A Woman to Stand Up to AOC: Jeanne Ives

Written by Laurie Higgins

Illinoisans and all other Americans who have watched in dismay at the growing power of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), her leftwing collaborators, and her fawning devotees who are rioting in the streets—also known as Harris/Biden voters—should be deeply invested in congressional races around the country. If we help the campaigns of good candidates and get to the polls, we have a chance to increase GOP representation in the U.S. House and retain GOP control of the U.S. Senate.

One of the stellar congressional candidates whom we need in the House is Jeanne Ives who is running in the 6^th Congressional District. She is exactly who the GOP needs to do battle with AOC and her leftist squad, which includes Ilhan Omar, an immigrant who violated immigration law in multiple ways and yet sits in the hallowed halls of Congress pontificating on morality.

Ives is running against a man so devoid of personal integrity that when asked by the Daily Herald to name an American who “most” inspired him named the egregiously obscene, anti-Christian bigot Dan Savage. The member of Congress against whom Ives is running and who is most inspired by the leadership of homosexual Dan Savage is Sean Casten.

To fully comprehend the import of Casten’s admiration for Savage requires some knowledge of how truly reprehensible Savage is.

Savage was raised in a Catholic family in Chicago but has abandoned the Catholic faith and long made his home in Seattle, Washington from where he writes his pornographic sex advice column in which he advocates for every form of sexual deviance you can imagine and some forms you can’t imagine.

Savage has called theologically orthodox Christians “bat sh*t, a**hole, dou**ebags,” and once, while addressing a crowd of hundreds of high schoolers at a National High School Journalism Convention, Savage launched into an anti-Christian diatribe. He advised his teen audience to “ignore the bullsh*t in the Bible” about sexual morality. “We ignore bullsh*t in the Bible about all sorts of things,” he snidely claimed.

When a hundred or more students began to walk out, the then 47-year-old Savage turned his savage rhetoric on them, calling them “pansy-assed.” Some of the young girls were seen leaving in tears.

Savage also formed the website Santorum.com to smear the good name of former senator Rick Santorum.  Click here to see the work of the man who inspires Casten.

More recently Casten, in an embarrassing Joe Biden-esque attempt to look clever and hip, tweeted out a link to a softcore porn music video by ignorant rapper Cardi B titled “WAP,” which stands for “wet a*s p*ssy.” The language and images in the video are obscene and degrading to women. Casten was exploiting the repellent video to make a political point about weatherizing homes through the “Weatherization Assistance Program” (WAP). Get it—WAP? So hilarious, right?

If Casten—who is the father of two young daughters—were a man of integrity, he would know that decent men don’t use degrading porn to score political points. Decent people don’t think softcore porn is funny or should be used for any purpose.

And if we were a decent society, his political career would be over. In fact, if we were a decent society, Casten’s public admiration for Dan Savage would have ended his political career before it started.

On Feb. 9, 2019, Casten tweeted this: “So I’ve been reading [Reinhold] Niebuhr. This quote from 1952 seems directly relevant to Candace Owens, Donald Trump and our present moment.”

Accompanying the tweet was a photo of a page from one of Niebuhr’s books.

That’s a weird tweet for several reasons.

First, Niebuhr was a Protestant theologian, and Casten is religiously “unaffiliated.” Of course, even non-Christians read theologians, but it is surprising that in the middle of a heated campaign a religiously unaffiliated lawmaker would be reading the work of a Protestant theologian.

Second, the very page that Casten tweeted from Niebuhr’s book The Irony of History is one of the pages that’s provided as a sample on the Google books website. What a remarkable coincidence.

Third, the quote he tweeted—which he says is “directly relevant to Candace Owens, Donald Trump and our present moment” says this:

Communism is not merely another version of Nazism. Nazism was a morally cynical creed which defied every norm of justice. It represented a moral nihilism which could have developed only in the decay of a highly developed and sophisticated civilization. Communism is a morally utopian creed which has a much wider appeal than Nazism because it speaks in the name of justice rather than in defiance of justice; and it is ostensibly devoted to the establishment of a universal society, rather than to the supremacy of a race or nation. The fact that its illusory hopes are capable of generating cruelties and tyrannies, exceeding even those of a cynical creed, can be understood only if it is realized how much more plausible and dangerous the corruption of the good can be in human history than explicit evil.

Hmmm. Let’s think about all that.

Which political party aligns with Communism? Which party has been endorsed by BLM communists and the Communist Party USA?

