On Saturday, Tomi Lahren, the millennial darling of certain conservatives, said it would be a “big mistake” for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. v. Wade. This opinion, while surprising from a conservative, is hardly shocking for Lahren, who said the same thing last year while on “The View.”
“I’m pro-choice, and here’s why. I am a constitutional, y’know, someone that loves the Constitution. I’m someone that’s for limited government,” she said. “So I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies. I can sit here and say that, as a Republican and I can say, you know what, I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”
Lahren fancies herself a libertarian of sorts, who, as Lachlan Markay observed on Twitter “nurtured and rode to stardom” on the “cultural resentment” movement. Yet she’s also enjoyed much admiration from the Right, if not for her ability to regurgitate talking points so as much as for her fresh-faced, babydoll-dress-wearing attempts to bring sexy back to conservatism.
Still, Lahren’s belief that her pro-choice stance stems from a deeply rooted, limited government ideology, is somewhat of a farce. Limited government does not mean the government and those who operate it are absent of all morals. It simply means the checks and balances put in place by the Founding Fathers ensure government does not grow too bloated and too powerful, placing the will of the people at risk, and undermining their authority. As James Madison said in The Federalist Papers:
If anything, by using this argument, Lahren is actually giving the government more power than it should have, since it essentially has subsidized abortion rights. What’s limited about that? Either way, a people who believe in a limited government (and that government itself), need not be bankrupt of morality. The pro-choice lobby, while murdering the most defenseless among us, also propagates the lie that abortion is harmless, and good for men, women, and society at large. By embracing the pro-choice view, and arguing that it’s actually morally superior, Lahren shows a grave lack of understanding when it comes to the limited government philosophy, not to mention basic morality, and the core tenets of conservatism.
“You can disagree with me but don’t you dare tell me how to think,” is a common retort of Lahren’s. But that, in actuality, is not only exactly what she does on her show, but what most on either side of the political aisle do, and feel it is their moral duty to do. What is politics if not the art of persuasion?
Of course, she has the right to tell an NFL player he should stand and salute her flag as much as I have a right to tell her she should lobby for the rights of unborn children. The principles of limited government simply say the government lacks the right to coerce her or me to think speak, or behave a certain way, so long as our rights don’t infringe on the rights of others.
Even more troubling than Lahren’s pro-choice view is her poor attempt to attribute the origin of that view to an ideology she barely seems to understand. And to make matters worse, she’s severely inconsistent in those beliefs to begin with.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in D.C. who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
