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We don’t have a single punishment for homicides. That doesn’t mean a state can constitutionally choose to impose criminal penalties for the intentional killing of some persons and not others. The traditional categories of justifiable homicide, including self-defense, don’t apply to most abortions. If equal protection means anything it means that states can’t pick and choose which people it wants to protect from killing with its criminal law.

Gyrate any way you like, the human rights amendment would impose a blanket, nationwide, requirement that there either be serious criminal penalties for nearly every abortion or no such penalties for other intentional and unjustified homicides. The penalties would have to apply both to abortionists and to the women who resort to them. If a state tried to criminalize performing an abortion but not procuring one, the abortionists would have an equal protection claim. There wouldn’t even be a rational basis for punishing them and letting their customers off.

The rule that the human rights amendment would impose is something no state legislature would vote for and very few Americans would support. The result would be morally repugnant and politically catastrophic. Yet somehow it is a “blunder” for Fred Thompson to argue against such lunacy and in favor of giving states the freedom to work out sensible restrictions on abortion through the normal process of politics.

Before somebody hyperventilates and says that the human rights amendment can’t be lunacy because the sainted Reagan ran on a platform advocating it, let me observe that even Reagan made mistakes. That one was a doozy.

Making a human rights amendment the holy grail of the pro-life movement gave the abortion boosters a huge leg up in the culture wars. Abortion on demand has never been popular, but it was, and is, more popular than a blanket criminal prohibition of all abortions for any reason (other than a threat to the life of the mother) at any stage of pregnancy.

Somehow, I think Fred’s going to be just fine. His views on abortion may alienate a few nutjobs, but they will resonate with most people who vote, both in primaries and in the general election because they make sense.