Labor and the Family
September 24th, 2013 by Peter
CT Mirror is reporting that “The new voice of labor in Connecticut is female and gay.” Lori Pelletier, a lesbian, is expected to be the first new leader of the state chapter of the AFL-CIO in twenty-five years. Interviewed about her impending election, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said:
..labor needs to reach beyond the traditional borders of organized labor and protect workers by “partnering with those groups that want to see social justice done. That’s what labor is all about.”
What that likely means is a still-closer alliance of Big Labor with anti-family activists. It was that same alliance that allowed pro same-sex “marriage” activists to leverage hundreds of thousands of Big Labor dollars to defeat the woefully outspent Constitutional Convention Coalition in 2008 and fool the public into voting against their one opportunity to free state government from the monied special interest groups that now control it.
That is why pro-family advocates roll their eyes when someone like Congresswoman DeLauro declares Connecticut’s “‘family-friendly’ policies a model for the nation.” Connecticut is one of only a handful of states that does not even require parental notification before an underage girl obtains an abortion. Family-friendly? Obstructing parental rights, taking the life of the unborn, redefining marriage by judicial fiat and attacking religious liberty are not “family-friendly” policies, Congresswoman DeLauro.
The CT Mirror story mentions “the increasing dominance of public-sector workers in organized labor” and that, too, has added to the growing divide between the labor and pro-family movements. Indeed, that growing divide is one reason why the Wisconsin Catholic Bishops stayed neutral in the failed effort to recall Governor Scott Walker in 2011:
But [Father Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute] suggested the Wisconsin bishops’ stance implicitly acknowledged “the changing reality of the American Catholic population as a whole. “The only sector of union membership that is growing is public unions,” he said. “That is highly problematic from a Catholic point of view, because these public unions publicly favor abortion rights and ‘gay marriage’ and seek to undercut the Church’s agenda on social questions.”