by Bob Ehrlich
Readers are familiar with the moniker “third rail.” In political discourse, it refers to those preciously few issues that are so untouchable that the mere talk of change, alteration or revision carries with it what amounts to a political death penalty.
There is general agreement in Washington, D.C., that reform of federal entitlements leads the brief list. The most recent example being the 2011 temporary coalition of former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon intended to secure a more sustainable Medicare program. Here, all was good and fine for a fast minute before the Democratic Party realized its number one nuclear weapon was in the process of being compromised. And that was that. Suffice to say that that now twelve-year-old effort was the last semi-serious, bipartisan attempt to control entitlement spending we will see for the foreseeable future.
Still, there have been other third rails, universally recognized by both parties and the culture at large. But that was then. This is now. And things they are a-changin’.
Example one concerns the education of young children. You see, pretty much from the beginning of time to the beginning of the Biden administration there was general agreement with regard to “hands off kids” – more precisely defined as teachers/administrators dare not interfere with the sacrosanct relationship between student and parent. But no more. Today, progressive school boards, teachers and administrators regularly involve themselves in intimate, sometimes sexual in nature, development issues with children of a tender age, often outside the purview of parents. That these interactions can extend to extraordinary subject matters such as the proposed gender transformation of the student speaks to both the boldness and the insanity of this bizarre new world.
Similarly, what not so long ago was Dick and Jane and middle school sex education pamphlets has morphed into graphic descriptions of sex in elementary school curriculum and libraries. You may have seen videos of distraught parents demonstrating against such access at school board meetings. Such demonstrations have become commonplace around the country. Still, the fact that they are needed in order to convey parental and community disapproval reflects a disquieting displacement of conventional sexual mores in 2023 America.
A third example is pulled from today’s headlines. It concerns the media coverage that rapidly morphed from “horrific terror attack in Gaza” on Oct.7 to familiar moral equivalency narratives from the left, which morphed into a “a plague on both your houses” media effort mere days later. Although the rapid adoption of such moral equivalency rhetoric (you recognize it whenever the adverb “however” appears in the context of mass torture, rape and murder) was predictable in light of the media’s predisposition toward the Palestinian cause and antagonism with respect to the “occupier” Israel, it has been nevertheless chilling to watch it all play out on American college campuses and within a number of our major cities. If you ever wondered why the worldwide Jewish community adopted the admonition “Never forget” in remembrance of the Holocaust, wonder no more.
If you ever believed porn for six-year-olds – the wholesale preemption of parental rights – and the attempted rationalizing of mass torture and murder constituted modern day third rails, think again. Remember, in order for progressivism’s brave new world agenda to work, third rails (really all of our familiar cultural baselines) need to be jettisoned. It’s the only way to desensitize an America the left so desperately wants to transform.
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Bob Ehrlich is a former Governor of Maryland, Member of Congress, and State Legislator. He is the author of five books on American politics and opinion pieces that have appeared in America’s leading newspapers and periodicals. He and his wife, Kendel, can be seen and heard on their weekly podcast, “Bottom Line with Bob & Kendel Ehrlich.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
