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The political marriage between moral and fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party has not been an altogether holy one. Election after election, the controlling fiscal elites have deceived the well-meaning with empty campaign pledges on issues such as abortion.
The truth is that Republicans created-and have preserved - the Constitutional right to abortion that many, including myself, deplore. The striking down of the state sodomy laws in 2003 was also quite Republican, but that topic is for another day. The federal judiciary has been appointed by Republican presidents for 24 out of the last 36 years. Seven justices of the United States Supreme Court are Republican, while only two are Democrats.
Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee, wrote the Roe v. Wade decision which gave Constitutional protection to certain abortions in 1973. At the time, Governor Ronald Reagan of California was an ardent abortion supporter, as was the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George Bush (the former president).
<snip> Whenever I ask Republicans how much their taxes would be raised to support all the unwanted children if Roe were overturned, they always respond that they would not be willing to pay one extra penny. This is a moral bankruptcy in itself: They want the government to force children to be born to infanticidal parents, but then they do not want the government even to pay for milk for the babies to drink! The central problem is that no one wants to pay for the mistakes of others, not even when the lives of the innocent are at stake. If we abortion opponents were to mobilize to demand the expansion of the welfare system to care for the unwanted children after Roe, our position would be morally consistent and we might save millions of lives. But in my entire life I have never met a Republican who was willing to mushroom welfare spending, whether to benefit children or not.
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