By Patrick
Pivoting off Andrew Bacevich’s endorsement of Obama, Ross started a heated discussion last week about abortion and the GOP. Since then, Larison, Dan McCarthy, and Jim Antle have responded. Excerpts from two of the most recent posts:
For decades the GOP kept luring pro-life voters to the polls by saying, “We just need the majority in Congress and control of the White House, and then you’ll see things change.” So these people faithfully turned out every time for candidates, some of them quite mediocre and undeserving, and finally gave the GOP the unified government it had said it needed, and in return they received nothing more than they had under Reagan at the beginning. It was also obviously during this time that the GOP was wasting all of its time and energy launching and defending the war in Iraq, while scarcely being able to expend an ounce of political capital on anything important to pro-life conservatives.
Ross:
Obviously, if you agree with McCarthy that the intervention in Iraq represents a graver evil than the post-Roe abortion regime – and, more importantly, that the continuation of that intervention only compounds the initial evil of the war – the case for voting against McCain, whether for Obama or for a third party candidate, is more or less airtight. The weaker, but to my mind more plausible case that would justify a pro-lifer casting a protest vote against McCain on foreign policy grounds is the one that Antle and Larison put forward – namely, that there’s little reason to think that the Senator from Arizona will put an anti-Roe Justice on the Court, so a vote for McCain isn’t really a vote against abortion anyway. I think they are mistaken on this point, just as I think that Larison is mistaken when he suggests that Roberts and Alito would vote to uphold Roe, and I suspect that pro-lifers who choose this election cycle to give up on the GOP would end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Dish 