Reblogged:Haley Wins, Vance Stays Wrong on Abortion

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Image by Gayatri Malhotra, via Unsplash, license.

After what sounds to me like a uniformly underwhelming debate, it appears, at least according to Matt Drudge's numbers as of this morning that Nikki Haley decisively won. As of writing, we have: 43% Nikki Haley, 25% Vivek Ramaswamy, 15% Ron DeSantis (!), 13% Chris Christie, and 4% Tim Scott.

Haley's total is more than the second- and third-place finishers put together.

Since Haley has momentum and is the main non-Trump candidate aside from Ron DeSantis, this would suggest that the smart money is on her as the best chance for the GOP to rid itself of Donald Trump in this election cycle, rather than continuing to lose elections and alienate independent voters (for starters) for another four years (also, for starters).

But if Donald Trump is the most immediate threat to the GOP (and to liberty, via the two-party system), its stand on abortion is a much more potent and longer-term threat, as yesterday's results once again indicated.

Two of those things we used to call Tweets should show the depth of the problem -- which, big picture, shows that the Republican Party is at best a temporary check on the Democrats, rather than a long-term home for those of us who value liberty.

The first tweet, by the execrable Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, shows that the anti-abortionists in no way are wondering whether their goal should be reconsidered. The money quotes from the long-form post are, "Giving up on the unborn is not an option. It's politically dumb and morally repugnant." and, "So let's keep fighting for our country's children, and let's find a way to win."

This appeal to a deeply wrong view of morality amounts to We lost on messaging, since the goal -- enslaving women to fetuses -- is immoral and there is no earthly argument to do so, or way to motivate about half the electorate to accept it.

There is a saying that goes something like, "You can't reason a person out of an opinion that person did not reach by reason."

Vance demonstrates this in spades: He doesn't stop and think Hmmmm. Maybe "the unborn" don't have rights because they aren't individuals, yet, or Lots of people don't seem to accept my idea of what constitutes a human life. Perhaps I should rethink that.

This doesn't mean that Vance and other pro-lifers can't consider this question rationally; but the fact is, they aren't.

The anti-abortionists overwhelmingly hold their position on faith, and based on religious teachings they exempt from the kinds of questions they would (or should) correctly ask of any other knowledge claim -- such as that morality lies outside the province of reason. (It doesn't.)

There is much more to say about this, but time does not permit, so I shall close with the second tweet, by historian C. Bradley Thompson, author of America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It:

The most potent force in American politics today is young women between the ages of 18 & 35.

And the Republican message to them is ________?

Religious Republicans often call themselves "values voters," but the above quote is much more in line with a rational (but too often, vaguely, inconsistently, and implicitly-held) grasp of values.

What Republicans seem uniformly oblivious to, is what is obvious to many young women: Outlawing abortion threatens their lives (because pregnancy is always medically risky) and futures (as any halfway conscientious parent or prospective parent will know), and for what? Satisfaction of the alleged demands of an alleged being that noone has proved exists in thousands of years of time to do so.

Women are correct to rebuff the Republicans as long as they continue to champion the alleged rights of "the unborn" at the expense of the living.

-- CAV

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