We should just welcome anti-choice activists into our party. Make them the foundation of our march to majorities in statehouses across the nation.
That is the laughable basis of Charles C. Camosy’s claim in Monday’s Washington Post. Apparently the poor, misguided souls are feeling left out of the Republican Party as now represented by Donald Trump—the guy who dares to think Planned Parenthood does some good work. Feeling neglected by their party of limited government, they are more than willing to jump ship, if we would only give them some encouragement.
Many pro-lifers were already frustrated with a party that merely goes through the motions and lacks a coherent plan when it comes to protecting prenatal children from violence. After last year’s conservative-led effort to defund Planned Parenthood failed, Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the pro-life Christian Defense Coalition, charged Republican congressional leadership with the “betrayal” of “the pro-life community that helped elect them”; and when Republicans yet again failed to pass antiabortion legislation last year, conservative commentator Erik Erickson declared that “the pro-life movement must stop being whores of the Republican party.”
Why stop at outlawing abortion? We can outlaw science at its very roots and perhaps even establish a creationist museum on the National Mall, complete with robotic dinosaurs that children can ride, just like their ancestors did. That would allow all of the anti-science fanatics a place under the big tent of the newly imagined Democratic Party, as well as the anti-choice zealots.
Mr. Camosy appears to be sincere in offering us a route to electoral victory, and it surely has nothing to do with a creeping panic that the GOP is actually imploding under the weight of its own contradictions. But why would we want to follow them down the same road? Why would we want to substitute fantasy for science, religious beliefs for civil rights, democracy for fascism? And why would we want to destroy the Republican party when they are doing such a fine job of it themselves?
And seriously? A “prenatal child?”