Family Values

Much hysterical comment from those who never wanted Obama, and who at one time noisily threatened to vote for McCain if Clinton were not the nominee, but who somehow feel that Obama owes them.

As soon as Obama promised out loud what everyone had really always assumed anyway, that there would be no federal funding for abortion or he would not sign the final Bill (frankly an inconceivable eventuality), then it became clear that, since making most or all of healthcare federally funded was the whole point, abortion might remain legal but would become practically impossible to procure. Those who say that Obama is some sort of sleeper agent may very well be onto something. But not at all in the way that they mean. And in any case, he is wide awake now. Never forget that he is an adult convert to Christianity.

Social democratic means to conservative, Christian ends. Old Labour, if you will, in British, Irish, Australian or New Zealand terms. The founding position of the Canadian New Democratic Party. Or the position of the conservative Democrats now back in their historic position as the de facto third and determinative party in a de facto hung Congress, these days as something very like a Continental Christian Democratic party, complete with the close ties to the Catholic Church.

And, indeed, to other things. Bringing us back to the hysteria of the Hillarities. Bart Stupak, you see, is a resident of the C Street house recently found to be inhabited by sinners, of all people, despite being maintained by the body these days normally referred to (though, that ye be not deceived, it is far from unique in this) as The Family. Stupak is expected to have known about other residents' transgressions as if the C Street facility were a common-or-garden boarding house, or the sort of accommodation normally provided to undergraduates. It might be. But somehow I doubt it. And even if it were.

Furthermore, The Family is held up as "fundamentalist". So, since they have all attended the National Prayer Breakfast, every President since 1953 has been a fundamentalist, or at least under that influence, has he? Relatively speaking (yes, including Bush the Younger), the nearest approximation was Jimmy Carter, and I doubt that they have him in mind, although it was he who signed the Hyde Amendment into law. LBJ may have had his moments, I suppose. Bill Clinton had a Southern Baptist streak a mile wide when it suited him, although again he cannot be at the front of his wife's shrieking supporters' minds. And Eisenhower was a Presbyterian who had originally been a Jehovah's Witness. But we are clutching at straws now. None of the rest provides any straws at which to clutch. Indeed, one was a Catholic, like Stupak. And another was an admittedly very idiosyncratic Quaker.

In reality, The Family, while nondenominational in itself, has its roots in the mainline Methodism to which Hillary Clinton and George W Bush both belong. All right, that was something different in 1935. But fundamentalist it was not, except to those who simply abuse the word, usually because they have no idea what it really means. Here in Britain, we, too, had a political movement nondenominational in itself but with its roots in mainline Methodism of the old school. It, too, reached out to and fully included Catholics. It, too, delivered universal public healthcare. And it, too, had a valiant record of opposition to abortion. The corresponding movement in Canada was founded by a Baptist minister. Is that "fundamentalist" enough for you?