Hadley Arkes takes on the establishment

It is widely known and certainly expected that the American Democratic political party, at least as a national party, is openly a proponent of what John Paul the Great called, "the culture of death." The Republican party, as a counter, enjoys the cooling support from "religious conservatives" or what the mainstream media insultingly refers to as "values voters." However, many of us who are traditional and orthodox and have in the past been supporters of the Republican party, are sickened by what we see. Aside from other issues, the Republican party many times likes to paint itself as the religious party or as the "pro-life" party. Many of my colleagues in fact look up to the Republican party as if it is some new church on earth. However, what goes oftentimes unsaid is how Republican party members and even the party as a whole, play and exploit religious conservatives for fools by saying one thing yet doing another. Hadley Arkes takes on the establishment in a must read response to an editorial in the WSJ. It's time to get something done about abortion and national politics does not seem to be the answer. Another thing it illustrates is how the Bush administration has been almost a complete failure and hypocrisy. If ever there was a time to restrict or end abortion, and yet...

Full excerpt:

In the May 11 editorial on "Rudy and the Right," the Journal editorial page, usually so savvy in its political sense, has backed itself into the reigning vice of the political class, and even the Republican wing of that class, on the matter of abortion. The Supreme Court articulated a new constitutional right to abortion -- and then assigned to itself a monopoly of the legislative power in shaping that right. Republican politicians rail against "activist judges," but then serenely settle into the notion that this matter of abortion is somehow exclusively the "business of the courts." It's rather astonishing that you should now absorb the same ruling premise; a premise that undoes the logic of the separation of powers. If there is a constitutional right, the legislative and executive branches must have the authority to vindicate that right, and in enforcing it, give it scale and proportion.

President Bush and other Republicans have been content to promise that they will appoint to the courts lawyers like John Roberts and Sam Alito. The unspoken promise is that these judges, one day, will overrule Roe v. Wade. And on the day that happens, what will those Republican politicians do? They have now talked themselves out of the notion that the political branches have any responsibility here. My guess is that most of the Republicans don't have the slightest sense of what they would do on the day Roe ends. And yet, it doesn't follow, as you suggest, that the matter simply returns to the states, as though the president and Congress had little reason to deal with this matter.

Consider just a few of the things that fall to the president and Congress: There is the obvious matter of the practice of abortion in the diplomatic and military outposts abroad, and in the District of Columbia. There is the question of whether the National Institutes of Health should make use of tissues drawn from fetuses in elective, not spontaneous, abortions. We have a dramatic case right now, in New Jersey, of a hospital that has arguably violated the Born-Alive Infants' Protection Act, the act that casts the protection of the law on children who survive abortions. But that case is languishing in the Justice Department, with a White House paying no attention. Would a President Giuliani take more interest in faithfully executing the laws we have passed? Using the old Bob Jones case, another administration may seek to withdraw tax exemptions from hospitals and clinics that violate the Born-Alive Act. That would be a momentous move, emanating from the center of our politics -- as would be the move to withdraw all federal funding from hospitals and clinics that house the partial- birth abortion. We are not likely to see criminal cases brought under the act, recently sustained, that forbids that grisly procedure. But the threat to remove federal funds could move us to the endgame on the performance of many kinds of abortions in hospitals and clinics.

Those are some of the things a president would be in a position to direct, quite modestly, without much exertion. You have taken the line for years that this matter of abortion cannot be the central issue in our politics. I'd simply offer this plea for a certain exercise of imagination: If some of us look out on the world, informed by the textbooks on embryology and obstetric gynecology, we think we have firm reason to know that these are nothing less than human lives that are destroyed in abortions. With a minor flexing of moral reasoning, we think that the justifications needed to take the lives of these small humans must be as compelling as the justifications that are needed to take other human lives. Anyone who looks out on the landscape with that lens sees 1.3 million lives taken in this country each year without the need to render a justification. Therefore, understanding that, where would you place this matter in the overall rank of our public business? Would it be just behind the question of interest rates or the level of taxes? Would you really be surprised that those of us who see things in this way cannot quite put this matter of the "life issues" at the periphery of our politics? Where then is the rigidity or the touch of fanaticism -- on the part of those who see what is there, and seek moderate steps to address it, or on the part of those who somehow cannot acknowledge that real human beings are killed in these surgeries?

SBW