Which party, while defying justice, speaks empty words about justice? Which political party has defied every norm of justice by facilitating lawlessness and donating scads of money to bail out lawless criminals who set fire to private property; deface public property; and assault elderly people, women, and police officers?

Which party has caused and grown powerful from America’s moral decay? Which party now embraces moral nihilism?

Which party judges people by their race rather than the content of their character? To which party do you think Nikole Hannah-Jones belongs? She’s the New York Times writer and author of the historically inaccurate 1619 Project who wrote, “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.”

Which party has demonstrated it is capable of cruelty and tyranny through unmitigated incomprehensible street violence, feticide, speech diktats, and religious oppression?

I’ll tell you which party. It’s Sean Casten’s party.

Opposing Casten is Jeanne Ives, a former state representative, Army veteran, ROTC instructor, graduate of West Point, mother of five, and committed Christian. Her religious and political commitments run deep. Several years ago, she wrote poignantly about her decision not to abort her baby who at 20 weeks was diagnosed with a genetic disorder incompatible with life:

[W]e … soon learned that Mark’s abnormality was genetically based and therefore a certain death sentence at birth.

At that point, our high-risk pregnancy doctor strongly suggested we abort the baby. In our conversation, the doctor spoke as if that were the obvious, most reasonable option. The thought of aborting Mark entered my mind for a few brief moments. How convenient, no one needs to think about this anymore, no increased medical expenses, no carrying the baby for 20 more weeks, no painful choice on how to respond to cheerful comments about my impending birth. The problem would just go away, and I could get back to caring for our other four boys.

But those moments passed quickly. I knew the decision to end Mark’s life was neither mine nor my husband’s to make. … The next four months I cried every day with a kind of grief I had never experienced. Our baby boy was alive inside me, kicking and rolling, and on the day we would welcome Mark to the world, he would die in my arms. I was not only grief-stricken, I was also scared. I was terrified to face the death of my own child.

But I never blamed God, and I never asked why Mark or why me. I understood more acutely than ever before the inescapable truth that suffering is part of this life, and it does not discriminate. What matters most in those dark and often lonely moments of fear and grief is how we respond to what sometimes feels like an unendurable burden.

Three weeks before I delivered, my son’s second-grade teacher, a wise and compassionate nun who knew that we were walking “through the valley of the shadow of death,” asked when I would have the baby. When I told her, she replied, “Good, then the healing can begin.” She was right.

Mark was born on April 28, 2002. He died 45 minutes after birth. After his birth, my doctor baptized him and nurses lovingly took baby pictures, dressed him, gave him a teddy bear, took footprints, and treated him with the dignity he deserved as a human being created in the image and likeness of God. He was just over 3 pounds and had a nose like my father’s. …

Our decision is not unique. Every day, mothers and fathers receive equally tragic diagnoses and make the same decision. A just, merciful and compassionate society does not kill those who are imperfect or those whose medical condition is inimical to life. Not even the laudable goal of ending suffering grants to one person the right to kill another.

A just, merciful and compassionate society cares for those who suffer, including pre-born babies with serious and even fatal conditions and family members who lose their beloved babies on the day they first meet. …

Ives supports without qualification or equivocation the entire GOP platform, including protections for religious liberty, speech rights, and the right to bear arms.

She supports the men and women who serve in our police force, risking their lives to protect our communities.

She supports lower taxes and school choice.

She opposes excessive job-killing business regulations and draconian anti-science COVID-19 restrictions that have left thousands of Americans jobless and suffering.

She opposes the eye-poppingly expensive Green New Deal and universal health care.

She forthrightly condemns the lawless riots and destruction that Democrat ideas have caused and Democrat politicians have facilitated.

And she offers no mealy-mouthed, half-hearted, self-conscious defenses of the “social issues” like some Republicans do.

Republican voters can rely on Ives to speak truth to power just as Democrats can rely on AOC’s Squad to speak lies boldly to power.

In another ironic tweet on Jan. 26, 2020, Casten called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a “scoundrel” for tweeting a Bible verse and accused Pompeo of refusing to discuss ethics. Casten refuses to condemn lawlessness, heartily endorses human slaughter, admires Dan Savage, and tweets porn and then calls Pompeo a scoundrel for tweeting a Bible verse. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising then that Casten supporters have been defacing Jeanne Ives’ campaign signs with the word “cu*t.”

Illinoisans and all other Americans deserve far better than Sean Casten. Find ways to support the election of Jeanne Ives.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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