Guest Opinion: For replacement theorists, not every life is sacred

The leaked draft of the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, when combined with the replacement theory pushed relentlessly by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik and others, has created a deadly, evil and inexcusable hypocrisy within the Republican Party leadership that shocks the mind.

On one hand, in the world of strident Republican leaders, every life is sacred and terminating pregnancy, at any time, should be illegal. On the other hand, those same leaders are emphatically and hypocritically telling us that increasing numbers of Black and brown people will be used to replace white voters.

Mr. Carlson and Ms. Stefanik and so many other Republican leaders won’t stop pushing this insidious fiction.

How can either of them get up in the morning and face themselves? They have blood on their hands. They pushed that theory so intensely that an 18-year-old man/child decided, in order to fight that fictitious “replacement,” he had to kill innocent American citizens.

As many have pointed out, the burden of the possible Supreme Court decision will fall mainly on poor women who do not have the resources to travel and access out-of-state, out-of-country abortion services. Among the children born to poor women who knew, for any number of legitimate reasons, they could not properly care for a child, will be brown and Black children. Instead of being welcomed into a world that cherishes their sacred lives, those children will immediately be treated, by those same Republican leaders, as contributing to Tucker and Elise’s replacement theory and become, outrageously, targets for hatred by Republican white supremacists, who now occupy a highly visible and established position in the party.

It is a level of hypocrisy that we should not tolerate, and Republican leaders need to be called on the carpet for that deadly hypocrisy and their lies and, if they do not condemn Carlson or Stefanik, for their silence. Republican leaders, aimlessly in search of approval, have gone to places not supported by thoughtful Republicans in Bucks County and elsewhere, and those rank-and-file Republicans can make a difference now.

Tom Taft is a resident of Chalfont and the great-grandson of Republican president and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Guest Opinion: For replacement theorists, not every life is sacred