Posted on 07/13/2018 9:12:09 PM PDT by Morgana
Popular Republican journalist Jonah Goldberg angered his base Wednesday by claiming people can be conservative and support abortion.
Goldberg is a senior editor at the National Review and a New York Times bestselling author. On Twitter Wednesday, he made the comment about fellow conservative journalist Tomi Lahren who has been openly critical of pro-lifers.
“Honestly, I think you can support abortion and still be a conservative. I just have a problem when you’re stupid about it or use left wing arguments for it — or both,” Goldberg wrote in the post, linking to one of Lahren’s recent comments.
Goldberg continued his thread to buttress his thesis that being a conservative is not about a single political issue:
No one would argue with Jonah that one could be an atheist and be a conservative or the many other things and be a conservative. But it is very difficult to be a conservative when you deny the most fundamental right to life there is and that is the right to life.
Thomas Jefferson, ironically the founder of the Democratic Party, understood that the number one goal of good government was to protect the right of life of its citizens. Conservative political philosophies are all about putting in place principles to make the lives of the nation’s citizens better by relying on freedoms and liberties free of undue governmental influence as opposed to government control. But it is impossible for citizens to enjoy any of the rights or freedoms under a conservative government if they are not alive to enjoy them in the first place.
Conservatives certainly can disagree about political policies like taxing and spending or foreign policy. President Ronald Reagan understood that Republicans can disagree on some political philosophies and policies and still be united as Republicans when they agree on 80% of the major issues of the day. But the pro-life former president clearly understood that human beings have a fundamental right to life they can’t be abrogated by government.
Mr. Goldberg has taken this news outlet to task for publishing this article. But the issue of the right to life and its primary place in the Republican or conservative political movements is a long-standing one. There have been decades worth of debates about keeping the Republican Party a pro-life party and having a strong pro-life position in the party platform, for example.
So the question of whether or not the Republican Party or the conservative movement rests on the fundamental right to life is a very important one for a considerable number of conservative Republican voters. To merely label this discussion as “clickbait or sloppy” is to do a great disservice to the merits of this very substantive and important debate and the considerable number of pro-life conservative Republican voters for whom it is the most important or one of the most important political issues they consider when voting.
In fact the issue of the right to life and its place in the Republican and conservative movement is so important that millions of Democrats who formally aligned with the Democratic Party are now Republicans/conservatives specifically because the Democratic Party and the liberals who control it moved in such a radically pro-abortion direction. To say that conservatives can be pro-abortion undermines the very reason so many people are conservatives in the first place.
When it comes to the debate over abortion in the Republican Party, Lahren has been openly critical of pro-life conservatives. About the debate about the open U.S. Supreme Court seat, Lahren told Fox News: “Implying that we’re sending a Supreme Court justice to the bench to carry out religious judicial activism is a mistake and unconstitutional. It’s not what conservatives stand for.”
While certainly not flattering to Lahren, his post did upset a number of his Twitter followers.
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A post miscarriage dilation and curretage is not an abortion
It’s the removal of post miscarriage fecal matter from the wall of the uterus to stem infection and to stop uterine wall bleeding
Good lord man how you find that to be an abortion defies reason
And I’m familiar with these as well as a husband and father of five
No kidding
I was same as you
What an odd post
Jonah and Lauren are both wrong but he’s much uglier
Her view on abortion though makes a so pretty young heartland girl seem a lot less attractive
A real pity
As did he with Trixie
I suspect he’s one of the resident neocon south haters here
But I’m just paranoid maybe
But so many of them fly from the same nest
When a "conservative" reveals his inner cuck, it's usually over a piece of tail. How ironic.
Rationalization at it’s finest.
No, you can’t support abortion and be conservative.
Blinks a couple of times *hard*.
Never knew that.
BTW, didn't Howlin ride the lightning in the infamous bug-zapper thread (the one over Guiliani for Prez) ?
Very odd post.
‘Anembryonic pregnancy’ isn’t an uncommon thing. Neither is fetal demise from chromosomal/genetic issues. First trimester is when things ‘bootup’ and if something’s amiss the plug is pulled figuratively speaking. Sometimes the body doesn’t get the message and the resulting eventual miscarriage can be incomplete (retained products of conception that cause infection) or take weeks to complete. Depending on the type of pregnancy loss the advice can vary.
We do know now that hormonally (and with respect to cancer risk later one) it’s better to let things end naturally. That’s not always medically immediately adviseable though. For example, a molar pregnancy.
If your wife had a miscarriage the fetus was already non viable ....
Cleaning up her lady parts afterwards is not an abortion
What unusual things you’ve been told?
A miscarriage is not “aborting normally”...no such term actually
A miscarriage is a spontaneous loss of pregnancy
An abortion is not spontaneous
If one drinks cases of quinine water or takes RU486 to induce a miscarriage that’s not a miscarriage it’s a self induced abortion
If she’s sitting in the tub or after sex or drinking a milk shake watching tv a preggers gal bleeds heavily from her vagina in ways no need to further elaborate on here through no fault of her own then it’s a miscarriage
Surely you see the difference
No one can be a good person and support murdering innocent little preborn babies between conception and birth.
Jonah Goldberg should state what a person does have to stand for to be a conservative, according to him.
Once he has done that, he should state why those things are more important than the Right to Life.
No, I have never seen a pro-choice “conservative” stay conservative in other areas once in DC....they quickly become rinos. If you do not have the morals to protect the most vulnerable and weakest amongst us as a leader why would protect any other idea?
“That was just cruel.”
No, it was just accurate. Accuracy isn’t cruel or compassionate.
Neocons are communists who split with the USSR & invaded the GOP. He’s evil and can’t write.
Jonah’s a craven Never Trumper snot and mediocre mind who thinks that because his parental connections greased his way into the world of punditry that he is somehow a superior thinker.
And his wife is a speechwriter for Nikki Haley.
An abortionist is a conservative? Nope. Next.
And yet, you can’t be a democrat and be pro-life.
No, you cannot. Even apart from the moral issue--the willful taking of innocent human life--there is the constitutional issue: Roe v. Wade violated the Tenth Amendment, by the federal government taking away the rights of states to have laws against abortion. The Tenth Amendment principle of a limited federal government is essential to constitutional conservatism.
Also, the pro-abortion side has made the issue a threat to religious liberty, e.g., by attempting to punish organizations who refuse to provide abortion-causing drugs in their health plans. Thus it is also a First Amendment issue, i.e., the free exercise of religion.
I despise abortion. I don’t despise people who choose it. I despise rape and child molestation. But none of these sins or crimes will go away, no matter what the courts say, no matter what laws are on the books.
Being pro-life is wonderful. I’m pro-life. It’s IN THE CONSTITUTION.
But it isn’t the legality of abortion that has much effect on it. If someone wants to rape or murder, the laws never stop them. Same with abortion. Early abortions are just a dilation and curettage of the uterine lining. Such a procedure is done daily in hospitals. Sometimes for miscarriages, sometimes for menstrual or endometrial dysfunction. Doctors will still perform these even if abortion is illegal. No one but patient and doc will ever know there was an embryo with a beating heart in there.
If you are a conservative constitutionalist, you must believe in freedom and the right to life. But you can be realistic and not start a stupid legal battle that is as pointless as a “no assault weapons” battle. It isn’t possible. If you are trying to legislate morality it just won’t work. Human nature is too powerful. Sin will always be with us.
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