I sometimes ask my students what their stance on slavery would have been if they had been white and lived in the South before abolition. Guess what? They would all have been abolitionists. They would all have been courageous voices against slavery and worked tirelessly to end it.
Of course, this is nonsense: many of them would have remained silent whether they had profited from slavery or not.
So I respond by saying that I will only believe their claims if they can provide evidence that they stood up for the rights of the unjust victims of injustice in their lives today who have been denied their very humanity, even if their moral testimony meant that they were shunned by their peers, disliked and ridiculed by those in authority and institutions, abandoned by friends, and in danger of being denied valuable professional opportunities.
So my challenge is for them to show me evidence that they really put themselves and their future at risk to stand up for a cause that is unpopular with the elites in our culture today.
At their first convention in Philadelphia in 1856, members of the newly formed Republican Party did just that, risking their success and their future to speak loudly and courageously against slavery.
Early Republicans knew that sticking to their anti-slavery beliefs would cost them votes and likely result in the party’s defeat in the general election, but the first Republican delegates adopted a platform that called for Congress to oppose slavery, even at a time when the Southern states, and much of the federal government, were controlled by a powerful “Slave Power.”
In fact, the Republicans lost the 1856 election to James Buchanan, a supporter of slavery and staunch opponent of abolitionism, but four years later their presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer who had served in the House of Representatives for two years, was elected. Over the next few years and decades, Congress worked to dismantle slavery, enacting the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to target the racism and slavery that Republicans knew would follow.
Now in 2024, the Republican Party once again faces a moral choice. Powerful forces, backed by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, are pushing to weaken the party platform’s opposition to the killing of unborn children through abortion and to redefine marriage as a sexual, romantic, domestic relationship to accommodate same-sex partners. Republicans see their long-held defense of the life of the unborn child and their traditional understanding of marriage as the union of a husband and wife as a conjugal union as out of step with public opinion polls and current cultural trends, and as a political liability that is likely to damage the party at the ballot box.
Some delegates to the Republican convention have openly proclaimed that this year’s party platform will be “more socially moderate,” a euphemism for abandoning the truth about the sanctity of human life and the nature of marriage and willfully capitulating to the progressive social dogma currently favored by society’s elites.
This cannot be allowed. Just as their forefathers did in 1856, Republicans today must have the courage to speak the moral truth, no matter how frightening the political backlash may seem. Republicans knew then, and they certainly know now, that arguments of political expediency and electoral popularity are no more useful as a defense for covering up the murder of unborn children or lying about the nature of marriage than they are for justifying slavery.
Justice demands that all human beings be protected by law from intentional homicide, regardless of race, ethnicity, or color, as well as age, size, disability, or stage of development. The public interest demands that the law not reduce the meaning of marriage to a mere sexual romantic relationship between whomever and however many people one desires. Instead, the law must reflect and promote a healthy understanding of marriage that unites one man and one woman in a conjugal bond based on physical communion made possible by reproductive complementarity.
There are, of course, perfectly legitimate debates about how best to reconcile political sensibility with enduring moral truth; I refer you to a paper published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, of which I am a signatory. But there is nothing morally sensible or ethically defensible about what is going on here; it is a cowardly attempt to erase truth from the Republican platform and substitute in its place ambiguity, even falsehood. Compromising moral essence or attempting to deny or erase it is never acceptable, regardless of the political situation we find ourselves in.
Political expediency, short-term electoral success, or the reelection of Donald Trump do not justify ignoring or silencing moral truth. “It is in no interest of a man” — nor of a party, nor of a nation — to give his soul for the whole world. Republican leaders would do well to remember this.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Law and director of the James Madison Program on American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
