Generally speaking, yes. However, I fail to see how RLC -- as a club -- can do that. True, many of us would like to do it. But I see no means, method or opportunity here. Part of that will come after educating more people.
And, as part of the whole of that issue, I propose that we work towards making government schools stop teaching deviancy as acceptable behavior to our children. That is something that is doable within the next couple years and most definitely points to the core of the problem.
Meanwhile . . . so many issues, so little time. . . . .
My first priority would be to make it a requirement that the Federal government stop spending money when there is a budgetary shortfall instead of raising taxes to "cover" the new (and always excessive) spending.
In fact, I'd be willing to help start a movement. I receive a pension. If it would apply to everyone across the board - NO exceptions, NONE - I'd willingly take a 5% cut in my pension. IOW, cut all spending programs - ALL spending programs - 5%.
The only exception would have nothing to do with individuals or their needs, but would be solely contingent upon national defense. After all, war does seem to make a difference. Other than that one exception, cut every item on the federal budget by 5%.
How's that for a plan, eh?
[Of course, this has about as much chance of happening as me adding two inches in height and dropping another 25 pounds in weight...]
That being evident we need to look to see how the Life Issue applies to the Federal Government and where the current political process went wrong and gave us this unsettled area of great conflict. During the Primary while there was discussion of the planks possible withdrawal, I posted the following Thread/Vanity lead comment:
HERE IS THE PROBLEM AS I SEE IT HOWEVER.
Judge Bork, after losing the nomination for the Supreme Court, wrote a fine short book about the experience and also about the issues that caused the Liberals to rally to his opposition. That book, The Tempting of America, exhibited the manner in which conservatives should explain their constitutional opposition against Roe v. Wade. I bring this up because it appears that this issue will be the rally cry of the opposition to Bush (or Pat in the Reform Party) in a way it never was with Reagan. We must remember that as conservatives of various stripe, we rarely hear the voices of the, so called, moderates. We listen over their heads, hearing the rabid Pro-Choice activists and gain false confidence that they sound to the electorate as hollow as they do to us. They don’t; they’ve had their ear on this issue for forty years.
Reagan ran in a time where the left and middle voters had no idea that the activist court tradition could ever be reversed. Their entire concept of legal scholarship at work in our largest law schools had convinced them that the lie of the Living Constitution had been adopted universally. Hence, little fear of fatherly Reagan on that issue.
Knowledge of the continuation of a fine tradition of Original Intent and a non-activist judiciary was not even on the radar screen of the media and the voters outside the conservative tradition. Also remember that this was the time of the rising of the Neo-Conservative faction, many of whom, at that time, were laissez faire about the abortion issue, much as many Libertarians are today. With Bush and the 2000 election, main-stream electorate voter’s now see the Republicans as ready, willing and able to do away with this touchstone decision in a way they never feared that Reagan would, or could. They will be galvanized with fear by this prospect in a way we are choosing to ignore.
As conservatives, wanting to communicate with and convince our fellow citizens, we must understand the context of the moderates’ allegiance to this decision. It certainly isn’t, in their minds, the support of the ungodly path, the love of the abortionist agenda or the thought of the unborn as worthless. Arguments and appeals that do not understand their internal context for this decision will never sway them.
Much of our rhetoric is too like Alan Keyes’s sound ethical argument against this vile procedure, and not enough like Judge Bork’s judicial and constitutional opposition. The ethical and moral battles will be won in peoples’ hearts, not in their elections. We Conservatives have lost patience too early with the judicial and constitutional arguments and have taken up the ethical and moral cudgel that divides rather than persuades. With a good group of conservatives on the court and in the legislative offices, that judicial and constitutional argument is the appeal we should be making to the moderates, citizens no less than we, and citizens who are not craven to the issues of our nation’s founding and heritage as embodied in those principles.
What then is their internal context for support of the Roe v. Wade decision? I believe I have the answer.
