I Told You the Tea Party was Good for Social Conservative Causes

Jim Wallis can try to portray the entire Tea Party movement as a bunch of extreme, hardhearted, libertarian individualists who don't give a fig for their neighbors, but he does not know what he is talking about. He has a fringe group confused with the broad center.

The truth is that the Tea Party movement has galvanized the conservative movement in general and there is a lot of overlap in the issues that most concern Christians and the ones that concern small-government, low-tax Tea Partiers. The outstanding results of yesterday's election with regard to abortion is a good case in point.

The Susan B. Anthony List was very active in this election cycle off-setting the highly funded pro-abortion groups like Emily's List and Planned Parenthood. On the Susan B. Anthony List website, which you can access here, they summarize their successes in the 90 races they targeted for this election. They spent over $11 million dollars on these races.

First, they supported the election of the first woman pro-life to the US Senate, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. They also supported John Boozman, a pro-lifer who replaced the pro-abortion Blanche Lincoln as Senator from Arkansas and Roy Blunt, a Republican pro-lifer who defeated Emily's List favorite Robin Carnahan in Missouri. In addition, they helped pro-life senator Charles Grassley of Iowa beat back a challenge from a pro-abortion challenger.

Second, this election saw the percentage of women in the House of Representatives who are pro-life increased by 60 percent while the percentage of women who are pro-choice decreased by 16 percent.

Third, four pro-life women were elected Governor of their states: Jan Brewer (R-AZ), Susana Martinez (R-NM), Nikki Haley (R-SC) and Mary Fallin (R-OK).

Fourth, of 48 candidates endorsed by SBA List overall, 34 won. In the SBA List-versus-EMILY’s List head-to-head races, SBA List candidates won 91 percent of the time.

Many of these successes would not have happened without the energy and enthusiasm provided by the Tea Party. While social issues like abortion are not central concerns of the Tea Party movement as a movement, it is nonetheless true that the kind of candidates the Tea Partiers vote for also happen to be, in many cases, social conservatives.

Those of us who consider the sanctity of human life to be the most urgent and tragic social issue in the Western world today need all the help we can get in advancing the conservative agenda and we aren't going to get any positive help from the Evangelical Left or from those establishment Republicans who secretly mumble "amen" when elitists dismiss the Tea Party movement as "bitter clingers."

There is good reason why the president of NARAL doesn't look so happy the day after the election. See the smile disappear here.

UPDATE 1:
Here is a story which expands on the facts that I mention in this post. This was a wonderful election for social conservatives. Those darn libertarian Tea Partiers somehow managed to elect a whole slew of pro-life and pro-marriage candidates. Amazing, isn't it?

UPDATE 2:
Jill Stanek has a great column in the Washington Post today outlining the gains made by pro-lifers in congress:

Tuesday's election garnered at least 53 new pro-life votes in the House. Conversely, only 151 winning House candidates were endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action, meaning just 34.7 percent of the 435 representatives in the 212th Congress will be reliable pro-abortion votes.

Read it all here.