Within days of Sen. John Kerry’s Fourth of July campaign swing through the Midwest, where he trumpeted his “conservative values,” including his belief that life begins at conception, he was hosting a $7.5 million fund-raiser in New York City, where his Hollywood pals called the president of the United States “a cheap thug,” “a liar” and “a killer.” A day later, referring to the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry declared, “Their values system is distorted and not based on truth.” In the same interview, his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, rhapsodized about the “genuine feelings” of the rhetorical assassins at the fund-raiser, enthusing, “Thank goodness in our country they have a right to express those feelings.”
Such are the “conservative values” of Kerry-Edwards. It is a safe bet that the tens of millions of Americans who hold traditional, conservative values very dear will have no problem telling the difference between shameless pretenders and the real McCoys. Indeed, on the social and cultural fronts, there is abundant evidence from the voting records of Messrs. Kerry and Edwards confirming their embrace of liberal social values in diametric opposition to what are universally regarded as conservative norms:
• Consider the 100 percent voting scores from NARAL Pro-Choice America that Messrs. Edwards and Kerry wear as badges of honor, notwithstanding the latter’s recent declaration, following more than 40 million post-Roe abortions, that he fervently believes that “life begins at conception.” Less than a year after being elected senator from North Carolina — after asserting that “partial-birth abortions should be banned” — Mr. Edwards voted against banning partial-birth abortions.
• An analysis of Mr. Edwards’ 2003 voting record by the authoritative, nonpartisan National Journal established him as the Senate’s fourth most liberal member. (Mr. Kerry was the body’s most liberal member last year, a distinction he has achieved on three previous occasions.) Less well-known is the fact that not a single U.S. senator received a higher liberal score than Mr. Edwards from the National Journal for the 15 votes in its social-issues category. Moreover, Congressional Quarterly’s review of Mr. Kerry’s publicly announced positions reveals that he supported the liberal line on 14 of the 15 social-issue votes.
• In 2000 and 2002, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards voted for an amendment that would broaden federal hate-crimes legislation to include crimes related to gender and sexual orientation. And in 2001, they voted against an amendment to withhold federal funds from public schools that barred the Boy Scouts from using school facilities because the organization opposed homosexual scoutmasters.
• Despite his professed opposition to homosexual marriage, Mr. Kerry in 1996 was one of only 14 senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which would have banned federal recognition of homosexual marriages. Though he was not in the Senate at the time of the DOMA vote, Mr. Edwards recently said he “would not support the Defense of Marriage Act today.” Meanwhile, both senators voted against an amendment in 2001 that would have eliminated the marriage penalty, which required tens of millions of married couples to pay an average of about $1,500 more in federal income taxes each year than they would pay if they were cohabiting.
• Despite the fact that neither Democratic senator would think of sending his children to failure-plagued inner-city public schools, both voted in 2001 against a federally funded demonstration project that would have financed vouchers for poor parents. The year before, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards voted to allow schools to distribute the “morning-after” pill without parents’ knowledge; and in 1991, Mr. Kerry voted against parental notification for teenage abortions.
• In 2000, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards voted against a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.
• Conservative rural voters, to whom Mr. Edwards is expected to appeal, will not be pleased to learn that both ends of the Democratic ticket voted in favor of gun-show background checks. Regarding Mr. Kerry, the National Rifle Association (NRA) recently declared that his 20-year Senate “record of words and misdeeds on firearms rights has earned him a key place among the most solid ’F’ candidates ever rated” by the NRA.
• Both senators also voted against the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General. Apparently fearing that the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court could be appointed by a Republican, they voted to continue the filibuster against the nomination of the eminently qualified Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
• Both senators voted in 2001 to kill an amendment that would have prohibited the use of taxpayer funds for needle-exchange programs in the District.
• Both Mr. Kerry, who brags on his campaign Web site that he has “a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) [the nation’s leading homosexual-rights organization] since 1995,” and Mr. Edwards, whose latest HRC rating is also 100 percent, oppose the Clinton administration-imposed “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” that bans open homosexuals from serving in the military.
“Conservative values”? Let the debate begin.
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