In some of the biggest news stories of the past few months, special interest groups from opposite ends of the political spectrum have used a new tactic that seems to be working. They are using public opinion about one issue to advance their agenda on an unrelated (or only tangentially related) idea.
The most obvious – and most successful – example is the lowering of the Confederate Battle Flag. Black activists, and a scattering of white liberals, have railed for years against the display of the Confederate flag, calling it a symbol of racism and oppression. More moderate voices disagreed for a variety of reasons and nothing much really happened.
Then a mentally unstable young man killed a bunch of folks in a South Carolina church.
In a public relations spin that I still find amazing, that abominable act became the springboard for an attack on the flag. Some P-R genius proposed that the issue was not mental health, or even the existence of evil, but the effect of a scrap of cloth, and somehow the idea took wings.
The media, which lives on controversy, took the ball and ran with it, and within a few days politicians were climbing all over each other to be seen leading the charge against that terrible flag. Amazon and WalMart dropped all items that showed the flag, South Carolina removed the flag from its place of honor on the state house lawn and other states removed it as a option on vanity license plates.
Now there is a similar move afoot from the other end of the political spectrum. It’s still early in the game, but it also seems to be working.
Right-to-Lifers, who have never been willing to accept Roe v. Wade, have discovered a new tactic – using the sale of body parts from aborted fetuses to attack Planned Parenthood. A series of secretly filmed videos has generated a huge reaction that is causing Planned Parenthood no end of grief. There are calls for criminal investigations and efforts to defund the organization – the tactic is working.
These back-door attacks work when frontal assaults have been largely ineffective, and I honestly don’t understand why they are so successful.
In the case of Planned Parenthood - whatever your opinion on abortion might be, whether you consider abortion a right, an unfortunate consequence or an abomination, the babies in question are dead. The aborted fetus is a by-product, and whether they burn them, bury them with honors, or auction the parts on E-Bay should not cloud your opinion on the issue,
Absolutely!!!
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