The Republican Party was founded on the principle that all human beings are possessed of inherent dignity. In some manner or another, for one hundred and fifty years and more, the Democrat Party has denied this fundamental truth, turning to one group after another to demean, dehumanize, and when possible, simply kill. There is a straight line from the men who went to the bloodiest war in our nation’s history to keep men and women in chains, to the men who donned white hoods to terrorize and hang with the implicit cooperation of elected Democrats, to the party that now fights so that a child can be brutally killed at any time from conception to a crowning head and beyond.

As a child in 1984, I knew that there was good and evil in the world. Globally, there was a regime determined to break men into a mold they would never naturally fit, driving God and freedom from the planet in equal measure, and a nation dedicated to self-evident truths and freedoms endowed by our Creator. At home, there were people who explained why it was all right (now a positive good!) to kill a million babies every year, and people who said that this was one of the worst atrocities our nation had ever committed. To a child, many things that could appear gray instead seem black and white; this is a gift God gives children, one that adults squander all too easily and readily.

That gift, like the Republican Party’s patrimony, lies in shambles today. The party — my party for thirty-one years and more, from before I could vote to today — has at long last cast aside the pretenses of three decades. We now know it for what it is: A party that believes government should grow (just not too fast!); that opposes government pork for Democrat-favored industries and loves it for Republican-favored ones; and a party that is comfortable with abortion on demand, all the way to the birth canal, just so long as money isn’t diverted from subsidies for Boeing for it.

The signs have been with us for some time. Ronald Reagan, whom I will always love the way only someone who loves a distant President as President can, nominated two of the Justices who saved the abortion regime from the edge of death. His successor nominated another. His Republican successor may have nominated yet another; only time will tell. The party unhesitatingly voted to confirm the men and women who we all knew would vote to continue the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of babies every year, without a perceptible peep of protest. After a while, you start to think they’re not coming here for the hunting.

Today’s Republican Party just killed a bill in the House of Representatives that carries the supermajority support of Americans nationwide; that would make it harder for the very worst butchers to hide late-term elective abortions as the result of rapes; and that would spare that tiny number of babies killed after viability and pain perception set in. A fraction, a tiny fraction, of the children killed every year from convenience, from fear, from anger, from misunderstanding, from a thousand different killers of mother and baby, would have lived; and now they will die, because the House Republican caucus suddenly understood that Republicans in the Senate may have to pass this bill, and all of their promises might suddenly matter.

I have voted Republican since I turned 18 for a number of reasons. I believe a small government is less of a danger to men than a large one, and less of a danger to liberty, as well. I believe that taxes work on income like they work on everything else. I believe the low should be treated as well as the high, and the high as meanly as the low. I believe that men should be free to make choices that harm no one else and to suffer the consequences of those choices. I believe men and women make their own choices, and as adults, they should be held accountable for them. I believe that our society is not a series of atomized tribes fighting for a finite pie, but rather a group bound by birth and by choice into the greatest people God has ever put on this Earth — a people that has accomplished so much good, and can accomplish so much more, even though the sin of Pride is a constant threat.

But first and foremost, I have voted Republican because I am Catholic. I voted for the Party that still retains my Church’s view of human beings — as all being endowed with inherent dignity by the Act of Creation, a dignity that cannot be put aside merely because it is convenient or even by any act of that human being’s own. I voted Republican because for all of the warts, this was still the party that cared for the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Or so I deluded myself. No more.

I will never vote Republican again. Not for any reason. Today, the Republican Party stands for dragooning children into an inferior educational system designed to make them good little worker bees; for sending taxpayer dollars to its own clients; for funding Obamacare but promising to undo it Tuesday if you’ll give them a hamburger today; for blessing Executive overreach because hey, President Bush III may want to do some cool stuff, too; for brutally crushing its base at every opportunity; and for helping grow a larger and larger government behemoth that must topple of its own weight some day, so long as its elected members can get a piece of the lobbying pie first.

But most of all, today the Party stands for indifference in the face of a man-made cataclysm of flesh and blood, and for apathy toward good and cooperation with evil.

RedState was founded — waaaaaay back — to promote conservatives in the primary and Republicans in the general, but always, always the pro-lifers. It is now clear, to me, that this is a hopeless cause. What that says about the possibility of peacefully reforming our legalized regime of mass murder, I leave to others. In 2007, I resigned as a Director of this site, in what was once one of the harder decisions I’d made in my life. Today, I know I cannot ever again post here, because I cannot and will not support the Other Party That Protects Abortion on Demand. This is, in its own way, far harder.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.