Humbug?

When Mount Goldwater erupts, the fallout of hot ash ( and hot air) is usually spectacular. It is also, in a way, refreshing . The senior senator from Arizona, once the doyen of the American conserva,tive movenment , is a great fan of Mrs. Sandra D. O’Connor, President Reagan’s Supreme <:ourt nominee. As such he is outraged by the clamor of antiabortionist fundamentalists against her. So Senator Goldwater tells us not only that the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Moral Majority, the leader of that clamor, should be "kicked in the ass" by all right-thinking Christians (a not uninviting idea), but that abortion is a "humbug issue" distracting Congress from more manageable matters. The senator isn't likely to have many takers on the latter proposition, although there is some practical sense in what he says. The abortion issue is legislatively intractable, and the grating moralism of the "social conservative" right and its drive to theocratize politics are both tiresome and threatening. But one reason they seem threatening , as the distinguished novelist Walker Percy has observed, is that in their outrage over pro• miscuous abortion the Falwells and tfleir allies prick the bad conscience of American society. When abortions begin to balance live births in certain jurisdictions, the state of the law needs re-examination. It does not need and, in our view will not profit from, the superficial re-examination envisaged in the so-called "human life" bill reported this week by the Hatch subcommittee