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Sometimes being a leader is telling people what they believe is a correct decision is wrong and working to make it illegal.

Slavery for example. If Lincoln would’ve said “I’m personally opposed to slavery but I believe it’s up to white people as to whether or not they want to own slaves, I don’t want to make them criminals” then we’d probably have a CSA in the southern part of the North American land mass. Sometimes it is right to say to others they are wrong, even when they ‘believe’ they are correct (but are wrong).

Presidential rhetoric is great, but the POTUS has no power in the amendment process. OTOH, a POTUS can appoint pro-life conservatives to the SCOTUS. We need just one more on the hbigh court and that would effectively end RvW as the law of the land.

President Reagan said it best:

"Our nation-wide policy of abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people, nor enacted by our legislators--not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973. [It was] an act of raw judicial power"...

"Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a "right" so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born."

"We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life--the unborn--without diminishing the value of all human life."

"Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning."

~~~~ President Ronald Reagan : "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation", 1983

If Lincoln would’ve said “I’m personally opposed to slavery but I believe it’s up to white people as to whether or not they want to own slaves, I don’t want to make them criminals”

Lincoln said in fact exactly that, repeatedly:

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."

Personally opposed. That's what he was.