On Thursday, I responded to a foolish, revealing statement by Jonah Goldberg asserting that “you can support abortion and still be a conservative.” You can read the whole thing at LifeSiteNews; here’s the gist:

[The Declaration of Independence] establishes that the core purpose of government is to secure the unalienable rights God has equally endowed on every human being – and among those rights, “life” is the first one listed. It’s the obvious prerequisite to exercising any of the other freedoms for which conservatism stands.

If you accept the Declaration’s premises, the only question remaining is one of fact, not philosophy: are the preborn the same kind of “life” Thomas Jefferson was writing about? The inarguable answer is yes.

According to all the established criteria of modern biology, a whole, distinct, living human exists once fertilization has occurred.

On Friday, Goldberg responded…not to me or the case I made, but to a LifeNews article that merely highlighted his comment and rounded up a handful of disapproving Twitter responses. As a result, his tweetstorm largely missed the substantive problems with his claim:

That last one here is key. Jonah identifies as “essentially pro-life” and has written valuable material on abortion in the past, though he also displays some muddy thinking on the subject that undoubtedly informs his level of comfort with “conservatives” who embrace it.

But at the end of the day, he is comfortable with them wearing the label, and not because he or anyone else in the more, shall we say, Beltway-sympathetic cliques of the Right is some absolutist for accommodating any and every deviation from first principles. Goldberg (rightly) says it “helped the cause” when National Review “purged the Birchers.”

So why don’t those who endorse legalized violence against children deserve to be similarly purged? What makes such a barbaric view any more respectable? Why doesn’t it carry a similar risk of morally and intellectually diluting the movement?

I’ve mentioned before a couple other instances of Goldberg demonstrating that he doesn’t consider abortion support beyond the pale, such as when he revealed that NR has “pro-choice” writers who “just don’t typically make that case in our pages” and that he disagrees “to some extent” on “moral, practical, [and] legal grounds” that “abortion is the taking of a life and should thus be treated under the law as such”; and when he suggested that Roy Moore was “the more evil man in his personal conduct” than pro-abortion Doug Jones.

In other words, he draws an arbitrary distinction between “personally” doing evil and doing evil through government, and/or fails to recognize some evils as evil at all.

It can’t be repeated often enough: the idea that most #NeverTrumpers were acting out of concern for the election’s long-term impact on conservative principles is exactly backwards. They were more comfortable with surrendering the presidency to Hillary Clinton because they weighed the issues at stake, including but not limited to abortion, less heavily than those of us who desperately wanted a different nominee yet recognized the stakes remained the same.

Keep that in mind the next time you see one of their lectures to the rest of us, which should be any minute now.