COMMENTARY: Could this be the Republican crack-up?

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.) (UNDATED) It is tempting to say that Bob […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.)

(UNDATED) It is tempting to say that Bob Dole’s abortion writhings are merely a clumsy attempt to harvest votes on both sides of the ideological chasm, but this ignores the deeper philosophical crisis that grips both Dole and the Republican Party. Watch closely. We may be witnessing the crack-up of the GOP.


Let’s start at the beginning. As Jack Kemp is fond of reminding us, the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, and it was founded for one central purpose: to oppose slavery. In 1856 both major parties, the Whigs and Democrats, waffled on the issue. So a breakaway group of Whigs formed something called the Republican Party. Within four years, the Whigs were no more and the Republicans were in the White House.

Moving forward to the 1996 presidential campaign, we find that the Republican Party, which was founded on that one transcendent moral idea _ that human life is sacred _ may now founder by abandoning that idea. It is quite clear that Dole hopes to steer the party away from its historic pro-life position. This is not a cosmetic change that Dole seeks. His intentions are nothing short of revolutionary.

Anyone doubting Dole’s intentions did not catch the candidate’s call for”tolerance”language in the party platform, which says that while abortion is very, very bad, those who disagree are nonetheless very, very welcome in the Republican’s ever-expanding tent.”Come one, come all”is the new battle cry. And designating the pro-choice Rep. Susan Molinari of New York as keynote speaker to the Republican National Convention further underscores Dole’s desire to accommodate voters who support abortion rights.

So-called political experts consider this”big tent”strategy to be nothing less than brilliant, and one should always keep in mind that political strategists have a single, shallow mission in life: to attract voters.

But at the heart of Dole’s calculation is a very deep and dangerous idea, one that permeates our society: There really is no such thing as a binding, transcendent morality. Instead, morality is merely a personal matter. This belief allows Dole _ whose pro-life record is exemplary _ to simultaneously demand”tolerance”for the extermination of innocent human life. He only exerts party discipline over economic policy.

If Lincoln and company had said,”We are personally opposed to slavery, but if others feel it is okay then we respect that view,”the history of this country would be vastly different. As would our view of Lincoln.

After all, what are we to think of a person who, on the one hand, believes a practice to be evil, but who urges us to nonetheless tolerate it? At the very least, we would have to assume that this person is not all that opposed to evil. We would not call such a person a great man, even a good one. We would say he was morally schizoid.


Should Dole choose a running mate who supports abortion rights, he will have taken the final step away from the pro-life camp. And he will luxuriate in the cheers of those who believe that morality, like musical taste, is merely an individual matter.

But those cheers may well be drowned out by the sound of traditional conservatives stampeding out of the Republican corral. His attempt to broaden his party’s constituency may have the opposite effect.

I have talked to many Republican-leaning voters, including Christian Coalition chief Ralph Reed and Focus on the Family head James Dobson, who have made it clear that they will not support Dole if he abandons the pro-life position. This may come as a surprise to those who believe traditional moralists are”easily led”(as a Washington Post writer once put it) and see politics as a purely negative experience.

If easily led, traditionalists would follow Dole, who at least gives better lip service to their cause than does President Clinton. If they thought politics purely negative, they would be content to cast their votes against the greater of two evils.

Yet these voters, who hold to their positions in the face of an enormous amount of ridicule, vote for one reason only: to affirm their moral principles. And they will stay home _ or vote for a third party _ rather than participate in the Republican retreat from the life issue. They will refuse to embrace a cheap idea of political unity based on standards so revoltingly low that the extermination of human life is a totem before which one either bows or is ridiculed.

Historian Paul Johnson has written that totalitarianism was the dominant issue of the 20th century, and that the dominant issue of the 21st century will be the issue of life itself. As Supreme Court rulings expand the categories of human beings that may legally be destroyed, Bob Dole should think long and hard about where he is leading the GOP. He is now only a half-step from the precipice. Before he stumbles over it, he should remember what happened to the Whigs. For no Republican has faced a more profound test since the party’s founder looked into the heart of slavery and said,”No more.”


MJP END COLSON

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