Republican Writer: “Honestly I Think You Can Support Abortion and Still be a Conservative”

Opinion   |   Micaiah Bilger, Steven Ertelt   |   Jul 13, 2018   |   4:21PM   |   Washington, DC

Popular Republican journalist Jonah Goldberg angered his base Wednesday by claiming people can be conservative and support abortion.

Goldberg is a senior editor at the National Review and a New York Times bestselling author. On Twitter Wednesday, he made the comment about fellow conservative journalist Tomi Lahren who has been openly critical of pro-lifers.

“Honestly, I think you can support abortion and still be a conservative. I just have a problem when you’re stupid about it or use left wing arguments for it — or both,” Goldberg wrote in the post, linking to one of Lahren’s recent comments.

Goldberg continued his thread to buttress his thesis that being a conservative is not about a single political issue:

No one would argue with Jonah that one could be an atheist and be a conservative or the many other things and be a conservative. But it is very difficult to be a conservative when you deny the most fundamental right to life there is and that is the right to life.

Thomas Jefferson, ironically the founder of the Democratic Party, understood that the number one goal of good government was to protect the right of life of its citizens. Conservative political philosophies are all about putting in place principles to make the lives of the nation’s citizens better by relying on freedoms and liberties free of undue governmental influence as opposed to government control. But it is impossible for citizens to enjoy any of the rights or freedoms under a conservative government if they are not alive to enjoy them in the first place.

Conservatives certainly can disagree about political policies like taxing and spending or foreign policy. President Ronald Reagan understood that Republicans can disagree on some political philosophies and policies and still be united as Republicans when they agree on 80% of the major issues of the day. But the pro-life former president clearly understood that human beings have a fundamental right to life they can’t be abrogated by government.

Mr. Goldberg has taken this news outlet to task for publishing this article. But the issue of the right to life and its primary place in the Republican or conservative political movements is a long-standing one. There have been decades worth of debates about keeping the Republican Party a pro-life party and having a strong pro-life position in the party platform, for example.

So the question of whether or not the Republican Party or the conservative movement rests on the fundamental right to life is a very important one for a considerable number of conservative Republican voters. To merely label this discussion as “clickbait or sloppy” is to do a great disservice to the merits of this very substantive and important debate and the considerable number of pro-life conservative Republican voters for whom it is the most important or one of the most important political issues they consider when voting.

In fact the issue of the right to life and its place in the Republican and conservative movement is so important that millions of Democrats who formally aligned with the Democratic Party are now Republicans/conservatives specifically because the Democratic Party and the liberals who control it moved in such a radically pro-abortion direction. To say that conservatives can be pro-abortion undermines the very reason so many people are conservatives in the first place.

When it comes to the debate over abortion in the Republican Party, Lahren has been openly critical of pro-life conservatives. About the debate about the open U.S. Supreme Court seat, Lahren told Fox News: “Implying that we’re sending a Supreme Court justice to the bench to carry out religious judicial activism is a mistake and unconstitutional. It’s not what conservatives stand for.”

While certainly not flattering to Lahren, his post did upset a number of his Twitter followers.

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LifeNews Note: This article has been updated from the original to include more tweets from Mr. Goldberg.