With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

The Godfather of
the Conservative Foundation Movement
ruled with the majority
in Roe and Doe.

Matt Bai's The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democrat Politics, is a candid account from an insider to the party of the enemies of life, of the struggles among six groups vying for control of Democrat Party fundraising and platform direction prior to the 2006 mid-term elections, including:

• MoveOn.org,
• the Daily Kos and other blogs, and
• a little-known but highly influential assemblage of three billionaires and sixty millionaires, The Democracy Alliance.

Ostensibly concerned with attempts of Democrat Party outsiders to wrest control from the party old-guard using powerful new means of communications centering around the internet, the author of The Argument ends up admitting that, by the 2006 mid-term elections, despite the influx of new blood, the Democrat Party was as far as ever from convincing voters—or itself—that it has any ideas or programs that make it superior to, or different from, the Republicans.

Of special interest in The Argument is a PowerPoint^® presentation nicknamed "The Killer Slideshow", formally titled The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix. Compiled over a period of about a decade by a leftist policy wonk, former Clinton administration official Rob Stein, the 2004 slideshow used charts, diagrams and other graphic aids to detail the rise of the conservative foundation movement between the defeat of Barry Goldwater by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, and Ronald Reagan's 1976 Republican primary challenge to President Gerald R. Ford.

The Killer Slideshow—no one was allowed to view it without signing a non-divulgence agreement—took as its starting point the August, 1971 memorandum from future Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chairman, Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Titled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System", the confidential memorandum was held to be the original inspiration for the system of conservative foundations, considered by Democrat Party operatives in The Argument to have locked down Republican Party domination of the Presidency for nearly thirty years between Carter and Obama, only interrupted by Clinton.

The presentation's point was to exhort leftist donors into replicating the Republicans' long-term, Presidential electoral success . (Regardless of the slideshow's ultimate effect, it is worthy of note that the Obamanistas projected a forty-year reign, longer than that of the Democrats during the Depression period 1933-1954. Democrat campaign strategist James Carville has argued quite persuasively that the political statistics make Democrat domination of the Presidency, the most likely outcome of the current economic and political struggles.)

Now, after gaining only grudging admission to the Republicans' "big tent" for the better part of five decades, Pro-Lifers—one of the most coherent voting blocks in the pivotal 1994 mid-term elections, with exit-polling showing 26% reporting Pro-Life as their most important voting issue—should now realize that from its inception, the so-called "conservative" movement was founded by those who only threw table scraps to the Cause of Life.

This is conclusively proven by the behavior of one of the leading founders of the superstructure of "conservative" foundations, (fundraising apparatus such as direct-mail, training institutes, think-tanks, journals and talk-radio), Lewis F. Powell, Jr., who The Argument documents as having initiated the movement's long-term, historic success. And yet Powell, this paragon of "conservatism"†, ruled with the majority in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court decisions which opened the floodgates of blood in the killing of more than 50 million children in the U.S. alone.

This betrayal didn't start with Republican California Governor Ronald Reagan signing into law one of the nation's first laws permitting abortion, in 1967. "Conservative" former President Dwight D. Eisenhower became converted to the false gospel of contraception and population control in the mid-1960s.

By that time, there was "growing government interest in population control and the putative threat to American national security posed by a growing Third World population. … '[W]orries about the Soviet Union and the possibility of Communist inspired revolutions in the Third World were widespread in government and foreign-policy circles'. Funding for population control in the Agency for International Development [USAID] began with a modest $2.1 million dollars in 1965 and quickly reached $185 million by 1980." (James R. Kelly, "Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name For Abortion Opponents", Abortion politics in the United States and Canada: Studies in public opinion, Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 1994. pp. 20-26.)

With imminent prospects for loss of our freedom at the hands of the leftists, how much longer can the Pro-Life movement afford to allow the Republican Party, and supposedly "conservative" Democrats, to shine us on? Will we have to lose our freedom completely, as with Canada—where merely praying on the sidewalk results in imprisonment —before we get serious about demanding that the Republicans authentically support our cause?

‡Though a Democrat, Powell was economically conservative at the same time that he was socially leftist. «Back

How did it come about that the Archdiocese of Chicago undercut Catholic legislators resisting contraception programs targeted against Chicago-area African-Americans?

Again, we have to turn to our declared enemies—in this case a journal trumpeting the contraception and abortion line—for a candid account of the betrayal of our cause by our own leaders.

In 1963, the non-Catholic governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, appointed a non-Christian millionaire, auto-parts industrialist and art connoisseur Arnold Maremont, to chair the Illinois Public Aid Commission, successor to an Emergency Relief Commission created in the Depression.

Maremont was adamant that contraceptives be provided at State expense, explicitly targeted at African-Americans, first in the Chicago area, with plans to go statewide later. In this he was resolutely opposed by Catholic lawmakers—a majority of whom were Democrats—who passed legislation in the Springfield statehouse outlawing the plan.

But defeat was suddenly snatched from the jaws of victory (to mix up a metaphor) when, after a confidential meeting in the back of a proverbial, black limousine between a high official of the Archdiocese of Chicago and a population-control official, the Church inexplicably okayed Maremont's plan.

Confused Catholic lawmakers went along with this stark reversal of the continuous course of Church teaching since the beginning. Today, two generations after the detritus of the sexual revolution has settled down, the proportion of European-American children born to single mothers stands at about 40%, the same as the rate of non-marital births during the 1960s to African-Americans. Thus we see that, in the treatment of our society's less privileged members, "what goes around comes around".

We might expect that members of ecclesial communities who have departed from the Catholic fold would fall for this, especially after the confusion sewn by the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference permitting contraception within marriage .

But in acquiescing to the spirit of the age—an evil spirit, as Pope Paul VI warned—officials of the Archdiocese of Chicago shirked their duty and paved the way for the organized and coordinated dissent on the part of 600 Catholic "Theologians"—many of whom weren't theologians at all —against Humanae Vitae, the Church's 1968, authentic reiteration of its ancient, ordinary magisterial teaching on the inviolability of the transmission of human life in the marital embrace. The Chicago Archdiocese's arrogant cowardice would bear bitter fruit a decade later, in the Roe and Doe decisions which have cost the lives of more than 50 million American children.