Do Gray and Brown want fewer blacks in D.C.?

Washington's new mayor, Vincent Gray, and the new chairman of the D.C. City Council, Kwame Brown, were arrested this week at the U.S. Capitol. They were demonstrating against the recent budget deal that would prohibit the district from spending money on abortions. Now, Gray and Brown can use a distraction. They are both mired in scandal. News reports didn't tell us which one of his two fully loaded, taxpayer-funded SUVs Chairman Brown drove to the protest.

Gray and Brown are not satisfied with Washington's terrible record on abortion. Since our country's bicentennial year of 1976, there have been more unborn children killed every year here than children born. Planned Parenthood-Planned Barrenhood is more accurate-has been especially active in the District of Columbia.

And we see the inevitable result: Washington, D.C., with a proud African-American culture, has been a majority black city since World War II. The war years brought thousands of people here looking for work. Many of those who came during the war were fleeing the worst aspects of segregation and Klan-inspired terrorism. But now, as of the 2010 Census, blacks are no longer the majority in Washington.

With a black-to-white abortion rate of 3-to-1 nationally, abortion remains what Jesse Jackson called it in the 1970s-black genocide. Now, Mayor Gray and Chairman Brown actually want fewer black people in the nation's capital. Why else would they be willing to risk arrest for the "right" of Planned Parenthood to abort more unborn children of black mothers?

At a time when Metro fares are rising, taxes are being hiked, and services cut in the district, isn't it a strange thing that this execrable traffic in death is what they are willing to fight for? One of the Gray-Brown supporters came from a protest meeting Monday night to demand more abortion for the district. The ban on abortion spending, he said "is the epitome of kicking the smallest person when he's already down." Tell the district not to kill the smallest person and you become the bully. That's the upside-down world we are facing.

Kwame Brown's father, Marshall Brown, told The Washington Post this week that he worries about a racially polarized electorate in the capital. The "new" white voters are not like white liberals of old, he said. "[T]he new white voters want doggie parks and bike lanes. . . . The new people believe more in their dogs than they do in people. They go into their little cafes, go out and throw snowballs. This is not the District I knew. There's no relationship with the black community. They don't connect at church, they don't go to the same cafes, they don't volunteer in the neighborhood school, and a lot of longtime black residents feel threatened."

But Mayor Gray welcomed the new Census figures for Washington, D.C. They were "good news," he said, even though the population west of the Anacostia River is growing "while east of the river [the predominantly black areas] it is stagnating or shrinking."

How sad it is to see Barack Obama's willingness to go to the mattresses for Planned Parenthood funding. He would compromise on any other part of his far left agenda but that.

Former Wall Streeter David Goldman wrote in First Things journal in early 2009 that the economic meltdown hit the home mortgage industry first. That was to be expected, he said, because young marrieds with children are the drivers of the home mortgage industry. Those walking their dogs or searching out bike paths are not. And of these young marrieds with children, Goldman wrote, we have no more in raw numbers in the United States than we had in 1969. Goldman thinks our economy may not get well until the question of family formation is resolved.

It won't be resolved as long as Planned Parenthood is being funded and as long as city governments like Washington's think that public funds for the destruction of human life is the summum bonum of public service. Lifestyle liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. If Kwame Brown cannot see it, maybe his wiser father, Marshall Brown, can. All of us who care about this wonderful city have a stake in this debate. Congress needs to hold firm on no funds for killing the unborn children of Washington. These smallest persons are already down. And we can stand up for them.