To understand this piece, you need to hear this part of the debate, starting at around the 33 minute mark, which I embedded in this piece on Green Mountain Daily (I tried to embed it here, with no luck).
The whole exchange lasts a little under four minutes.
There are two questions, and they're yes or no questions, asked by Shumlin of Dubie:
- if a bill arrived at your desk restricting a woman's right to chose, would you sign it, and;
- do you oppose abortion in the cases of rape and incest;
A lot of candidates are willing to answer these questions Dubie, however (like his running mate, Phil Scott) seems to hover around the issue like a fly trying to figure out which piece of fruit is the moldiest, yet still worried about getting smacked down in flight.
Len Britton, apparently, doesn't want to answer the question at all. If he has any opinion on abortion, he's hidden it well enough that I can't find it.
Beaudry, on the other hand, is willing to be quite specific:
Furthermore, Beaudry shared his views about the ongoing abortion controversy. He proudly stated that he is a "pro-life" candidate, with the obvious exceptions of rape, incest, and cases where the mother's life is in danger. He also said that he is being fully endorsed by the Vermont Right to Life Political Committee along with gubernatorial candidate Brian Dubie.
Now-- I'm pro-choice and have been for most of my adult life, but I know people who are anti-abortion, and I don't necessarily think badly of them for that-- I get where they're coming from. While I think that politicians often use pro-life issues in a fairly cynical fashion as wedge issues, they are able to do so because of the chunk of population that honestly believes abortion to be amoral.
I'm not posting to argue that point. More than a decade ago, I just gave up on arguing with people about abortion. I can't think of any case in the last fifteen years where I've had a discussion in which someone changed their mind about it, so I'm not here to discuss that.
I'm here to discuss integrity.
There's a history in this country of a stealth campaign on the part of activists on the religious right since the 1970's. They'd float school board candidates who would conceal their agenda until in a position of power. That's how you end up with situations such as a school in Connecticut attempting to hold a graduation in a Christian church.
I want to be clear: this is not about Christians or Christianity. This is about a group of activists who are intentionally using stealth techniques to get into office by obscuring their extremism. This is why, until this year, candidates like Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle, rarely had any electoral victories at all, even in primaries: they were too openly crazy to win anything.
In Vermont, this embracing of wingnut right-wing idiocy has yet to manifest itself in a serious fashion, so our candidates who support extreme views need to be careful enough not to allow those views to see the light of day lest it leave them scorched and maimed.
So let's be clear about this: when a candidate refuses to answer a question about whether or not he thinks abortion is acceptable in the case of rape and incest? There's virtually nothing to lose by saying "I think that's a perfectly acceptable exception" unless he is (a) strongly beholden to pro-life extremists or (b) is a pro-life extremist himself.
There is no reason not to answer that question unless you don't have the simple integrity to stand by what you believe.
Cowards. Every damned one of them.