12 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017colleagues have now forced him to resign. A political story, a
human story, and a sad one.nSteve Krieg, a Democrat running to unseat U.S. congress-
woman Elise Stefanik, referred to the New York Republican as
“a child” during an early-October candidate forum. Over the
summer, Krieg was accused of sexism after he called Stefanik
a “little girl” in a Facebook comment. “Don’t worry, sweetie,
you’re a little girl. You can always run home to Mommy and
Daddy,” he wrote at the time. During the recent forum, the
Democrat attempted to defend his earlier remarks but instead
ended up doubling down: “I think most of us... have some of
a sexist in us.... But Elise, I recognize her—I’m not going to
say a ‘little girl’—as a child.” Prominent Democrats have so far
remained mum, declining to defend Stefanik or denounce
Krieg’s repeated insults. Perhaps sexist comments are worth
decrying only when they’re made by Republicans.nCalifornia governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill
downgrading the act of intentionally exposing a non-carrier to
HIV without that person’s knowledge from a felony to a mis-
demeanor. The new law does not just cover sexual transmis-
sion; an HIV-positive blood donor could intentionally fail to
disclose his condition before giving blood without facing fel o ny
charges. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who represents San Fran -
cis co, said in a statement that the law reverses a discriminatory
legislative practice that was “treating people living with HIV
as criminals.” But the law doesn’t criminalize HIV-positive
members of the population, only those who intentionally trans-
mit their disease to non-carriers. In fact, there’s a whole class
of similar laws covering other communicable diseases, such as
hepatitis. There’s nothing wrong with criminalizing such reck-
less behavior.nSo it is now against the law to “misgender” residents of
nursing homes in the state of California. In one of the stranger
moves in the culture war, California progressives decided to
protect the state’s elderly from the alleged harm of a way-
ward pronoun. There can’t be many nursing-home residents
suffering from misgendering. This exercise in legislative
virtue-signaling mostly signals that California is getting
more Californian by the day.nIn the wake of the battle over Confederate statues, New York
mayor Bill de Blasio hinted that the city’s public sculptures
needed a look, including a towering 125-year-old monument to
Christopher Columbus at, yes, Columbus Circle. The explor-
er’s defenders, including Governor Andrew Cuomo, make hon-
oring him a matter of Italian-American heritage, which misses
the point. In the 15th century, no one anywhere questioned the
right of conquest (the Tainos and Caribs, the indigenous people
Columbus encountered, were busy fighting each other). It was
Columbus’s merit, as a navigator and a visionary, to push
Europe’s wave of discovery westward—he hoped to China,
though by his death he had begun to suspect that he had found
someplace else. Columbus sailed for Spain and for Christ en -
dom; the language of his employers, and his own faith, are the
inheritance of hundreds of millions in the world he thought
new. May we have our sins forgiven, and achieve even a frac-
tion as much.Yet DeVos is an unusual kind of education secretary. She attracts
hostility and she attracts threats. If she is to do this job, she is enti-
tled to do it in safety. May she have all the protection she needs.nIn our previous issue, we editorialized about Dana Rohr a -
bach er, the GOP congressman from California who is, among
other unfortunate things, a “Charlottesville truther”: someone
who thinks that the recent far-right rally in Charlottesville was
staged by the Left in order to make conservatives look bad and
to “put our president on the spot.” We now know that there is an -
oth er such truther in Congress: Paul Gosar, an Arizona Re pub li -
can. He suggested that George Soros was funding it all, adding,
“Who is he? I think he’s from Hungary. I think he was Jewish.
And I think he turned in his own people to the Nazis.” Soros was
born in 1930; he was 14 when the war ended. We might also
record that, in addition to living in Europe, Soros was but one
when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped.nFor seven terms, Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) has been a solid con -
servative congressman. He did excellent work in reorienting
federal mental-health policy toward the most severe cases. He
has also voted the pro-life line. Then came news about an extra-
marital affair and this text from his lover: “You have zero issue
posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no
issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week.” (She
turned out not to be pregnant.) There was further news that,
over the years, Murphy had treated his Hill staff abusively. HisnIllinois governor Bruce Rauner, a business-oriented
Republican who campaigned on having “no social agenda,”
has signed into law a radical abortion bill that will, among
other things, conscript his state’s taxpayers into paying for
abortions up until the minute before birth. It is ghastly. There
are two things Rauner could have done differently here: He
could (and should) have vetoed the bill; leaving in place the
status quo is consistent with having “no agenda” on the
question of abortion. Or he could (and should) have told the
truth about his abortion agenda before deceiving pro-life
Republicans into accepting him as a candidate. Rauner’s
wife is a longtime abortion-rights advocate, and now
Rauner himself has become the most important abortion-
rights activist in Illinois. Securing a cherished goal of the
abortion lobby, public funding,
is not consistent with having
“no agenda.” Republicans
rightly favor a “big tent”
approach to politics, but conser-
vatives have learned the hard
way that people who aren’t
with us on abortion—on
the critical mor al ques-
tion of our time—aren’t
actually with us on much.
Gov er nor Rauner’s per-
formance has been de -
ceit ful, and it has been
shameful.THE WEEKSCOTTOLSON/GETTYIMAGESweek-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/11/2017 2:45 PM Page 12