I hope and pray that any pro-abortion GOP candidates posing as pro-lifers will slip up and show their true colors, and that Christians committed to protecting the unborn will sit up, take notice, and act. Part of my prayer may have been answered during a recent interview of Donald Trump, a moment that went largely unreported in the mainstream media.

At the 16:30 mark of the interview, asked about the sort of person he would select for a Supreme Court justice, Trump started gushing about his sister, Federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, describing her as a “phenomenal” choice for the high court. Endearing, except that Judge Barry is not only pro-choice; she is pro-partial birth abortion, and has twisted our Constitution in past rulings to support this hideous practice.

Trump quickly added that she’d have to be ruled out “at least temporarily.” Did he mean she’d have to be ruled out temporarily because if he were president he wouldn’t be able to nominate his own sister? Or maybe “temporarily” refers to the primaries, and once he’s made it to the general election he’ll be free to take off the pro-life mask and court social liberals. Neither meaning bodes well for the unborn child with the bad luck to find herself carried into a Planned Parenthood clinic.

It was an off-hand comment about his sister and not a policy statement, but it’s clear that Trump lacks a principled commitment to pre-born human beings. For any serious GOP candidate, this should be the first order of business.

The Republican Party Can’t Survive Without Its Principles

The United States is a “propositional nation,” held together not by tribal bonds but by a common commitment to the dignity of each human being, and the freedom we all deserve as children of God. The greatest threats to our nation have emerged from our failures to take that freedom seriously and extend it to every citizen. Likewise the Republican party cannot cannot succeed as the vehicle of a single ethnic or economic interest group. It will endure and prevail only if it is true to its principles, and only if its spokesmen know how to argue for them compellingly. It is not the GOP that wins elections by bribing this group or that with government favors. Instead, it stands for freedom and fairness for all — or else it collapses completely.

In the wake of undercover videos that exposed what Planned Parenthood is doing to American children with American taxpayers’ money, there is no more room for Republicans to waffle or dither about abortion. The veil of ignorance behind which the Supreme Court cowered in 1973 has been torn from top to floor. We know that these unborn children are human and are alive. You can’t get intact livers and brains from “clumps of cells.” Any Republican — any human being with access to a computer — is now just a few mouse-clicks away from staring this truth in the face. What excuse does anyone now have for ignoring it? None.

The Republican Party faces a crucial test, and voters are watching to see if it will pass. Will that party be true to the principles that it claims can unite a nation, and offer opportunity and respect to each human person? If so, it can reach across ethnic and social lines and assemble a winning majority. If not, then it will expose itself as the tool of a shrinking minority of worried taxpayers and pessimistic white people, and end up a footnote to 21^st century history.

In case your history books left this out, the Republican party was created to reorganize the scattered opponents of slavery, an intrinsically evil institution which was not dying off, as our Founders had promised it would, but thriving and spreading across the continent. Southern leaders even had plans to expand an American slave empire southward, via conquests of Cuba, Mexico, then Brazil. When the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected, these slavery advocates seceded from the Union and fired on Federal troops, provoking our nation’s bloodiest war. Lincoln would not purchase peace at the price of spreading the stain of slavery across the Americas.

The Republican Party saved the Union, and after the war fought for the basic constitutional rights of black Americans. The Democratic Party allied with the Klan to take those rights away. Indeed, for almost 100 years, the Republicans were the party of choice for black Americans, and others who favored civil rights, while the Democrats regularly threatened to shut down the government to stop anti-lynching laws. It took until 1948 for some Democrats to begin to catch up with the Republicans’ longtime support for equal protection under law, and even in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson finally adopted the Republican position, it was a Democrat, Howard Byrd, who tried to kill the Civil Rights Act through a 14-hour filibuster. Almost 40 percent of Democrats in the House voted against the bill, which 80 percent of Republicans supported.

Republicans Ended Communism. Abortion is Next.

An even greater threat to human dignity than racial discrimination was totalitarian socialism. Facing this menace, Republicans were alert to the aggressive and evil nature of Communism from the beginning. So were most Democrats at first. But the lure of Marx’s utopian promises proved too much for many Democrats, who allowed the New Left to hijack that party in 1968. “Liberation” from sexual mores, and a “peace movement” that wanted to shrug off the grim duty of fighting the Cold War, proved alluring for millions of Americans, along with the promise of a generous nanny state — which would cushion every citizen’s life from cradle to grave.

Too many Republicans responded to the New Left’s rise with timid, “me-too” solutions: The GOP establishment would accept the Sexual Revolution and its stepchild, legal abortion, though they agreed to frown on it. They would grow the welfare state more responsibly than the Democrats. And like the Democrats, they would appease the Soviet empire through “Détente.” They would manage our nation’s decline gradually and comfortably.

Ronald Reagan said no to all of this. He rejected the basic premises of the New Left, and wasn’t going to ape it. He saw the growth of government at home as strangling our prosperity. And our endorsement of legal abortion was a stain on the “conscience of a nation,” as he wrote in a book on the subject which he published while in office.

But the greatest threat to America in his time, as Reagan knew, was the militarily mighty, economically desperate Soviet empire. So he was willing to work with any American who shared his sense of alarm at the increasingly reckless gambits that Soviet leaders were making, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, from El Salvador to Mozambique. He coined his “80/20” rule, which meant that he’d view anyone who agreed with him on 80 percent of issues as an ally. But given the nature of the Soviet threat, that “20 percent” could never include any squishiness on Communism. There were plenty of Republicans who were “soft” on the Soviet Union back in the 1970s. You probably wouldn’t recognize their names, because Reagan froze them out of any important offices, instead appointing principled Cold Warriors such as Caspar Weinberger, Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Casey.

Communism in Europe is now a distant, awful memory. The Berlin Wall has been broken up for souvenirs. Pink Floyd may have claimed the credit, but historians know what really provoked the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev, and his desperate attempts at reform: The implacable fact of American resistance to Soviet expansion, and our high-tech military expenditures. We challenged the Soviets on their own turf, in the only arena where totalitarianism could claim to compete with freedom: building better weapons. We forced them to spend themselves into collapse.

Ronald Reagan showed how Republicans can prevail on a global scale and change world history by holding fast to their principles. Now that party must turn to a more insidious threat, whose cruelty has been exposed by courageous journalism and confirmed by medical science: the destruction of our own young people — by the tens of millions.

In a country this large, prosperous, diverse and dynamic, we will always find it challenging to unify our citizens and help them to look beyond their short-term self-interests. The only force that can manage that is a code of high ideals, a set of profoundly truthful, powerful statements about human nature and human rights. Happily, we already have these, in the form of Our Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Only one major party takes these principles seriously, sees them as more than tools for judges to use to carve out new grievance groups or politicians to justify more redistribution of wealth. That party, the GOP, cannot go on compromising with leaders who don’t see human life as important.

No one who supports legal abortion has any place holding office for the Republican Party, or serving in its structure in any capacity — from the Republican National Committee down to the lowliest county committeeman. Republicans wouldn’t have tolerated pro-slavery secessionists in 1860, or Communist fellow travelers in 1980. Nor should they accept any longer those who share the sordid utilitarianism of the abortionist and the organ trafficker. As Rick Santorum asked this week:

How low can we go? How much can we walk down this road to depravity that we just see a little child, a child with a beating heart, and your reaction is to dissect it. Your reaction is to remove a brain while the heart is beating. How cruel is this? How much have we dehumanized that child in the womb? How callus are we to human life and what’s the effect on the American psyche?

No party that claims the principles of Lincoln can collude in this any longer.