In my last post, a long meditation on the disturbing political implications of the religious right’s “prophetic stance” against American society, I quoted extensively from a brilliant review by Alan Wolfe in The New Republic, but in pursuing my own theories, didn’t completely do justice to Wolfe’s piece. But after reading the profile of Rick Santorum in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, one of Wolfe’s observations struck me as especially trenchant: “In these days of conservative ecumenicalism…all that matters on the right is whether your beliefs are conservative and not what your beliefs actually are.” That’s certainly true of Santorum. According to Michael Sokolove’s profile, Santorum in 2002, alluding to Toni Morrison’s famous description of Bill Clinton as “the first African-American president,” called George W. Bush “the first Catholic president.” Sokolove asked Santorum the obvious question: what about America’s actual Catholic president, John F. Kennedy? And Santorum basically said Kennedy wasn’t much of a Catholic at all, because, like many Catholic Democrats today, he “sort of adopted that same line, that they are going to hold that part of themselves off to the side, which has led to people who want to completely separate moral views from public life, which is a dangerous thing.”Bush, on the other hand, is a better Catholic than JFK, suggests Santorum, because his views are consistent with “Catholic social teaching.” So there you have it: two thousand years of scripture, Church Fathers, creeds, counsels, scholastic philosophy, monastic traditions, saints and martyrs, liturgy, and magisterium, are hardly worth mentioning in comparison with the Right’s contemporary obsession with abortion and gay rights. Despite the inelegance of his words, Santorum serves as an eloquent example of Wolfe’s point about the debasement of conservative Christianity by its essentially secular dedication to partisan politics.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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February 1: RNC Scolds Republican Pols For Cowardice on Abortion
The backlash to the Supreme Court’s abolition of federal constitutional abortion rights is having some interesting new consequences, as I explained this week at New York:
For decades, the Republican National Committee has staked out a hard-core anti-abortion position. So now that a Republican-controlled Supreme Court has abolished the federal constitutional right to an abortion, you’d figure the RNC would take a moment to relish its victory. But you’d be wrong.
Instead, the RNC is lashing out at apostates. In response to 2022 Republican candidates avoiding the topic of abortion and to signs of strife in the party’s alliance with the anti-abortion movement, the RNC has passed a resolution scolding its members and urging them to keep the faith. It concludes with marching orders:
“WHEREAS, The Democratic Party and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the issue of abortion during the 2022 midterms, concealing their extremism while mischaracterizing and vilifying pro-life Republican candidates; and
“WHEREAS, Instead of fighting back and exposing Democratic extremism on abortion, many Republican candidates failed to remind Americans of our proud heritage of challenging slavery, segregation, and the forces eroding the family and the sanctity of human life, thereby allowing Democrats to define our longtime position; therefore, be it
“RESOLVED, The Republican National Committee urges all Republican pro-life candidates, consultants, and other national Republican Political Action Committees to remember this proud heritage, go on offense in the 2024 election cycle, and expose the Democrats’ extreme position of supporting abortion on-demand up until the moment of birth, paid for by the taxpayers, even supporting discriminatory abortions such as gender selection or when the child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome.”
In states where Republicans have the power to set abortion policy, the RNC doesn’t want any namby-pamby compromises allowing the majority of abortions to proceed (despite its characterization of Democrats as the real “extremists”):
“RESOLVED, The Republican National Committee urges Republican lawmakers in state legislatures and in Congress to pass the strongest pro-life legislation possible — such as laws that acknowledge the beating hearts and experiences of pain in the unborn — underscoring the new relics of barbarism the Democratic Party represents as we approach the 2024 cycle.”
If you aren’t familiar with the rhetorical stylings of the anti-abortion movement, the “relics of barbarism” business is an effort to tie legalized abortion to the slavery and polygamy condemned by the original Republicans of the 19th century (who would probably view today’s race-baiting GOP with a jaundiced eye). The “beating heart” reference is an endorsement of “heartbeat” bills banning abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable, roughly at six weeks of pregnancy or before many women even know they’re pregnant.
The resolution is really the announcement of a new hunt for RINOs on the topic of abortion. Some in the RNC worry that their politicians will become squishy on reproductive rights because their constituents (and many swing voters) don’t favor abortion bans and regret the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, as shown by 2022’s pro-choice winning streak on ballot measures and general Republican underperformance. This pushback by the RNC parallels the anti-abortion movement’s efforts to make extreme abortion positions (such as a national abortion ban) a litmus test in the 2024 Republican primaries, especially at the presidential level.
Will this counterattack stem the panicky retreat of Republican politicians who care more about winning elections and cutting taxes than “saving the babies,” as the anti-abortion activists would put it? I don’t know. But at this point, it’s another sign that the Dobbs decision wasn’t quite the clear-cut victory for the forced-birth lobby that it initially appeared to be.