Editorials
Why are Missouri Democrats imposing a pro-choice purity test ahead of midterms?
Earlier this summer, after months of public meetings, the Missouri Democratic Party inserted a paragraph into its platform that said that while the party is now and ever shall be pro-choice, those who feel otherwise are still welcome to vote Democratic.
Well, that was crazy talk for some Democrats.
Alison Dreith, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri, called the inclusive language “sickening” and “a slap in the face to the base voters of the party.” Rachel Sweet, of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, said that by “rolling out the welcome mat for candidates who do not support abortion rights,” the Missouri Democratic Party was “signaling to its female supporters that their rights are expendable.”
Well, the welcome mat has been taken back inside now. Which strikes us as especially self-defeating with the November midterms dead ahead. When Democrats say the republic is at stake, and democracy itself, do they mean it? If they do, this is an odd time for purity tests.
Yet with not just Democratic Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s seat but control of the U.S. Senate potentially at stake, the state party reversed itself on Saturday. It tossed out the offending paragraph welcoming abortion dissenters. And in the process, needlessly offended some of the many Democrats — 28 percent, according to the most recent national Gallup polling — who call themselves pro-life.
Darryl Jeffries, a former union electrician, retired contractor and lifelong self-described pro-life Democrat from Tebbetts, Missouri, was an observer at Saturday’s meeting of the 68 Missouri Democrats who draft the platform. It was his first political meeting of any kind, he said, and quite educational: “It just sounded like I was disenfranchised and wasn’t welcome.”
That shocked him, he said. “I call myself moderately pro-life; I don’t have all the answers. But the language I heard was ‘We really don’t want to hear from you people.’ “
The head of the Missouri Democratic Party, Stephen Webber, said the fix has unanimous support: “The goal is to unify all Democrats, and we did that on Saturday.”
That’s not the case. Joan Barry, a former Missouri House Democrat from St. Louis County, said she did dissent at the meeting, by reading a statement and by abstaining from the vote, as she said several others on the committee did.
Webber insisted that all criticism is coming from Republicans “trying to sow divisions.” He also said he’d never heard of the national group “Democrats for Life,” and that any grumbling was coming from people who are not from Missouri.
“Not from Missouri? That’s interesting,” said Barry. “I love my party, love everything it stands for and wouldn’t be anything else, but it’s ridiculous they said women were being thrown under the bus” instead of that the tent was just being let out a little, to show tolerance and, not incidentally, to win in November.
Jeffries said it was the platform committee members who looked like outsiders to him, “a bunch of rich New York Democrats making decisions for the thousands of us blue-collar people they’d really just like to see go away.”
He wonders if “this is going to hit Claire McCaskill hard” and thinks that “if I’ve got a good read on her, she’s not for this.” Though McCaskill is strongly pro-choice, we’re not sure why any Democrat locked in a toss-up race would be for showing supporters the door.
Yet Jeffries, who at 65 has voted only once for a Republican, Ronald Reagan, isn’t sure what he’s going to do now. Maybe “they enlarged the tent,’’ he said, “but they made the door smaller.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2018 6:56 PM.
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