What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.

I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.

That’s the same attitude they have about gay marriage, which, like abortion once was, is supposed to be a settled debate, not up for discussion anymore. The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.

But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.

This is of course true of any moral principle, which is why the left moved with alarming speed from arguing that gay marriage wouldn’t hurt or affect anyone to demanding that everyone actively endorse and celebrate it or face ruin. There is no limiting principle to the argument that consenting adults have a right to have their sexual arrangements officially recognized by the state. That’s why the rationale used in the gay marriage debates of the 2010s is exactly the rationale deployed today in the transgender debate, which will in turn eventually be successfully deployed on behalf of plural marriage, polyamory, and even pedophilia.

The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.

Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after. Having accepted, for example, that abortion is morally licit in cases where the child is conceived through rape or incest, or that it should be allowed in the first trimester because that seems a reasonable compromise with the left, today’s Republican Party has lost the ability to object to abortion on any grounds whatsoever.

Either an unborn child is a human being, with the same right to life as an infant or a toddler, or it has no rights and can be killed with impunity. Compromising on this is incoherent. It is to admit defeat.