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Gore = ANTI-CHOICE (tell your pro-Gore friends)

From <votenader.com/brokenpromise/brokenpromisesarchive.html>
29 October 2000

Perhaps the #1 reason cited (certainly among the top ones) for "why we've got to vote for Gore instead of Nader, to make sure we keep out Bush" is to protect Roe V. Wade. The following background was new to me and may come as quite a surprise...

The following are taken from the Gore's Broken Promises Archive, http://votenader.com/brokenpromise/brokenpromisesarchive.html

The four enclosed are: broken promise for "pro-choice" policy (perhaps most surprising to most people); broken promises for gay rights; broken promise that "health care should be a right, not a privildege"; scores of deaths due to lax FDA enforcement under Clinton/Gore watch.

See http://votenader.com/brokenpromise/brokenpromisesarchive.html for more examples.

#4 SIGNING A FREEDOM OF CHOICE ACT

In "Putting People First", Clinton and Gore promised to sign a Freedom of Choice Act, in order to "ensure that a woman's right to choose is not jeopardized by a Supreme Court reversal or limitation of Roe v. Wade." It didn't happen, in part because Clinton and Gore refused to fight for it. As Fred Barnes reported in New Republic, Clinton and Gore "made no effort to broker the dispute that derailed the Freedom of Choice Act" in the summer of 1993. Barnes explains that this wasn't surprising: Clinton and Gore always try to reap the benefits of their position in favor of reproductive freedom without risking much politically. As Bill Bradley noted during his fight for the Democratic nomination, Gore has flip-flopped on a women's right to choose, and long tried to conceal the fact. In fact, AS A CONGRESSMAN, GORE COMPILED A SUBSTANTIAL ANTI-CHOICE RECORD, voting FOR the Hyde Amendment that banned federal funding for abortions for poor women, AND to deny federal funding to hospitals and clinics that perform abortions.

[When you're poor, no money = no access. Thus a 100% anti-choice policy for the poor (and even the Republicans (recall famous Quayle quote about he'd "understand if it was one of his relatives who choice abortion) will let abortions by the rich "slide". So while the differences are not quite (yet..?) zero, they are between different shadesof roll-back of Roe V Wade, which a Gore presidency would continue to erode, just as Clinton/Gore did nothing to stop the violence which has closed so many clinics that 80% of women do not have access to a clinic in their county at which abortion is even one of the choices available.]

#11 - Gays in the Military

Throughout the '92 campaign, candidates Clinton and Gore pledged to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. In Putting People First, they promised to "repeal the ban on gays and lesbians from military or foreign service." That unqualified promise was broken almost as soon as Clinton and Gore met resistance from military leaders (though it was known all along that the military opposed ending the ban). The administration ended up accepting an awful compromise, the current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" charade that HAS LED TO THE DISCHARGE OF 67% MORE gay and lesbian troops than were being discharged under the previous policy! As columnist Bob Herbert put it plainly in the New York Times, "He didn't fight, he caved." Equally telling are the words of Tom Stoddard, director of the Campaign for Military Service: "He raised this issue as a matter of principle. You can't simply split the difference on matters of principle."

#13 UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

During the '92 campaign, Clinton and Gore assailed the Bush Administration for lacking a universal health care plan. Putting People First rightly noted that the United States "is the only advanced country in the world without a national health care plan" and promised that "in the first year of a Clinton-Gore administration, that will change." Though they tried to keep this promise, their [Exceedingly generous of Nader to call this secret meetings with HMOs behind-closed-doors, locking out grassroots advocates, "Trying" to keep a promise -HB] health care plan catered to the very corporate interests that caused the problem in the first place. Hillary Clinton's health care task force worked in secret, and spent more time talking to HMOs and insurance companies than to physicians and ordinary Americans. The result was a terribly complex, heavily bureaucratic approach to health care that was defeated and never resurrected. Clinton and Gore have taken a piecemeal approach to health care ever since, and the United States remains the only Western democracy in the world that doesnt guarantee health care to its citizens. Eight years after Clinton and Gore wrote health care should be a right, not a privilege, around ten million more Americans are without health care coverage