Whoopi Goldberg Inspires a Teachable Moment

Even a really stupid remark makes points about abortion and America

Note to Readers: A version of this essay appeared this morning on American Thinker.com.

Whoopi Goldberg Inspires a Teachable Moment

Whoopi Goldberg (whose real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson and who is paid some $8 million per year for hosting ABC's The View, a position she's occupied since 2007) made a numbingly stupid remark the other day.

It was hardly a "Stop the Presses!" moment, however, as the actress, comedienne and authoress has a history of making stupid statements; the most famous was probably when she defended Roman Polanski (convicted of raping a 13 yr.-old girl) by saying that the act (which included drugging the victim and rendering her unconscious) "wasn't 'rape' rape." Whoopi also excused Michael Vick's involvement in dogfighting as a result of "cultural influences," and fairly recently declared that the Holocaust wasn't about race, but was a matter of "white people doing it to white people."

But her latest, as she chimed in on the current kerfuffle over the prospect of the Supreme Court overturning the Roe vs. Wade decision regarding abortion, was to declare that the decision to have an abortion was strictly between "my doctor, myself and my child."

(Leaving aside that her use of the terminology "my child" would seem to contradict the argument by abortion advocates that what is aborted is not a child but an inconvenient, non-viable mass of tissue) I find it quite remarkable that her comment seems to imply that the child has a vote in the decision-making process; I wonder how the child casts that vote, or otherwise makes its wishes known.

I know it's wrong to presume how someone will vote, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that a child in its mother's womb would vote to be born, rather than to be aborted. And yet, even if the child has a vote, and a way to cast it, it can be easily out-voted by the woman and her doctor. And this provides a "teachable moment" about Democrats' understanding of voting and of the very nature of American self-government.

Democrats (as well as the various permutations of Libs/Progs/Commies etc.) have a great fondness of late for proclaiming, in high dudgeon, that almost everything of which they disapprove or with which they disagree constitutes "a threat to our democracy." They even paint the Electoral College as being "anti-democracy," claiming that it subverts the notion that every vote should count equally.

Actually, they're right; the Electoral College is anti-democracy, precisely because it prevents more heavily-populated states -- with their greater number of votes -- from "democratically" imposing their will upon less-populated states (you'd think that people who are always claiming to want "a level playing field" would appreciate this).

This is illustrative of their (perhaps willful) failure to grasp the distinction between a democracy (which the U.S. is most assuredly not; it's notable that the word "democracy" appears nowhere in the Constitution nor in the Declaration of Independence) and a representative, constitutional republic (which the U.S. most assuredly is, or at least was founded as).

Democracy is simply majority rule; Ben Franklin described it with the metaphor of two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. The lamb will always be outvoted, and will always find itself on the menu. And the wolves, as they pick their teeth, will always say, "'Too bad about that lamb, but we had a fair 'n' square election and he lost. He was delicious, though!"

Democracy contains no provision for the rights of minorities. Only a representative republic keeps minorities (whose rights Democrats claim to always be protecting) from being at the mercy of the majority. Majority rule is essentially mob rule. George Washington even said, "Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

A republic, by its nature, controls the majority and prevents it from using its greater number of votes to limit or even negate the rights of the minority (whether that minority is a group defined by racial, ethnic or other characteristics, or whether it's the metaphorical lamb, or the very real unborn child).

It seems that nowadays the only Americans who grasp this concept were educated in the days when "Civics" was part of the public school curriculum, before such studies were crowded out by "sexual identity studies" and all the other "Progressive" chozzerai being crammed down students' throats.

Our Founders not only clearly grasped the difference between a democracy and a republic, they knew that a democracy could and likely would lead back to the same kind of tyranny they had rebelled against. Frequently they even said so; John Adams, for example, said (in 1814), "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

But try to explain that to Whoopi Goldberg, or to the people who watch The View (or to Americans who vote Democrat).

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