Defunding Planned Parenthood Should Be a Conservative ‘Litmus Test’ | [site:name]

Yesterday Donald Trump indicated that he was open to continuing to fund Planned Parenthood, saying, “What I would do when the time came, I’d look at the individual things they do, and maybe some of the individual things they do are good. I know a lot of the things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government, absolutely.” Of course it’s not truly possible to wall off Planned Parenthood’s abortion work from the rest of the organization. Half a billion dollars of taxpayer money helps keep the nation’s largest abortion provider alive. Funding Planned Parenthood funds abortions.

Unless Trump backtracks from this position and vows, like most of the rest of the Republican field, to defund Planned Parenthood entirely, he shouldn’t receive a single conservative vote. Not one. This applies to every candidate in the race. Pledge now to defund Planned Parenthood or face relentless conservative opposition.

Yes, I know the objections: “But what about the border?” “What about ISIS?” “What about China?” “There is more than one relevant issue in the race!” Yes, there are certainly many issues, but an unwillingness to defund Planned Parenthood — especially in the aftermath of videos that show its true, blood-red colors — tells me all I need to know about the candidate’s moral courage and moral reasoning.

First, let’s talk moral courage. It’s in the social issues that the Left truly tests a conservative’s mettle. They’ll give here and there on taxes. They’ll vote for military interventions. Some will even compromise on entitlement reform. But when it comes to the sacrament of abortion, it’s no retreat. To paraphrase Churchill, they’ll fight you in Congress, they’ll fight you on the airwaves, they’ll fight you in court, they’ll fight you in Hollywood, and they’ll fight you on Facebook. They will never surrender. Not ever.

Conservatives who lack the same resolve are instantly suspect — not just on abortion but on a range of issues. When push comes to shove, if a candidate will give on a matter of life or death, what won’t he give on? Where, exactly, is his line in the sand? Can you trust a candidate to defy the full fury of popular culture and build a wall when he can’t defy the full fury of popular culture on life? In fact, recent history shows that the very failure to impose “litmus tests” has brought the conservative movement to grief again and again — see, for example, Republican Supreme Court appointees Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connnor.

The same moral mind that reasons to the pro-life position also tends to reason to a whole host of other conservative positions, including fiscal conservatism.

Then there’s the matter of moral reasoning. It turns out that the same moral mind that reasons to the pro-life position also tends to reason to a whole host of other conservative positions, including fiscal conservatism. While we’ve long heard (primarily from the mainstream media) that the conservative sweet spot is socially left and fiscally right, in the real world politicians who are socially left tend to be fiscally left. As a general rule, social conservatives are fiscal conservatives. When Senator Jim DeMint retired, Timothy Carney wrote a piece in the Washington Examiner noting that the strongly pro-life senator also happened to be the Senate’s leading libertarian. And he wasn’t alone:

The best fiscal conservatives in politics are all social conservatives. Look at the Club for Growth scorecard again. All the most fiscally conservative senators are pro-life. You have to go down to No. 27 in the Club’s rankings — Mark Kirk — to find a pro-choicer.

This has long been the case. Remember when the Republican establishment told conservatives to vote for Delaware’s Mike Castle? He wasn’t fiscally conservative and socially liberal. He was just liberal, with a 33 percent pro-life and 43 percent fiscal-conservative voting record. In other words, weakness in one area predicted weakness in the other.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some fiscal conservatives who are social liberals (and even fewer social conservatives who are fiscal liberals), but the same reasoning that sees the family and not the government as the basic building block of society and understands that private institutions, like the church, are better at caring for people than vast social-welfare systems also drives people to value life and liberty. Indeed, reverence for life often motivates opposition to jihad, the Islamic cult of death. Simply put, moral reasoning typically isn’t compartmentalized, and the same moral impulses that drive decision-making on one issue drive our decision-making on all issues.

#related#Moreover, moral reasoning isn’t merely an issue of positions. Priorities matter as well. There are religious progressives who call themselves pro-life but who won’t lift one finger to help the unborn if doing so would damage the larger progressive enterprise. Sadly, many Catholic and Evangelical progressives fit this category, vowing to their coreligionists that they’re pro-life while exerting minimal to nonexistent efforts on behalf of the unborn and maximum efforts on behalf of the Left’s sprawling “social justice” initiatives.

If a “conservative” politician can’t defend defunding Planned Parenthood now, then he lacks moral courage. If that politician legitimately believes Planned Parenthood, a baby-part-selling death factory, deserves one dime of federal money, he lacks moral reasoning. And he lacks both if he’s not willing to prioritize this fight. If we can’t trust you on life, where can we trust you?