Guest Opinion: Republicans Ignore Social Issues at their Peril

In my judgment, the last Republican President who truly cared about the pro-life issue was my former boss, President Ronald Reagan

The Republican Party may be poised to nominate yet another candidate for President in 2012 who may give token support to our traditional values, but who would be unwilling to reverse the pro-abortion, anti-family policies put in place by the Obama administration. It is time to stand for principle and nominate for President a leader who will proudly stand up for the right to life of the unborn while re-affirming that the family unit is the foundation of a Good Society.

P>CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - A favorite cartoon strip of mine was the Peanuts one which ran every Sunday during football season. Lucy would be holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick, and each time Lucy would pull the ball away just as Charlie Brown ran up to kick it. Every year Lucy would assure Charlie Brown "that it would be different this time," but each time Lucy would play Charlie Brown for a sucker and pull the ball away from him at the last minute.

That story about Charlie Brown reminds me of what has happened all too often to pro-life voters. They back Republican candidates for President who say they support the pro-life cause but then do little to advance that agenda once in office. Pro-life, pro-family organizations simply become another "interest group" to be wooed during campaign season and then generally ignored once the election is over.

The Republican Party may be poised to nominate yet another candidate for President in 2012 who may give token support to our traditional values, but who would be unwilling to reverse the pro-abortion, anti-family policies put in place by the Obama administration. Two leading candidates to be the Republican nominee for President next year are Mitt Romney and Mitch Daniels. Romney came in second to John McCain in the race for the Republican nomination in 2008. He is independently wealthy (having made a fortune in private equity buyout deals), and has the best national organization of any contender. Mitch Daniels is the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the George W. Bush administration and currently serves as Governor of Indiana. If he enters the race for President, Daniels likely will have the backing of the Bush entourage - George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove. He also reportedly has the support of former Vice President Dick Cheney, along with key neoconservative spokesmen such as David Frum, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer.

Mitt Romney has a long history of siding with the social liberals on pro-life, pro-family issues. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, Romney made it very clear that - like Kennedy - he was supportive of abortion rights and homosexual rights during a debate between the two men during that campaign. The YouTube vignette of that part of the debate is a classic clip.  

Running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney filled out a campaign questionnaire saying: "I respect and will protect a woman's right to choose.. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government's."

Now that he is running for President, Mitt Romney claims to be pro-life.

As for Mitch Daniels, this prospective candidate for President wants to declare "a truce" on social issues; and, when asked if he would reinstate President Reagan's "Mexico City" policy which banned federal funding of abortions overseas, Daniels' response was that "I don't know".

Try telling the Obama administration that you want to declare a "truce" on social issues - an administration that is working in close conjunction with the cultural left to expand abortion rights, require the military to accept homosexuals and undermine our traditional understanding of marriage as between a man and a woman. The Obama administration even refuses to execute its constitutional duty of legal representation in federal court of the Defense of the Marriage Act (DOMA). I cannot help but compare the policies of the Obama administration to those of the socialist government in Spain which has been extraordinarily aggressive in undermining the traditional values of that country ever since coming to power.

Can conservatives seriously expect a man like Mitch Daniels who avoids discussing cultural issues like the plague and who has publicly called for a "truce" on social issues to defend our values with any fervor during the campaign, particularly in a head-to-head debate with Barack Obama? More importantly, will a man unwilling to campaign openly about the importance of defending the innocent human life of the unborn and the sanctity of marriage do anything substantive for that cause as President?

In my judgment, the last Republican President who truly cared about the pro-life issue was my former boss, President Ronald Reagan. President Reagan had a famous conversion of heart on that issue when he was Governor of California. Ronald Reagan came to realize that abortion was the taking of an innocent human life, thanks in no small part to the influence of William Clark who was Governor Reagan's chief of staff at the time. President Reagan's strong pro-life stance sure didn't hurt him in 1984 when he ran for re-election against Walter Mondale, a pro-abortion advocate. Reagan won 49 states in that election. When asked about abortion in a Reagan-Mondale presidential debate, Reagan's response was that, while he knew it was a difficult issue, he had to come down on the side of life.

Americans understand that our nation has serious economic and foreign policy problems which must be addressed. But, if we don't fix the culture, everything shall be for naught. Our objective should be to restore this nation to one guided by the principles of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian ethic. A free market system without an ethical underpinning guiding it cannot work. A Constitutional Republic without the Judeo-Christian ethic as its foundation will not last. Pro-life supporters shouldn't be like Charlie Brown and conned again into supporting "a lesser of two evils" candidate for President just because he is not as bad as Barack Obama. It is time to stand for principle and nominate for President a leader who will proudly stand up for the right to life of the unborn while re-affirming that the family unit is the foundation of a Good Society.

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Tom Pauken is a former Reagan official and author of the book, Bringing America Home. It can be purchased here

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