True North

Never let it be said that I’m not a big-tent kind of person.  Indeed, the GOP - as an amalgam of fiscal, social, legal and cultural conservatives, any individual of whom might fit one through four of those four adjectives - needs to some extent to be flexible on its bedrock principles, especially since they are so relatively complex.

Indeed, that’s one of the things that separates conservatism from liberalism; you can teach any child to be a liberal (indeed, that’s what many of our schools do); it’s a short leap from “share and share alike” to “what is yours belongs to everyone; from “don’t run with scissors” to “the Second Amendment is a collective right”; from “mind your own bees-wax” to “keep your laws off my body”.   It’s not for nothing that Churchill said a man has no heart if he’s not a liberal at 20 and no brain if he’s not a conservative by 40; liberalism and adolescence are both prone to callow, facile sloganeering.  Conservatism is, if you were raised liberal (and to some extent in western culture we all are), somewhat counterintuitive.

So to be a conservative (at least a multi-issue conservative) requires a certain amount of thought - and any group of three individuals who thinks about any set of issues is going to come up with at least four solutions. So running a “conservative” party necessarily needs accomodating a wide range of points of view (to say nothing of the more-rigid, more sloganistic views of the single-issue crowd who, I should observe, often don’t understand conservatism outside the bounds of their main issue - although they can be, and have been, taught).

And that is as it should be.  It makes election time a contentious scrum (as we see in the GOP Presidential race right now), but there’s really no other way. 

That being said, “big tent” or no, there are some “Republicans” we’re better off without. 

The Star-Tribune seems to have a boundless stockpile of these people.  They show up on cue in columns by Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow; people who mewl about feeling “cut off from the current state of the party”, who pine for the days when the GOP, especially in Minnesota, was pro-choice and anti-gun and took a soft line on crime and foreign policy.  In other words, when the GOP (nationally and especially in Minnesota) was basically Tics in better suits.

Two of these popped up in the Strib yesterday, in an op-ed by Liz McCloskey and Peter Leibold entitled “To value life — in all regards — is to be politically adrift”.  The duo - described as “…a doctoral candidate at the Catholic University of America” and a “former general counsel of the Catholic Health Association”, respectively, describe a journey that’s not all that terribly different than my own (if you substitute “Protestant” for “Catholic”), in some ways:

When we were born in the early 1960s, it was possible to be both a Democrat and a Catholic without any agonizing pangs of conscience. John F. Kennedy was president; John Courtney Murray was a public theologian; Pope John XXIII was opening a window to the world at the Second Vatican Council. But as we came of age politically, we felt orphaned by the Democratic Party, whose prolife positions on war, poverty and the environment did not extend to the lives of the most weak and vulnerable, those not yet born.

In other words, they are liberals, except for that whole “infanticide” thing.  Now, I’ve confessed in the past - abortion, like gay marriage, isn’t my hottest-button issue.  I’m pro-life, but it’s somewhere down my list of “gotta haves”.  As it was for Ronald Reagan, as it happens.

While the moderate wing of the Republican Party provided us a foster home when we worked on the Senate staff of John Danforth, R-Mo., with the likes of former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and others, the Grand Old Party’s move to the right, including its hardening, dominant positions on the Iraq war, access to guns and the death penalty, among other issues, have made it an inhospitable place for us to dwell permanently.

Let’s stop right there.

I’m not one to speak for the GOP as a whole - far from it.  But if Ms. McCloskey and Mr. Leibold can’t tell the difference between the life of a fetus - a human-under-construction, utterly innocent of any wrongdoing, exactly as the Catholic Church teaches - on the one hand, and convicted murderers, especially child-murderers, murderers who rape and then kill, mass-murderers and spree-killers on the other, perhaps it’s not their politics that are adrift.  If they compare abortion on the one hand with the right of the law-abiding citizen to defend themselves from criminals on the other, perhaps it’s not the GOP’s politics that have deserted reason and rationality.

During many elections we find ourselves facing the same dilemma: Which of our values must take a back seat when we go to the voting booth? Do we let our moral concern for peaceful resolutions of conflict, the environment, addressing poverty and aggressive enforcement of civil rights guide our choices? Or do we stand firm on another important issue of conscience and signal our hope for an end to abortion? Often, both choices leave a bad taste in our mouths.

Welcome to real life, kids!

But the fact that you - a “pro-life” voter - get a “bad taste” in your mouth because I have the right to protect my and my family’s lives through the grace of the Second Amendment as an individual right, then perhaps your notion of “life” is what’s adrift.

Tuesday’s March for Life in Washington brought home this problem. The assumption of abortion opponents is that anyone serious about his or her desire to see an end to abortion will vote for the “prolife” candidate. Yet there is rarely a candidate, and certainly not a political party, that embodies the consistent ethic of life that would make casting a truly prolife vote a simple or straightforward choice.

May I suggest that y’all - and the organizations you represent - are the ones with the inconsistent “ethic of life”.  To fail to differentiate between innocent life and life that is itself anti-life - murderers, and those whose actions are lethal enough to be covered by laws governing legal self-defense - is inconsistent to the point of meaningless.  And I say this as a conservative who opposes the death penalty. 

If the Democratic Party could adopt a much less disdainful, more welcoming, perhaps even “prochoice” stance toward those under its tent who have conscientious objections to abortion, we would be much less squeamish about supporting its candidates, and we know that we are not alone in that conviction.

As the 2008 campaign unfolds, we will look for a candidate who will not use rhetoric or a tone seemingly designed to alienate those of us who simply cannot cheer for speeches celebrating the availability of abortion….

…A party and a candidate that truly respect this viewpoint are ones that can adopt these two political orphans.

I can’t speak for the notion of “respect” - but if my party were to follow your viewpoint, that the life of a murderer or of someone who wishes to kill my family and I are of no less value than an an innocent human-under-construction - then I’d choose “orphan”. 

It’s a view of “life” that doesn’t even rise to the level of “illogical”.

Cross-posted at Shot in the Dark.