Conservative starlet Tomi Lahren is facing a heap of backlash from her usual supporters after an appearance on ABC’s The View in which she defended the decriminalized status of abortion. Lahren, who hosts a popular show (Tomi) for Glenn Beck network The Blaze and is a frequent guest on Fox News programs, said that as someone who “loves the Constitution” and believes in limited government she can’t support the government “decid[ing] what women do with their bodies.”
“I’m pro choice,” Lahren admitted, calling it hypocritical to profess support for small government yet want to ban abortion. “I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”
Contra Lahren’s critics, this is a perfectly coherent position, and one that was once perfectly respectable within the mainstream conservative movement. There’s only tension between believing abortion should be legal—which is all being “pro-choice” means—and the Constitution’s prescription of “life, liberty, and property” protection for all if you believe that personhood begins at conception. But one needn’t believe this, nor even be a Christian at all, in order to champion conservative political philosophy.
And even if one does believe that abortion is an immoral practice, it doesn’t necessarily follow that one must wish it banned completely. There are plenty of pro-life Americans who believe a blanket ban on abortion is not the best way to end the practice, given how black markets work. They instead strive to end abortion through changing hearts and minds, advocating better pregnancy-prevention methods, working to expand adoption options, and things like that. Again, this might seem horrific to people who believe that aborting an eight-week old fetus is the exact same as murdering a 2- or 20- or 80-year-old, but that’s a matter of moral or religious perspective. Many others who believe abortion is wrong are simultaneously able to hold that it’s not the same degree of wrong as ending a life outside the womb, or that the competing rights of pregnant women make abortion morally justifiable in some circumstances.
Listen, I am not glorifying abortion. I don’t personally advocate for it. I just don’t think it’s the government’s place to dictate. https://t.co/qRjbAtJdo7
— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) March 19, 2017
These are all positions that can convey coherent internal logic and political/moral belief systems. You may think folks like Lahren—who says she is personally against abortion, even though simultaneously pro-choice—are wrong, and that abortion is always the gravest of transgressions or never so, but it’s erroneous and unfair to brush aside their beliefs as simple stupidity, hypocrisy, opportunism, or cowardice. It’s exactly this kind of reflexive dismissal of differing beliefs and moral gray areas that keeps us locked in the stupidest kind of culture war over abortion, one that manifests in it being the most important litmus test for acceptance into political movements on the right and left and results in a host of high-profile, symbolic battles that all lead back to the same status quo.
Anyway, a lot of conservatives have been calling for Lahren’s head since her View appearance, insisting it’s an embarrassment and an outrage that such a pro-choice harpy could be a public face of Republicanism. As with Milo Yiannopoulos—who said all sorts of horrible things about women, Muslims, transgender people, etc., but was only ousted from polite conservatism after joking about pedophilic priests—it’s telling (if predictable) that tepidly pro-choice views are the dealbreaker for the right with Lahren, while things like calling Black Lives Matter activists “the new KKK,” referring to the Middle East as a “sandbox” that needs to be bombed, and defending the shooting of unarmed black men by cops never really rustled Republican jimmies.
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