The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news analysis…
DEMOCRATS TALK ABOUT ABORTION — REPUBLICANS
TALK EVERYTHING EXCEPT ABORTION
ON Friday, January 3rd — the swearing in day of the 119th Congress — five term Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA) was re-elected as the 56th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
With one vacancy in the 435 seat chamber, Johnson won with the narrowest of margins, receiving 218 votes against Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who with 215 votes, will continue to serve as the Democratic Minority Floor Leader and Leader of the House Democratic Caucus.
In a nineteen minute acceptance speech delivered from the podium of the House, Johnson gave a broad ranging talk addressing numerous issues on the Republican national agenda.
Johnson discussed securing our borders, strengthening national defense, controlling inflation, protecting jobs, combatting overregulation, extending tax cuts, attracting foreign investment, restoring energy dominance, defending parental rights, eliminating the Green New Deal, ending electric vehicle mandates, dismantling the Administrative State, reducing the size of government, putting America First, and achieving Peace through Strength.
Nowhere in this lengthy laundry list of partisan policy objectives did Johnson bother to mention the most pressing and consequential moral issue confronting America today — the deliberate killing of over one million pre-born children every year through legal abortion.
Johnson even enunciated a list of “Seven Core Principles of Conservatism,” which, in a shocking omission, failed to include upholding the sanctity of innocent human life from conception to natural death.
Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, in contrast, in his remarks, spoke directly and forcefully in favor of so-called reproductive rights.
It should be obvious by now that the deletion of 27 pro-life and pro-family planks from the Republican National Platform in 2024 was more than just a temporary and expedient tactical downplaying, for electoral purposes, of Republican opposition to abortion.
It is now clear that it was the beginning of a fundamental shift in direction, by national Republicans, on the issue of abortion. Since that time, President Trump has asserted that abortion is now a state issue, that the Republican Party will no longer support the Human Life Amendment, and that he would veto any federal ban on abortion.
He went on to describe state heartbeat laws and six week abortion bans as “extreme,” and promised that the Food and Drug Administration, under his Presidency, would keep the abortion drug Mifepristone legal.
Mifepristone now accounts for 63% percent of all U.S. abortions.
As Johnson’s remarks indicate, the Republican Party, it would seem, is moving on from abortion, as it has, already, moved on from the defense of traditional marriage and natural law.
Much of the blame for this disastrous defeat for the right to life can be apportioned to the leadership of mainstream national pro-life organizations, such as the National Right To Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the Family Research Council, Students For Life, Priests For Life and Americans United For Life.
Instead of standing up for their professed principles, the leaders of these groups made the political calculation that the Trump candidacy had to be supported at all costs, even if meant lying to their own members, as Brian Burch of Catholic Vote did, when he claimed that the new Republican platform (which supports contraception and IVF) is “unmistakably pro-life.”
Meanwhile, Fox News Contributor Tammy Bruce, the lesbian former Chairman of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization of Women, who once boasted that she “fought Operation Rescue in the streets,” will be appointed spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State in the second Trump Administration.
President-Elect Trump, not Secretary of State designate Marco Rubio, made the announcement Friday.
Pro-life Catholics must learn two lessons from this catastrophe.
First, the leaders of national right to life groups — compromised political actors masquerading as disinterested moral crusaders — should neither be trusted nor supported ever again.
Secondly, when it comes to political leaders, we should heed the wisdom of the inspired Word of God in the 145th Psalm: Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.
