Somebody was asleep at the switch during the 1980 Republican National Convention. Either that or there was some behind the scenes strategy being employed.
In looking at some of the language used in Republican Party Platforms, post Roe v. Wade, I came across some interesting conflicts in the 1980 Platform. Read on and see what I mean.
Jump across the squiggle, if you dare.
First there's this (underlined emphasis mine):
Free Individuals in a Free Society
It has long been a fundamental conviction of the Republican Party that government should foster in our society a climate of maximum individual liberty and freedom of choice.
Further along we get:
Privacy
The essence of freedom is the right of law-abiding individuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without undue governmental intervention.
snip
The Republican Party commits itself to guaranteeing an individual's right of privacy. We support efforts of state governments to ensure individual privacy.
Then, of course there's this:
Abortion
snip
we affirm our support of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.
Wow, who was editing this thing? There was clearly a conflict between the rights of the individual to liberty and freedom of choice, the pursuit of happiness without undue governmental intervention, as well as to privacy; and the ultimate violation of all those rights when the government interferes with the privacy of a woman to freely make her own choice without undue government intervention.
This particularly strong language was not used in the 1976 platform and it was gone altogether in the 1984 platform. Whatever its purpose, it was specific to this one platform, and no other.
Perhaps is was strategically written as a means to appease the moderates in the republican party who had yet to be convinced of the unproven strategy of courting evangelicals by adopting a less ambiguous anti-abortion plank than was used in 1976.
Such pro-privacy, pro-personal liberty language may have served to affirm the commitment on the part of Reagan republicans to what the old school conservatives genuinely believed about keeping government out of our private lives. It was telling the moderates, hey, if this anti-abortion pandering thing doesn't work out, then we can fall back on the personal liberty thing next time. If that's what it was, apparently it worked because the platform was obviously ratified as written.
Sometimes there's more to these party platforms than one might think. These aren't quite the throw away documents that some might think they are. We should all take a close look at exactly what the 2012 platforms say, and realize that what they said in the past is still relevant and also worth a look.
Thanks for reading. Comments, if any, are greatly appreciated.