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This election is shaking the Republican Party and forcing it to reexamine its first principles.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - Thursday is the day I spend almost entirely in the car as I continue my weekly travel to the campus of Catholic University in Washington D.C. The trip up to the Capitol City is one which I can enjoy, if I use my travel time wisely.

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However, the return trip is always a struggle. It inevitably involves fighting the beltway traffic, no matter when I depart. I often fill the time with listening to the radio, including talk radio.

My experience of the Sean Hannity radio show this past week prompted this article.

Next week will bring “Super Tuesday” in the United States Presidential Primary Campaign, when over twenty States will hold their primary elections. Just months ago most pundits had predicted the outcome of this primary race, calling the winners in both major parties.

And, they were wrong.

The American people cannot be fit into boxes and seem to have a growing problem with the current political labels. In this piece, I address only the Republican primary. However, it is my conviction that the Democratic Party is in a similar state of flux and transition.

The Republican Party is being shaken to the core during this Primary campaign.

Those who thought they controlled the Grand Old Party have discovered that they do not. The principles which inform the Party of Lincoln are being closely reexamined and reconsidered by voters. The results are bringing deep concern to some, including some who call themselves conservative.

For example, Sean Hannity got quite upset during his radio show this past Thursday. He certainly does not welcome the emergence of Senator John McCain as the newest frontrunner on the Republican side. Oh, you have heard the drill; he said that McCain was not a “true conservative”, and that he sounded “like a Democrat.” He accused him of using “class warfare” because the Senator said in the last debate that patriotism should trump profits.

These are the same kinds of criticisms that he had leveled against Governor Huckabee when he was the frontrunner. Only Huckabee had said, even more profoundly, that the good of human persons should trump profits. When he did, Sean Hannity accused this good man of not being a “true conservative”, but rather a populist, as if that was a bad word.

Ironically, after excoriating the Governor from Hope, whose pro-life, pro-marriage and pro-poor ‘populist’ message was beginning to capture the hearts of many people well beyond his evangelical base, Hannity is now asking him to step aside from the campaign for the sake of the “conservative movement.” Only a few weeks ago this same Sean Hannity claimed the Governor was not a conservative at all.

As the show progressed, the rants became a bit a bit too sanctimonious sounding as the commentator opined about his unwillingness to “give up his principles” as a conservative and vote for McCain. Then he did what he said since the beginning of the primary campaign he would not do. He endorsed a candidate on the air, Gov. Mitt Romney. He then insinuated through his rhetoric that any listener who did not follow suit was, well, I guess unprincipled?

What happened next was priceless.

A caller challenged the talk show host claim to being principled, noting that he had Mayor Giuliani on many times before he tanked and had to leave the campaign. He proceeded to correctly note that the host was quite affirming of the Mayors’ Presidential bid. Yet, as the caller again correctly noted, the Mayor was not pro-life and would not defend marriage against the efforts to redefine it by granting equivalent legal status to homosexual paramours.

Implicit within the callers’ questions was the obvious compromise which had already occurred in the talk show host’s principles. Had Hannity compromised concerning the fundamental human rights issue of our age, the right to life of every human person from conception to natural death? The caller then said that Hannity had “egg on his face.”

The talk show host was upset by the caller at this point. With obvious frustration he went through the standard conservative litany of issues he held dear, taxes, fiscal restraint, crime, and several other of his pet issues and sought to argue that because the Mayor was “conservative” on these issues, that he was a worthy candidate.

The caller understood something the host did not. Without the right to life there are no other rights and the entire structure of human rights is threatened. Without the freedom to be born there are no other freedoms. Freedom is a good of the human person. Almost 50 million persons have not been able to exercise it because their lives were taken in the ...