LOCAL ANGLES: GOP MODERATES THREATEN THE PARTY'S SOUL

California Gov. Pete Wilson and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman have joined the list of Republican moderates vowing to strip the anti-abortion plank from the GOP's national platform. If they succeed, we will watch the Republican Party self destruct.

The debate over abortion is at the core of the culture war in our nation. No other single issue better defines what we believe about human life and its value. An abortion mentality affects far more than whether or not a woman is allowed to abort an unborn child.

When the value of human life is judged only in terms of its convenience or utilitarian function, and killing becomes legal in certain instances, where does the killing end? Certainly not in the womb. We already have seen euthanasia of the old or sick -- unthinkables a generation ago -- emerge as the latest quandary for medical ethicists.

Do we stop at making killing of terminally ill patients or those in a persistent vegetative state legal, or do we extend it to the impoverished elderly, who now must be supported by a comparatively dwindling number of young Americans? What about the severely retarded? Or the handicapped?

The consequence of the loss of meaning in society is that man, who once was seen in the image of God, instead is seen only as "a bundle of urges and drives seeking existential satisfaction," in the words of constitutional lawyer and author John Whitehead.

Such is the big picture. It's not simply a matter of choice, as pro-abortion forces would have it. Nor is it an issue of political "viability," as sophists like Wilson and Whitman seem to believe.

Wilson's argument in favor of removing abortion from the GOP plank is that conservatives believe government ought to stay out of people's lives, which ought to apply to restricting abortion.

Thank you, Gov. Wilson, who two years ago signed the biggest tax increase and government power grab in California history, for espousing your impeccable conservative credentials when it comes to abortion. Besides, abortion was illegal until the government's highest court created the right out of thin air in 1973. I'd say Gov. Wilson is a couple of decades late in worrying about government intrusion in people's lives.

Whitman, the sophist poster girl, offers this adroit but fallacious argument: Republicans need to abandon the abortion position to show the party has not become captive to extremists.

What extremists? If Gov. Whitman would rather not consider the issue of whether an abortion mentality is numbing our national conscience and ushering in moral and social unthinkables, then how about a look at recent polling data.

Granted, a narrow majority of Americans indicated they favor a "woman's right to abortion." But when pollsters ask whether abortion ought to be restricted under some conditions, the responses contradict the pro-abortion view.

A 1992 poll by Ladies' Home Journal, for example, found that 52 percent of the nearly 28,000 respondents thought abortion should either never be allowed or allowed only in the cases of rape, incest or if the mother's life is endangered. Another 16 percent said abortion should be allowed only in the first three months of pregnancy.

The LHJ poll is similar to others taken in the past few years. So why, with a majority of Americans favoring restrictions on more than 90 percent of the abortions performed, can't Wilson and Whitman abide the anti-abortion plank in the Republican Party platform?

My guess is it has something to do with flawed anatomy: They've lost their spines and intestines and favor moral relativism and expediency over passioned conviction. If there are voters to be had by taking the easy road, then why be dogmatic about something like 1.5 million unborn children being aborted annually? Instead, let's be tolerant of those with opposing views. After all it's a big tent in the GOP.

But as William F. Buckley Jr. says: "It is not hard to exhibit toleration toward a point of view if you have no point of view of your own with which that point of view conflicts."

Exactly.

But Republicans ought to leave feigned tolerance and sophistry to the liberals, and instead embrace an expression of conservatism described in the book "Up From Liberalism," where Buckley writes: "I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."