Ku Klux Klansman holds high office in the Senate, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Lynching was the answer to the "uppity" Negro who stepped out to assume independent manhood. The leading opponents of civil rights were Democratic governors and senators in the South.

Then came abortion. The Democratic Party leaders are to the man (and woman), pro-aborts. They've never found a method of killing the unborn too gruesome to support, including partial birth abortion in which the baby is partially delivered. Then scissors are stuck into the child's brain to kill it. The abortionist delivers the dead baby and throws it away. The Democratic Party leadership, on the whole, has voted time and time again to oppose any limitations on partial birth abortion.

Many in the pro-life movement have warned that the abortion mentality would spread and it has. It has increasingly spread to handicapped infants born in hospitals. The solution to the problem is to let the handicapped die.

Nor has it stopped with the death of the infant handicapped. Remember Terri Schiavo, the young brain-damaged woman who was ordered starved to death. The Democratic Party was outraged when Republicans in Congress tried to intervene on the side of life for Terri and the parents who wanted to care for her.

Several years ago a Democratic governor in Colorado said, "It's the duty of the elderly to die and get out of the way." Since then several states have passed legislation allowing the elderly to be put to death at their request.

In the last few years Democratic spokesmen, media personalities, and celebrities have written books and produced films that have called for the assassination of President George W. Bush, Vice-president Dick Cheney, and Senator Jesse Helms and his entire family. They voiced hopes that former Attorney General John Ashcroft would die of a serious illness and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife would feed him so much high-cholesterol food that he would die from it.

Congressman John Murtha has called for our troops having supplies, training, and equipment denied to them which would mean more deaths of our soldiers and of the Iraqi people.

What has happened to the Democratic Party? Some Democrats have laughed these verbal assaults off. Rarely have we heard the Democrats attack their own or demand more civility as the Republicans have done. But many rank-and-file Democrats have wondered where the party of FDR and JFK went. It started out as a party which supported earning its bread at the sweat of another man's brow. Its position has evolved to earning its votes by draining the blood from another man's heart.

Debbie W. Wilson

Debbie W. Wilson is a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.