I think Sanders’ defense on NPR of supporting candidates who are anti-abortion is completely wrongheaded. The bottom line commitment of the left is to freedom, to emancipation from all manner of domination, and reproductive freedom is a critical part of that program of emancipation. I simply don’t see how the state or a parent or a husband or a boyfriend or anyone can force a woman to carry a fetus to term and bear a child against her will. I don’t think the left should compromise on that. At all.

(Though the left makes all manner of ugly compromises all the time, so it would be a big mistake to cast this entire discussion as strictly about political morality. Like many leftists, I supported Sanders despite his backing, in word and deed, of the State of Israel, which is a comprehensive regime of systemic human domination and degradation. Liberals who think abortion is non-negotiable don’t think support for illegal or immoral wars is non-negotiable, and wars can also be the instruments of domination and degradation, particularly of women. This business of lines in the sand gets tricky.)

I also think Sanders’ statement may have been completely unnecessary, since according to this article, Mello’s position on abortion seems to have “changed” in a more progressive direction. The potential gratuitousness of Sanders’ statement calls to mind that cliché about it being worse than a crime, it was a blunder.

What I find a little hard to swallow is the liberal freakout on Twitter over Sanders’ decision to endorse Mello. Mello’s position, as described here, is virtually identical to Tim Kaine’s position. Like Kaine, Mello has taken bad positions on abortion in the past. (Before he went to the Senate, Kaine voted for parental notification laws and bans on late-term abortions and funding for centers that tried to dissuade women from having abortions. And don’t forget: immediately after Clinton chose Kaine as her VP candidate, he came out—explicitly in defiance of Clinton’s position—in favor of the Hyde Amendment.) Like Kaine, Mello has “evolved,” claiming that his position now is that while he personally opposes abortion, he would never translate that view into policy. And according to a seemingly credible Twitter thread I read (I know, I’m laughing at that oxymoron myself), Mello had an abortion rights advocate speaking powerfully in favor of reproductive rights on stage with him during his campaign.

A lot of liberals were either silent on Kaine’s positions on abortion or drafted extended apologetics about his “evolution” on abortion or claimed that basically his position didn’t matter because even if he eventually became President, the Democratic Party as a whole was pro-choice. Regardless of how they got there, these folks wound up enthusiastically supporting Kaine for VP. (Just go back and read NARAL’s or Cecile Richards’ statements on the selection of Kaine or the reports in Vox and the Center for American Progress on Kaine.) Yet now liberals are going after Sanders because he endorses a candidate for mayor of Omaha—mayor of Omaha; as opposed to that trifling position of Vice President of the United States—whose “evolution” is similar, if not identical? It’s hard not to think that this is about something other than abortion.