THE INTOLERANCE OF "TOLERANT" REPUBLICANS
Tell, David
The Intolerance of “Tolerant” Republicans By David Tell Here’s a simple fact you’d never know from the media coverage of the abortion controversy inside the Republican party last week: A large...
...Then Beard pursues her true purpose: a look through “the window Christie and her family open to the tradition of public service among Eastern Establishment Republicans...
...The family has long been defined, it turns out, by what they are not...
...People may believe that life begins at conception, although I don’t hear it preached in my church, but I have to wonder...
...Abortion is not a life-ordeath issue, literally, for its defenders...
...Upholstery: faded...
...And they are despised for it...
...And this “extremism” still mystifies Whitman...
...Or, alternately, “dangerous to morals or to the welfare of society...
...And they said they’d be doing it on behalf of . . . Bob Dole, thus echoing the conclusion of the New York Times editorial page that a majority of Republicans want “a candidate brave enough to tell the [pro-life] Family Research Council that it cannot meddle in a matter that ought to be decided privately between women and their consciences...
...Others weren’t quite so dopey about it...
...Anything that has had surgery on it is bloody...
...So why exactly are abortion-rights advocates so livid about the whole process...
...The opposite of tolerant is intolerant...
...noxious...
...Dole was selected in primary elections conducted months before a compromise on Republican platform language about abortion was ever floated...
...The Gary Bauers and Phyllis Schlaflys and Ralph Reeds, who do not much care that the “Jesus wept” man is weird, who intuitively understand him and regard him as part of their cause—they are unpresentable, too...
...Olympia Snowe and governors William Weld, Pete Wilson, and Christie Todd Whitman threatened for a day or two to pursue any means necessary—including a floor fight—to modulate the platform’s pro-life words...
...What...
...Author Patricia Beard opens with a description of Pontefract, the governor’s ancestral “working farm” in hunt-country New Jersey...
...The answer can be gleaned in an otherwise unremarkable puff-piece biography of Christie Whitman called Growing Up Republican...
...They’ve gone to different morgues and stuff like that, and they’ve blown them up so they look like full-size”—she paused —“you know...
...Was the picture troubling at all...
...The August 7 New York Times called pro-life Republicans “pestiferous...
...evil...
...Extremism made them very uncomfortable...
...In her rarefied, horsey-rich world—and in most of the much larger American world of good universities and interesting professional careers— the revelation that someone who otherwise passes for normal harbors moral misgivings about abortion inspires incredulity and embarrassment...
...Anne Patton is a representative of both the National Women’s Political Caucus and Republican Women for Choice...
...Especially because, unlike the “Jesus wept” man, they refuse to stay on the sidewalk...
...The Intolerance of “Tolerant” Republicans By David Tell Here’s a simple fact you’d never know from the media coverage of the abortion controversy inside the Republican party last week: A large majority of Republicans who voted this year chose a candidate named Dole who has never parted meaningful substantive company with the pro-life movement on the issue of abortion...
...They are inside the building, out-organizing the better types who oppose them...
...Acting on those misgivings, actual pro-life advocacy, simply isn’t done...
...Beard drinks in the home’s interior details with relish, savoring the refinement and perfection of their social signifiers...
...It is the modern abortion crusaders Christie Whitman cannot abide, not the gist of their crusade...
...If the pro-life plank Bob Dole briefly suggested in June did not horrify them, how can a virtually identical platform explain their present anger...
...It may be more like the Crusades, where people used religion to get their way...
...Wood furniture: antique, often Sheraton, and well kept...
...On the first day of platform hearings, she happened by a solitary protester carrying a sign reading “Jesus wept” over a horrible photo of an aborted fetus...
...If abortion rights were a make-orbreak issue for pro-choice Republicans, they would have left the party by now...
...It means “bringing or carrying disease...
...I’m disappointed,” announced New York’s lieutenant governor, Betsy McCaughey...
...The word was new to me, so I looked it up in Webster’s...
...She dismissed him out of hand...
...They haven’t...
...And so on...
...On some people it does have an effect,” she said...
...It doesn’t have an effect on me, because I know what it is...
...In other words, the GOP’s platform committee deliberations left the party in pretty much the same situation it’s been in for 16 years...
...It isn’t...
...The man with the fetus photo and the “Jesus wept” sign is unpresentable...
...The abortion language approved last week contains pretty much the same “compromise” pro-choice Republicans warmly welcomed when the Dole campaign initially broached the idea in early June—an expression of broad respect for Republican philosophical diversity, and nothing more...
...There must be something else about the pro-lifery of the GOP that irritates its antagonists—not the style of moral argument that surrounds abortion, not even the moral argument per se...
...She doubts her party’s “extreme conservative positions are really about religion,” she tells Beard...
...There’s tolerance for you...
...And it is not a life-or-death issue, politically, for pro-choice Republicans...
...It makes one unpresentable...
Vol. 1 • August 1996 • No. 47
