COMMENTARY: A lesson in how a non-issue gets coverage, while a real story gets buried

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) In recent weeks, one political party has […]

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) In recent weeks, one political party has seen one of its core tenets jettisoned, an act that will affect millions of people, while the other has decided to maintain the status quo on a matter of internal dispute. Which got the most press coverage? The latter.


There’s a simple explanation for this strange behavior. The first story involved President Clinton’s decision to sign the welfare overhaul bill, thus signaling a deep change in the Democrats’ historic advocacy for the poor. The latter dispute involved the Republican Party’s human-life amendment, which is part of the party’s platform _ a document, many agree, that is almost entirely symbolic.

Nevertheless, it has become an obsession among many in the media and politics to denounce pro-life forces as a threat to the democratic process.

This attitude is based on a total misreading of what pro-lifers hope to accomplish with a human-life amendment, an issue that will play large and loud in the presidential campaign.

I fully support an amendment to the Constitution protecting the unborn. That we have come to a pass in our history when one must embrace the extermination of innocent life in order to escape charges of being unsophisticated and even extremist is profoundly disheartening. But let’s consider who is really being extreme here. At the risk of sounding self-serving, let me suggest that the radicals have congregated on the other side. What’s more, the very nature of the human-life amendment has been twisted almost beyond recognition.

We all know the subtext to this story. Religious conservatives are said to be taking over the Republican Party and forcing their grating philosophy on an unwilling public. The proverbial man (or bacterium) from Mars would assume that the Republican Party has always supported abortion on demand, but is now in the process of being taken over by a religious version of the Red Guard.

Yet this picture is upside-down. In truth, religious conservatives are not the revolutionaries, but instead defenders of the longstanding moral and political opposition to abortion. Advocacy of a human-life amendment has been in the platform since 1980, and that year certainly does not mark the beginning of the GOP’s opposition to abortion.

In 1972, when I and another campaign aide _ named Pat Buchanan _ were working for President Richard Nixon, we came up with the presidential campaign’s rallying cry. The Democrats, we said, were the party of”amnesty, abortion, and acid.”This was not offered as a compliment. The line was clearly drawn even then _ and this was before Roe vs. Wade was decided.


So there is no lurch to the right, or any kind of takeover attempt _ at least not by the religious right. The party is standing firm on its historic position. Nor is there any truth to the charge that Republicans are trying to”outlaw all abortions”by passing a human-life amendment.

Not that the charge isn’t made with regularity and shrillness. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis boldly wrote last weekend that the GOP will take”its harshest position ever, calling for a constitutional amendment to prohibit all abortions _ even to save the mother’s life _ and for the criminal prosecution of doctors who terminate pregnancies.” This is preposterous. A constitutional amendment is not a criminal law. It confers rights _ in this case the due process rights of the 14th Amendment would be conferred to unborn children _ that in turn become the basis for various laws.

In other words, this plank calls for throwing abortion back to state legislatures, where the democratic process will decide, first of all, if America really wants any limits on abortion and, if so, what those might be.

What could be more American than this? Since when did supporting due process and the democratic process become a mark of extremism and intolerance?

This is truly a dark comedy we are living through, one in which the people who hope to inject democracy into decision-making are regarded as dangerous to democracy, while those who support judge-made law are seen as defenders of the popular will. And it is nearly diabolical when a president who vetoes a bill outlawing a form of infanticide, called late-term abortion, chides his opponents for their lack of moderation.

The Republican plan would hardly outlaw all abortions. Instead, for the first time since Roe vs. Wade, it would give Americans the opportunity to arrive at a consensus on an issue that is tearing this country apart. I submit that to oppose giving Americans this opportunity is extreme and intolerant. Perhaps the hard-line position taken by amendment critics betrays a deep-seated fear that Americans would vote sensible abortion restrictions if given the chance.


The funny thing is, while the so-called revolutionaries in the Republican ranks dominated the news, something truly earth-shaking did occur in American politics. Democrats saw Bill Clinton agree to sign legislation that would end the guarantee of public assistance to all comers. That really is a revolutionary change _ and much more worthy of saturation coverage than a short-lived platform dispute. Then again, in our upside-down world, one should expect the status quo to get more attention than the earthquakes.

MJP END COLSON

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