By Scott Tibbs, June 10, 2010
Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, "But we knew nothing about this," does not He who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not He who guards your life know it? Will He not repay each person according to what he has done? -- Proverbs 24:11-12 (NIV)
Mitch Daniels claims to be personally pro-life, and he claims to support pro-life public policy. For the past 6 years, I have been less than comfortable with his lack of action on issues like abortion but I have not had a reason to doubt Daniels' claim that he is pro-life. Then he declared to the Weekly Standard that we should declare a "truce" on social issues like abortion in order to solve the fiscal crisis the nation is facing.
Who could disagree with that? After all, when you have a deficit of over a trillion dollars a year, how could solving that not be more important than the fact that we're killing 1,200,000 babies every single year and have killed over 50 million babies since 1973?
Wait. What?
Look. You either believe abortion is murder or you don't. If you believe abortion is murder, then nothing should take precedence over doing what you can within the law to prevent babies from being killed by dismemberment for profit. Nothing else comes close, whether it be shrinking the budget deficit or defeating Islamic terrorists. We've allowed a slaughter within our own borders that is unprecedented and it is even worse outside our borders. Since 1970, over one billion abortions have been performed worldwide. The abortion industry puts the Nazi Holocaust to shame.
I am not saying that solving our financial crisis is not important. What we are doing right now is simply not sustainable. We are going to have to reduce the size and cost of government or we risk severe economic damage. There is no reason, however, why we cannot work to being fiscal sanity back to the federal budget and work to eliminate abortion at the same time. We are more than capable of dealing with two issues at the same time.
There has been speculation about Daniels challenging Obama in 2012 for some time. The speculation started almost immediately after the 2008 election. When Obama became the first Democrat to win Indiana in 44 years, Mitch Daniels completely dominated his challenger and finished with nearly 60% of the vote. If Daniels can win with that kind of a margin in a terrible year for Republicans, he's a serious threat to Obama winning a second term.
If Daniels wants to keep the 2012 dream alive, calling for a "truce" on social issues is not the way to do it. Daniels will damage himself with Republican primary voters who are motivated by social issues like abortion. If he were to win the nomination, he runs the risk of a less-than-enthusiastic Republican base in the general election. Do I really need to remind anyone that it was the "values voters" who played a huge part in President Bush winning a second term in 2004?
You can't call a "truce" on 50 million murders, Governor Daniels.
