Morality trumps party politics

Reason and charity are the casualties of most political arguments. “Politics is a contact sport,” one media pundit said this week on a news show. “Journalism is war by other means,” said another.

Rising above all this, the journal First Things has a political analysis on its blog that is reasonable, charitable, and intellectually honest. It’s by Princeton Professsor Robert P. George, who always seems to have the most brilliant argument in the room, even when the room is full of other intellects.

Which it sort of is, in this ongoing, online debate over pro-lifers really having only one party to support.

I find no cause for joy in this. I wish that it were possible for pro-life citizens legitimately to support Democratic candidates. I wish that the party of my parents and grandparents had not placed itself on the wrong side of the most profound human rights issue of our contemporary domestic politics. I wish that the killing of embryonic and fetal human beings by abortion and in biomedical research were resolutely opposed by both parties so that we could cast our votes based on our assessments of the candidates’ and parties’ competing positions on taxation, immigration, education, welfare, health-care reform, national security, and foreign policy. It is hardly satisfactory that pro-life citizens—representing a variety of views on the range of issues in economic, social, and foreign policy—find themselves bound to the Republicans because the only viable alternative is a party that has abandoned its commitment to the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human family by embracing abortion and embryo-destructive research.

It’s hard to find sich clarity and reason. And moral courage.