Dems have skewed priorities

Connecticut has many chronic problems — like high taxes, government labor costs, drug addiction, child neglect, and the failure of education, poverty, and urban policies — but the state’s majority political party, the Democratic Party, gives them barely a thought. Instead Connecticut’s Democrats are obsessed with facilitating illegal immigration and abortion.

Last week state Attorney General William Tong announced that his office is helping to defend in federal court a New York State law similar to one in Connecticut that authorizes driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. “Your immigration status and place where you were born have nothing to do with whether you’re a safe driver,” the attorney general said.

But the ability to get a driver’s license and other forms of identification even if you’re in the country illegally weakens federal immigration law and devalues citizenship. This is a form of nullification.

Also last week the state Senate’s Democrats called on the Lamont administration to make up the $2.1 million in federal grant money that Planned Parenthood of Southern New England is losing because it refuses to comply with a new federal rule prohibiting federally funded clinics from assisting abortion. The Democrats call the rule an attack by the Trump administration on women’s health, especially the health of women from racial minorities.

But the rule didn’t take Planned Parenthood’s grant money away and isn’t putting the organization out of business. Instead Planned Parenthood has chosen to refuse all federal money and put its other services at risk if it can’t facilitate abortion. Connecticut’s Democratic state senators agree. They think that abortion is so important that state government should reimburse Planned Parenthood for whatever federal money it loses by giving abortion its top priority.

Yes, abortion causes strong feelings like those of Planned Parenthood and the Democratic senators. People who oppose abortion have strong feelings too, and they (or people seeking their favor) are in charge of federal policy on the issue at the moment. But it is demagogic to call the new rule an attack on women’s health and on minority women in particular.

For many people, including many women, want abortion to be prohibited or at least oppose government’s paying for it even as they also want the medical needs of women and children to be served — along with the needs of the unborn. Even some prominent Democrats used to say abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” rather than as ubiquitous as the current controversy makes it seem.

Since the opposing positions are sincerely held and sometimes even honestly articulated, it is also demagogic for one side to demonize the other. The Trump administration’s new rule is just another manifestation of the country’s division on an issue that always has been controversial and probably always will be.

In any case while the new rule may hinder some abortions, it won’t outlaw any, and Planned Parenthood easily could keep its federal money and ensure the continued facilitation of abortion by creating a separate organization for that. Abortion supporters probably would finance the separate organization amply, especially since liberals now seem to consider abortion the highest social good.

Then Connecticut’s Democratic state senators could start pondering neglected public needs far more compelling than abortion — like child protection, transportation infrastructure, addiction rehabilitation, and policing the state’s anarchic cities.