Kerry and me.

 

 

Kerry Dougherty is a columnist in the Virginian Pilot and is unquestionably the most mainstream of the ones that the Pilot pays. She’s also a good writer. You feel that you get a chance to know her from her stories about her parents, especially her mom, who was apparently a heavy smoker who liked a cocktail or two. This is the sort of family that people can relate to: neither plaster saints nor “Mommy Dearest” villains.

The other thing to respect about Daugherty is that she’s more than willing to take on the conventional corruption that passes for local government in places like Virginia Beach. Here the big money comes from real estate interests who are always ready to saddle the taxpayers with expensive things like “light rail,” a boondoggle that is designed to enrich only the developers along the line at the cost of a billion dollars.

So I was disappointed to find Kerry using the label “ultraconservative” as a way of smearing Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia. There is no question that Cuccinelli is a conservative, but one of the ways that the MSM uses to demonize people on the Right is to label them and ridicule them rather than engage them in debate.  Cuccinelli is Catholic and opposes abortion. Cuccinelli's opponent has been making the case that he is waging a "war on women"  because he opposes abortion. So is opposition to abortion an "ultraconservative" position outside the American mainstream?  According to the Washington Post, no fan of Republicans,

By 56 percent to 27 percent, more Americans would prefer to impose limits on abortions after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy rather than the 24-week mark established by the Supreme Court, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

An additional 10 percent of those surveyed volunteered that they would prefer to outlaw abortion in the United States altogether or limit it sooner than 20 weeks after fertilization.

The fact is that the country is roughly evenly split between people who oppose abortion and those who support it. But when you ask people to get more granular, you find that only 19% say that abortion should be legal in all cases.  

 

That means that about one in five are in favor of abortion up to the moment of birth: for convenience, for fetal abnormalities, for sex selection, and  - since we’ll soon be able to test for the homosexual gene – to abort babies who may be homosexual. Those who oppose abortion in all cases, 17%, are roughly equal to those who favor it in all cases; neatly balancing the scales. If you remove those who support abortion in all cases and add those who have no opinion (22%), 78% of Americans would like some limits to abortion which puts them at odds with Terry McAuliffe and his supporters at Planned Parenthood as well as with Barack Obama.

We wonder if Kerry Daugherty would like to reconsider who should be tarred with the “Ultra” label, or if she has other issues in mind?