Remember back to the sixties and early seventies; remember when this issue was captured by the activist judges. Remember that the liberal-left could not win this issue legislatively and so saw their open path to win by the judicial fiat of a court decision, what they could not win in State or Federal legislatures. Judicial fiat, lacking the legitimacy of legislative compromise, left a festering divide on this issue in a way that the Civil Rights Act and other such issues of the Sixties never did. How was the appeal made by the liberal-left to the electorate of that day? What was the context? I’ll refresh your memory.
Unformed reform tradition, of a good and valid conservative context, did not exist and was not given a voice in the major parties. The sixties were a time when all citizens recognized the injustices that were contextual within our social, business and governmental institutions. Women, in particular, achieving higher education as never before, began to realize that the vestiges of old cultural traditions were being used to unjustly subjugate them in many ways.
1.) They did not have equal pay for equal work. They were of lesser worth.
2.) They were subjugated by good Judeo-Christian doctrine to a subservient role in marriage that often put them at the mercy of spouses unchecked by the same Judeo-Christian community.
3.) The paternal medical community, predominately male, held one set of standards for male contraception, disease and behavior, and another for female options. Women, accepted into the electorate and property holding class were still not “in charge” of their own bodies in a way that any male took for granted.
4.) Church, social and governmental arguments all tried to free mankind to be “self-actualized” but continued to define and limit the options open to women due to the child-bearing function of their sex. Well you might be able to practice the rhythm method for avoidance of children this year, if you are married, if your husband goes along, and if you realize that when (not if) it fails you are going to be pregnant and then all society, medicine, spousal and parental forces have an over-riding say in your pregnancy.
That is a poorly worded, but memory invoking, context of the world where women and men found the plight of women-kind in the sixties. The advent of easy birth control, equal pay provisions and access to fair treatment under marital laws was then all bound up in the last Trump Card condition of pregnancy that spoke its way to the condition of every women and many men of that day. The activist liberal-left took advantage of that open fear and with the seemingly benign “first trimester” wording of the Roe v. Wade rationalization following the addition of privacy rights into the federal constitution what was never there before.
Doing away with the Roe v. Wade decision on the ethical grounds, so clear to many of we conservatives who have thought of this question for decades, will be a terrible uphill fight we may lose, and losing may lose all. As you can see above, in the moderates’ mind the Roe v. Wade “freedom” (though false) is inexorably tied up in all the reform that moderates feel women have achieved in the last forty years. Should we not make the fight? Certainly, we should, but on the legal, constitutional and judicial grounds that Bork used so well.
The only appeal that can sway the moderate voter is to our common heritage and respect for the principles we hold in common.
1.) The Constitution has been trivialized by the activist court. They have manufactured false “rights” and remedies that were never intended.
2.) The nation wrenching division on this issue is due to the status quo being defined by judicial fiat and without the working of our laboratories of democracy, the state governments.
3.) The first trimester sales job of the proponents of Roe v. Wade is not the test that laws its supported have been held to: Abortion-on-Demand and abortion by tax payer and abortion as contraception have been the goals of the proponents.
4.) Legitimacy is the goal of all citizens for all of our laws and institutions and that will only be won through legislative prudence at the proper level of government designed to deal with complex issues. There the issues of rape, incest, abuse and subjugation that lurk in the back of the mind of all moderates can be put to rest, just as the absolutism on our side must be held out for the ethical and moral context and not the complex civil society.
Fellow Conservatives, we wanted this context to our campaign and plank in our party(s) we support, but we must wage the fight on the political and legal issues or we will not deserve to win. Our moral and religious standards, and rigor, we must hold for our own actions or we will never be entrusted with the confidence of the broad electorate.I apologize on the length of the comment required to make my point and while I know there are those who agree and disagree, I would appreciate thoughtful comments.
The RLC could have a unity of Pro Life libertarians and conservatives if the issue of the Judicary writing law through Judicial Activism was properly addressed.