Whom Should Illinois Family Action Criticize?

Written by Laurie Higgins

Illinois Family Action (IFA) has received a fair number of responses to recent articles on a local election in suburbs north of Chicago, only one of which was critical. Frankly, we expected more critical emails. It’s tempting as a non-profit organization to avoid offending our supporters, but IFA (and our sister organization, Illinois Family Institute) is committed first to biblical truth. Our mission is not to defend Republicans.

That said, we realize that the Republican Party is our best hope for defending the preborn, marriage, family, and religious liberty. And we think that serving truth first will ultimately restore the integrity of the Illinois GOP — but not without some pain in the process.

To reiterate, IFA is not an arm of the Republican Party, but we do recognize that the Republican Party more closely aligns with our mission and does so more often than does the Democratic Party. For those reasons, having a candidate who rejects truth about the inherent rights of the preborn (or rejects the truth that marriage is a sexually complementary union) within the Republican Party is more dangerous than having them in the Democratic Party.

The angry email accused us of “eating our own.” Someone who endorses the legal ability of women to kill preborn babies is not “our own.” There is not, nor ever will be, a moral right for one person to kill an innocent, defenseless person.

It was not merely the information about Arie Friedman’s pro-abortion position that we wanted to communicate in our last two articles. We are equally invested in getting all Illinoisans to think about the bigger picture — the dynamics within the IL GOP.

Our argument is that whenever we get an Arie Friedman or Mark Kirk in office, it’s nigh unto impossible to get rid of them because the Republican Party will never field a challenger to an incumbent Republican. Barring a scandal or complete incompetence, we will have them in office for years. While socially liberal Republicans are in office, they further erode the philosophical commitments of the party.

The Illinois GOP, however, will be willing to field a challenger to an incumbent Democrat.

Finally, until the Illinois GOP sees that they can’t get their socially liberal candidates elected because social conservatives won’t vote for them, they will continue to promote socially liberal Republicans. The Illinois GOP needs to suffer some consequences for alienating its base and for promoting issues that are rejected in its own platform. (The presidential election is not analogous to other federal and state elections, but for purposes of brevity, I will not discuss the differences here.)

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