Exactly. Nor was it enough for our founders, who established a Union guaranteeing a republican form of government. Nor would it be enough for any thinking man, once a state or locality decided to enact genocide or ritual cannibalism.
State and local autonomy are political goods of near-fundamental, but not truly fundamental, importance. Even these crucial goods are finally for the sake of justice, for the securing of the rights of man which enable him to serve God.
The notion that local autonomy is a first principle, with no deeper reason justifying it, is a mere prejudice for small over large, few over many. There is nothing of political wisdom in it.
Abortion was wisely left to the states so long as there was a genuine national consensus that it was evil. But the tyrannical elevation of the issue to the national level by the Supreme Court has placed the issue squarely before this people as a nation, and our national commitment to first principles of justice requires that we respond to it as a nation. Abortion has become what Alan Keyes calls a "Declaration Issue," by which he means an issue which, if we fail to resolve it as a national people, will fatally sap our national dedication to the first principles of free government.
The parallel here to slavery is not "mythical" or opportunistic. Slavery was also left, by the prudence of our Founders, at the discretion of states, but with a national commitment to acknowledging its evil and a national presumption that it would eventually end. The issue became a matter for direct federal power only when the Slave Power, via Douglas, Dred Scott, and secession, attempted to break it out of the state level and in various ways impose it or its effects (disunion or repudiation of the principle of equality) on the nation. At that point, to simplify, a solution imposed by federal power was necessary if the nation was to remain based on the twin principles of consent of the governed and respect for the equality of man.
I don't know what "myth" of Lincoln you are referring to. So far as I can tell, those who use this language are the ones who never actually read entire speeches or documents of Lincoln's longer than three paragraphs.
How can you possibly hope to make the point that the federal government must clean up the mess it has made by exercising even more unconstitutional power? Please retreat to the safety of you social club's site. You're absolutely destroying what little credibility Dr. Keyes and your club have.
You boys may as well start working on your grand finale. I know you have one in the works somewhere in the fevered single consciousness you all so obviously share. Trot it out so that it can be dismantled.