Ever since Herschel Walker announced his candidacy for the Senate last year, his campaign has been a fascinating sociological experiment in what happens when a politician's stated policy positions are constantly contradicted by his actions.
This week, we found out that Walker, who has labeled abortion “murder” and called for bans on the procedure without exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother, may not be so wedded to that position. According to the Daily Beast, in 2009 Walker sent a check and a “get well” card to a woman who had aborted his unborn child. (Full disclosure: I am a contributing writer to the Daily Beast’s opinion page.)
Walker denied the story, threatened to sue the news outlet for defamation, and said he didn’t even know the woman’s identity — only for the Daily Beast to further report that the former girlfriend is also the mother of one of Walker’s children.
Few Republicans, who generally wear their anti-abortion position on their sleeves, have expressed any doubts about backing Walker.
Walker getting caught in a lie is about as unusual as a day that ends in “y.” After all, this is the same candidate who once inveighed against absent fathers — before it was revealed that he’s fathered four children with four women. But what is most revealing is that these latest allegations haven’t dented Walker’s support among conservative, nominally “pro-life” voters. Their nonchalant reactions exposed the lies and contradictions at the heart of the anti-abortion movement.
Few Republicans, who generally wear their anti-abortion position on their sleeves, have expressed any doubts about backing Walker. Instead, they’ve offered him unconditional support. “Republicans stand with him,” said Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
A prominent Georgia pastor, Anthony George, who hosted the candidate at his church this week, told Politico for a piece on the lack of outrage from conservative Christians that “any Christian who engages in the political process … you’re always going to be confronted with someone that is either less than ideal, or something that flat-out contradicts what you believe in.”
“Less than ideal?”
Anti-abortion advocates regularly label abortion as “murder.” By that logic, Herschel Walker is a “murderer.” Indeed, Texas Republicans, for example, passed legislation that allows individual citizens to sue anyone who aids and abets an abortion after six weeks. One imagines that Walker’s behavior qualifies.
In the same Politico piece, Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, predicted that Walker’s consistent outreach to evangelicals is now going to pay a lot of dividends. One might expect evangelicals to be more upset at Walker’s alleged lies and misdeeds — and on an issue that has animated Republican politics for decades. But considering self-identified evangelicals were among Donald “Access Hollywood tape” Trump’s most loyal supporters, the only real surprise would be if they mustered even a scintilla of outrage over Walker’s hypocrisy.
The muted response from some of the country’s most virulent critics of abortion is an instructive reminder that for many conservatives — particular conservative politicians — opposition to abortion has little to do with morality, and everything to do with politics.
This disconnect between supposedly diehard opposition to abortion and the erratic commitment to that opposition has been on prominent display since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Indeed, conservative commentator Dana Loesch summed up best the rank hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement. Calling Walker’s former girlfriend a “skank” she said, "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
Republicans, who regularly moralize about the evils of abortion, are more than happy to look the other way on Walker’s transgressions because his success is in their political best interest. So what if Walker is, by his and their logic, now accused of murder? He’ll vote to make abortion illegal, Republicans say, and that’s enough — just as it was enough to look the other way on Trump’s outrageous behavior because he had stocked the federal judiciary with conservative judges.
Few seem bothered by the contradiction of punishing women for wanting to make the same choices as Walker, who allegedly told his girlfriend that it was “not the right time” for him to be a father again. That would be a completely rational decision, one that, if Walker is elected, he would vote to deny to millions of American women. But then it’s also not hard to imagine that if Walker were a female candidate who had aborted a child, the response from the anti-abortion community might be a tad different.
This disconnect between supposedly diehard opposition to abortion and the erratic commitment to that opposition has been on prominent display since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Where were the public celebrations by “pro-life” politicians when the court finally reached the right’s 50-year anti-abortion goal? Instead, Republican politicians actively played down the significance of the ruling.
Pennsylvania's GOP nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, who called abortion “the No. 1 issue” during the primary, labeled it a “distraction” after the court’s ruling. In Arizona, GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters initially called for a nation-wide abortion ban and even voiced support for a federal personhood law, only to scrub his website of anti-abortion language after winning the nomination. And when Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., proposed a federal 15-week abortion ban, his Republican colleagues, instead of rallying to a worthy crusade, grumbled that Graham had risked damaging the GOP’s prospects of winning back the Senate and House this fall.
Indeed, Republican politicians have repeatedly denied that they want to criminalize abortion or send women to prison for having the procedure, or doctors for performing it. But if one believes abortion is murder, why should a woman — or anyone who assists her — get a pass for aborting a fetus? Doesn’t valuing life mean punishing those who take it?
Yet to take that position would require true introspection about the implications of blanket opposition to abortion. Walker’s apparent experience with abortion shows that, beyond the anti-abortion platitudes, there are real-life dilemmas for women (and men) confronted with unexpected pregnancies that don’t fall so easily into a pro-life bucket. But that’s a problem for another time.
After all, Republicans could win control of the Senate in four weeks.
