Via the Free Beacon. Without exaggeration, one of the worst answers to a question about abortion I’ve ever heard. Imagine deflecting a question about the legality of killing a child in the womb by insisting that “moral clarity” allows for no other position. Racism is self-evidently bad, anti-semitism is self-evidently bad, prohibiting the liquidation of a human being for the sake of convenience is … self-evidently bad?

If there’s any American cultural issue in which there isn’t moral clarity — certainly not for the pro-choice side — it’s this one, and that really is needless to say. However highly one values a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and the child growing inside her, even most Democrats (I think?) would acknowledge some misgivings about exercising that right to terminate. It’s a test of competing moral interests, with pro-choicers concluding that the interest of an unformed human being ultimately must bow to that of an adult. Only the farthest reaches of the left, though, tend to treat that competition as a no-brainer on the level of “racism is bad.” Look how the issue is typically handled by the entertainment industry, which is thoroughly liberal but seldom given to balls-out cymbal-smashing celebrations of abortion even in dramas that defend the practice. The lack of moral clarity gives them pause.

Even the majority opinion in Roe itself didn’t claim moral clarity, for cripes sake. Remember the trimester framework? That existed because Harry Blackmun recognized that as a child develops in the womb, its moral interest in being born alive grows with it. The Roe Court tried to legally, ah, split the baby because it had misgivings too.

But Gillibrand’s running an overtly feminist campaign, the only way she can think to distinguish herself in a field of 20 candidates and several better-known women, so she feels compelled to voice this glib Orwellian horsesh*t. How do you get the attention of progressive voters who seemingly have no use for you? Tell ’em that not only are they right about Roe, they’re as right as opponents of the Klan and the Nazis were. What a rodent.

Maybe she’s tired of the lame default answer that Roe must be defended because, well, it’s Supreme Court precedent and precedent shouldn’t be overturned lightly. That’d be a hard argument to pull off while analogizing to racism, since it was the Warren Court’s willingness to dump bad precedent that made school desegregation possible. So Gillibrand’s going to dispense with all of it. It’s not about precedent to her, and it’s not about a delicate balance of moral interests. Her side, the side of liquidating untold millions of unborn children, possesses absolute moral clarity. It’s a lasting disgrace to this country that this person is a member of the U.S. Senate.