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Pro-Lifers As Important As
Ever, if Not More So Part Four of Four By Dave Andrusko
Morris is an oft-times insightful critic of pro-abortion President Barack Obama, although he is so deeply opposed his analysis can be (to be charitable) implausible. Wherever he may be personally on abortion, we know exactly where he is on abortion as an issue: opposition to it is not important to what he calls the "New Republican Right" which includes a heavy infusion of Tea Party activists. It would take pages to rebut the particulars, but the core of his argument is the first paragraph: "A fundamental change is gripping the Republican grass roots as they animate the GOP surge to a major victory in the 2010 elections. No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops. Now economic and fiscal issues prevail. The Tea Party has made the Republican Party safe for libertarians." What should we say in response? For starters, I strongly suspect this is a classic example of the wish being father to the thought. As you read through his latest iteration of this dubious argument, it's hard to conclude this is just disinterested analysis. He wants it to be this way. For another thing, we've already written about members of the Tea Party and what we can tell about their position on abortion (www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Oct10/nv100710.html). That blog was written in response to a previous Morris column, which drew criticism from Kathryn Jean Lopez, an editor-at-large of National Review Online, and her colleague, Ramesh Ponnuru. As was pointed out October 7, Morris simply chose to ignore the Republican Party's ongoing commitment to fighting abortion and how well pro-lifers had done in electoral contests. Morris has gone back to the well again, and he is no more convincing now than he was a few weeks ago, although he is coming at it differently. This time, in essence, Morris is making the case that Tea Party members and sympathizers have no use for abortion and will (it is implied) punish the Republican leadership if it remains staunchly pro-life. This misses two points. First, as was noted in the October 7 blog, there is the result of The American Values Survey (AVS), which describes what it does as "a large, nationally representative public opinion survey of American attitudes on religion, values, and politics." Among many other things it found in its 2010 survey was that those Americans who consider themselves part of the Tea Party Movement "are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases." National Review had its own "detailed look" taken earlier this year of people who said they'd participated in tea-party rallies or "have not participated in a tea party protest but . . . generally agree with the reasons for those protests." "Most tea-party sympathizers," wrote Ponnuru and Kate O'Beirne in their analysis, "are pro-life. They are more pro-life than the electorate as a whole, although less so than Republicans." In addition, "Tea-party participants, meanwhile, are both more pro-life and more frequent churchgoers than the electorate. (Parenthetically, for many newly-active Americans, their initiation into politics was ObamaCare, which is chock-full of provisions that promote abortion and the rationing of medical care.) Second, I have no doubt that Tea Party members and sympathizers are working very, very hard. But, earth to Morris, so are single-issue pro-lifers. Indeed, I cannot remember an off-year election in which we worked harder. The difference is we've been doing this for going on 30 years, while the Tea Party's involvement is new. That's the way the news business works, but that shouldn't' be an excuse to minimize what you and I are doing or our crucial our contribution is. Please send your comments on Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |
Contrary
to the saying, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my
friend, especially not when he argues that those who are new to
the Republican Party not only do not have opposition to abortion
as a core issue but that the GOP is better off that way! Such is
the repeatedly voiced contention of author, Fox News
contributor, and one-time Clinton pollster Dick Morris.