The senator was exposed in his debate with Walker.
The senator was exposed in his debate with Walker.
I t was seemingly easy to guess how Friday night’s debate between Georgia senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker would go: As soon as the topic turned to abortion and the latest allegation against the former football great, Walker would be wiped out.
Instead, Walker had his best moments during the exchange on abortion, not because he’s a practiced, eloquent pro-life advocate, but because Warnock’s position on the issue is so outrageous that Walker was able to poke holes in it with blunt, commonsensical jabs.
If anyone was wondering why more Republicans aren’t abandoning Herschel Walker over the abortion allegation, Friday night showcased the answer: Warnock’s radicalism on the issue makes him a completely intolerable alternative.
The debate moderators asked Warnock whether he supports any restrictions on abortion, and the senator notably dodged. “We are asking you to take a clear position right now,” one of the journalists asked. “Do you believe there should be any limitations on abortion set by the government?”
This question almost always stumps Democrats (our own John McCormack asks it often). One might assume that a Baptist pastor would have a single restriction ready at hand — say, no late-term abortions or abortions for sex selection — to try to signal some moderation, or at least an awareness of an element of moral complexity to the issue.
Instead, Warnock had nothing.
Even worse, we already know that, as a co-sponsor of the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, the senator affirmatively wants to wipe away any restrictions on abortion in all 50 states. And he’d kneecap the filibuster to do it.
Warnock has a clever formulation to justify his position — the exam room is too crowded, he says, to let in the government as well as the doctor and the pregnant woman. This is the kind of line that politicians love, since it’s simple, vivid, and memorable, but it collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
As Walker pointed out, Warnock fails to mention another party in the exam room, the unborn baby. And since the senator favors government funding of abortion, he actually wants government in the room, albeit to subsidize and encourage the procedure rather than restrict it in any way.
Further taking the offensive, Walker noted that not many pastors would have left out the baby; and then, citing the high number of abortions in Atlanta, he asked Warnock why he isn’t protecting and baptizing those babies.
A little later, a moderator asked Warnock about a statement he made at a rally a few weeks ago that he trusts women to be guided by their conscience on abortion and that “even God gave us a choice.”
Warnock clearly was reaching for another good line, although this one took him into bizarre and indefensible theological territory. Yes, of course, God gave us free will. That doesn’t mean all choices are equal, or that government should never ban acts of moral turpitude.
Many people use their free will to steal cars, yet that doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders, say God allows choice, and do nothing to protect the owners of automobiles on grounds that rules against grand theft auto are high-handed and moralistic.
Here, again, Walker made the obvious rejoinder. He stated that God wants us to choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life”).
Warnock’s final point was that Walker, as a pro-lifer, “wants to arrogate to politicians more power than God has.” If we take this literally, it’s absurd — no human law means that the legislator who passed it has more power than God.
The point also clearly makes no sense if we apply it to any other area of public policy. Set aside violent crime or theft, and consider lesser offenses: The government makes it impermissible for people to choose to hire or sell their homes based on race, to choose to sexually harass co-workers, to choose to take heroin, or to choose to build a commercial building in a residential area. Do all these laws render God powerless and wipe out our free will?
This whole line of argument is preposterous, but of a piece with Warnock’s performance in this crucial portion of the debate. His evasions and meretricious arguments might have led the uninitiated to think he was the novice with doubtful polemical skills rather than the sitting senator.
Warnock was doing the best he could, though, as a man of the cloth who has signed up for his party’s orthodoxy on abortion that is — when seriously interrogated in a competitive district or state — morally and politically indefensible.