THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, February 16, 1995            TAG: 9502150028
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A14  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Short :   45 lines

THE GOP AND ABORTION: DON'T WALK THIS PLANK

It doesn't take a gleeful Democrat to wonder why the Republican Party persists in an anti-abortion platform that plays well only with one wing of the GOP. The thought also occurs to more moderate Republicans (not to mention the nation's most numerous political group: independents).

Republicans have watched their party's candidates swing way right on this issue to woo that wing of the party which is convinced that outlawing abortion and requiring school prayer are the keys to moral - and electoral - victory. And they have watched too many of those candidates lose the general election to voters who are with Republicans on the perennial pocketbook issues but know that social ills are more complex than illegal abortion and legal school prayer could cure.

This sort of zealotry, though from the opposite end of the political spectrum, has cost the Democratic Party support since the '60s. It still does, despite ``New Democrat'' Clinton. And it threatens a similar impact on the Republican Party.

Yet at last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, columnist and sometime presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan declared that ``anyone who tries to rip that (anti-abortion) plank out of the platform will have to come over Pat Buchanan.'' And Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, called abortion and school prayer such ``hot button'' issues that selecting a pro-choice GOP presidential nominee or dropping the anti-abortion plank ``would absolutely guarantee an explosion and perhaps even a third party.''

Their sympathetic audience, The Washington Post reports, found both Buchanan's and Bauer's remarks reason to cheer.

So might an unsympathetic audience - in the Republican Party and in the electorate at-large - that would like to see the extremes marginalized right and left. A Grand Old Party deprived - or is it relieved? - of these litmus tests of political piety could demonstrate not only whether the Religious Right has the Republican clout it touts but whether it has the public support it claims. by CNB