Daniel Henninger's weekly column – the Gosnell murder case
Everyone clings to something, and we now know what liberals cling to.
But what do liberals cling to? Recent events have revealed two things. Gun control and abortion.
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By now, many details of the accusations against Dr. Gosnell have
become known. One will suffice. The Philadelphia grand-jury report,
which is a hard read, says: "The way he ensured fetal demise [Dr.
Gosnell's phrase] was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's
neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping.' Over the
years, there were hundreds of 'snippings.'" Most were third-trimester
babies. Eight of his clinic staff have pleaded guilty.
In these times of a media that need to fill a bottomless electronic
news hole, a story as sensational as the Gosnell abortion trial should
be everywhere. But as conservative bloggers and a few liberal writers
such as Kirsten Powers have established in recent weeks, most major
newspapers and TV networks have produced little or cursory coverage of
this trial. The two exceptions are the Associated Press and Fox News.
The basic conservative criticism here is that the media have
underplayed the Gosnell story because its details might undermine
support for the abortion status quo, or at least cause people to ask
what exactly that status quo is these days. Rather than risk that, the
Gosnell story was demoted.
In response, some have said the conservative bloggers are wrongly
seeing a conspiracy of silence where there is only a difference over
news judgment. By now, this response is implausible. It is hardly a
revelation anymore that the media play the news in subtle but tilted
ways to protect what they think is a settled social good, such as access
to abortion, no matter what.
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Mr. Obama's remark about rural Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and
religion is the coin of the realm in his crowd. But let's put their
shared consensus another way: Somehow it became a conventional view in
contemporary American politics that it is non-urban conservatives who in
every case have to accommodate their beliefs to a national culture
created by people who live somewhere else. "They" must adjust on
abortion, guns, school prayer, sexual mores and all the rest of it.
Liberals, meanwhile, not only feel no need to concede anything but use
the commanding heights of the press and academia to define anyone who
dissents from their ever-evolving national culture as a political fringe
obsessed with people, one might say, who aren't like them.
******
Political correctness—the silent code that decides whose side of the
story gets elevated and whose side gets buried—has been a blunt but
effective weapon, which the dominant liberal culture has used to achieve
a lot of victories over "them" the past 40 years. But the wins have
come at a price. That price is the return of an unmistakable, growing
and potentially destabilizing bitterness in American politics.
The whole column is worth a read.
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