Jacob Rees-Mogg has said the unsayable. Good for him

There are any number of reasons to feel irritated about the reaction to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s frankly expressed views about abortion – which hold that it’s wrong in all cases, including rape. One is the entirely characteristic, reflexive intolerance of his opponents: see Suzanne Moore’s piece in the Guardian to the effect that the abortion stuff is all of a piece with being a quasi fascist, that being a Catholic pro-lifer is part and parcel of being ‘a neoconservative bigot’, and that his views on benefits and zero hours contracts are more of the same package. Except of course they’re not; they’re separate issues.

But part of my own irritation is to do with the nature of the debate itself. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, I think abortion is wrong because it’s the wilful destruction of a human being, because the foetus is human and there’s no logical point during gestation – like 24 weeks – at which you can say it miraculously becomes human and deserving of the protection of the law. It doesn’t help, though, that his observations on abortion were in the same interview as his views of gay marriage which he expressed as a Catholic, in Catholic terms.