With the Stuart Restoration of 1660, the tide of English politics turned sharply against the Puritans, and it became illegal for any man who refused Holy Communion in the Church of England to hold public office. What, then, was a dissenting politician to do? To a good many of the most influential Puritans — men of the wealthy gentry and merchant classes, the establishment Republicans of their day — this question was easy. The new office-holding qualifications, they thought, were no big deal at all.
Take Sir Humphrey Edwin. He was Lord Mayor of London by day but a Puritan dissenter “in his private views,” as we now would say. So one Sunday morning each year, he would swathe himself in his official finery, proceed to St. Paul’s, and — in order to retain eligibility for the mayoralty — ostentatiously receive the Anglican rites. Then, that afternoon and every other Sunday of the year, Sir Humphrey would repair to Pinner Hall Conventicle, his regular nonconformist chapel, and satisfy himself that he’d somehow done right by his convictions. This neat trick was called “occasional conformity.”
More conscientious Puritans despised the practice. The great Daniel Defoe, a lifelong Protestant dissenter, took direct aim at Sir Humphrey in a widely circulated pamphlet of 1698. Defoe likened Edwin’s habit of popping up sequentially in opposed churches to “playing Bo-peep with God Almighty.” The mayor had silenced his faith for “publick advancement and glittering gawdy honours of the age”; he had made his ideas “become pimps to secular interest.” When Edwin’s friends objected that there were more important things in life to worry about, and that multiple church attendance advanced the noble cause of peaceful compromise, Defoe satirically replied that dissenters had then best be sent to the gallows: “They that will go to church to be chosen Sheriffs and Mayors would go to forty churches rather than be hanged.”
Which brings us to George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole. Today in the United States, 300 years and an ocean away from the Lord Mayor and Daniel Defoe, the overriding moral issue that divides our politics is no longer adherence to a religion. The issue, instead, is abortion. But the requirement it imposes on public figures is the same. And like Sir Humphrey before them, Bush and Dole — and many other Republican dignitaries besides — flinch from that requirement. Bush and Dole both call themselves pro-life, but both also wish very badly to be chosen Sheriff. So each has performed an act of occasional conformity with the governing orthodoxy. Each has inaugurated a presidential campaign by kneeling down before the watchful priests of Big Media and accepting the basic pro-choice sacrament — disclaiming, that is, any interest in the abolition of America’s regime of abortion on demand.
“I’m a realistic enough person to know that America is not ready to ban abortions,” Governor Bush announces, because “America’s hearts are not right.” Mrs. Dole, for her part, says she “would support the idea of a constitutional amendment, if it were possible.” But, she quickly adds, “Of course, it’s not. It’s not going to happen because the American people do not support it.”
All of which is perfectly fine so far as it goes — as pure analysis. There is, from Left and Right, a standard rap against the “incrementalist” abortion strategy that Bush and Dole now both nominally endorse: the strategy of ending the ghastly, late-term “partial-birth” surgery; imposing parental notification and consent requirements on abortions for minors; expanding opportunities for adoption as an abortion alternative; and so on. The rap against such a plan is that it represents “insincere” pro-lifery — that no politician genuinely convinced that abortion is appalling slaughter would take such a “leisurely” approach to the problem, but would instead want to go all the way, right away, heedless of public opinion.
This particular criticism, it seems to us, is insincere itself — more a childish sneer than a serious argument. A man did not have to be John Brown to honorably and meaningfully oppose slavery in the 19th century. And in the current era, where abortion is concerned, it is the better part of wisdom, and much the more effective approach, to be William Lloyd Garrison or Abraham Lincoln. It is absolutely, undeniably true, after all, that “America’s hearts are not right” on the question. Millions upon millions of minds must first be changed before abortion’s fullscale grip on the country can finally be loosed. If piecemeal debate over subsidiary issues like partial birth can help change those minds, as surely it can, then all to the good.
But it is the debate over such measures, not the measures themselves, that will do most of this necessary work of persuasion. Incremental measures must be increments toward a larger, identified goal. And it is here that a just complaint can and should be lodged against Governor Bush and Mrs. Dole. For debate over abortion — calm, intelligent, sustained, and unembarrassed advocacy — is precisely what both candidates seem least able to provide and most intent to avoid.
The governor makes his discomfort clear by implication. He wants to do . . . well, whatever it is he wants to do “instead of arguing over Roe v. Wade.” The abortion controversy “has been very polarizing.” It has been “debated for 30 years.” There are “strong positions on both sides.” How to handle first-trimester abortions is a “hypothetical” conundrum, and George W. Bush quite plainly hopes you will not pose it to him again.
Elizabeth Dole is a good bit more explicit on this score. Dole says debate over the fundamental right to life is “irrelevant and highly divisive” and threatens to obscure “sexual harassment,” “an overly burdensome tax code,” and suchlike more “urgent” concerns. “We should agree to respectfully disagree on the subject of abortion,” she urges the country. We should “refuse to be drawn into dead-end debates.” We should “not just kind of endlessly debate something that really is not going anywhere.”
These are responsible politicians, determined to guide democratic discourse about the most pressing social-policy dispute of the day? We suppose it is possible for a public figure to be only “personally opposed to abortion,” as Mario Cuomo used to say, and still remain somehow “sincerely” pro-life. We suppose, as well, that such a theoretically pro-life but operationally pro-choice Republican might well win himself the presidency — by reassuring the country that no troubling idea about abortion well ever work its way past his lips. We are quite certain, however, that no such candidate can or will do much to retard America’s abortion-industry culture of death. On a matter of such signal importance, truly principled statesmen owe the public much, much more.
David Tell, for the Editors
