America has been in a tizzy to rename things of late, as well as to tear down statues of a wide range of leaders once esteemed as a matter of course, including Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Much of the work has been carried out by angry protestors bent on defacing public property, and some of the affected monuments have been restored. On a few occasions, however, the dirty work is being carried out by public bodies, and no instance of rank partisanship has been more detestable than an Illinois county’s decision to remove the name of the late Henry J. Hyde from its judicial center. The decision earlier this month by the DuPage County Board to pry Hyde’s name from the center’s facade is shameful.

Apart from the venality of the action, which defies one of the few remaining customs of a nonpartisan character in American life, there is the wrongfulness of the chosen rationale. The board voted 10-5 for the removal in a huff about the 32-year congressman’s authorship of the Hyde Amendment, a spending limitation Congress first enacted in 1976 that, with slight changes and after a federal court battle, has remained the law of the land ever since.

The amendment barred the federal Department of Health and Human Services from spending taxpayer dollars on abortions unless the life of the mother was endangered by carrying the baby to term (additional exceptions for rape and incest were added during the Clinton years). An analysis of the impact of the Hyde Amendment by the Charlotte Lozier Institute’s Michael New calculated that it had saved in the neighborhood of 2.5 million human lives by mid-2023. That translates to about one in every 125 people in America who owe their existence to Hyde’s heroism.

But there is more to the DuPage Board’s insult than the rejection of a law that, in effect, has withstood the winds of partisanship and the tides of changing presidential administrations. Republicans and other people of goodwill across the nation should be outraged by the board’s action. To his credit, one senior Democratic figure, David Axelrod, the chief strategist and former senior White House advisor to Barack Obama, scorned the board’s move, saying on Twitter, “I disagreed w/Hyde but he was an honorable man; a WWII vet who devoted his life to service. Regrettable move.” The 10-5 vote was along partisan lines, but two other board Democrats did abstain from the final tally.

The truth is that Henry Hyde was a giant among conservative leaders in virtually every sense. As the national GOP struggles to regain its footing on a range of social issues, several analysts have pointed to the fact that the Republican Party was founded on uniquely moral propositions. It owes its existence to its opposition to slavery and polygamy, which its first platform in the 19th century described as “the twin relics of barbarism.”

The party’s iconic leader to this day is a fellow Illinoisian of Hyde’s, Abraham Lincoln, who saved the nation during the Civil War when the treatment of some men and women as property nearly sundered it. In his own day, Hyde was (and remains) the Lincoln of Life, an incredibly powerful writer and orator whose annual floor speech on abortion has been captured in an ad produced by Family Research Council’s Faith, Family, Freedom Fund. The link is worth two minutes of everyone’s time. Few have shown comparable eloquence in Congress on any issue.

Hyde was, of course, more than an orator. He was born in Chicago in 1924 and, as an interesting biographical note from Georgetown University describes, his poor family had a rough go of it. Hyde worked to pay his tuition to the local Catholic grade school and high school. In 1942-43 he played on a Georgetown basketball team that made its way to the Final Four that year, where he squared off against the 6’ 11” Hall of Famer George Mikan and shut him down in the last minutes of the semifinal. Hyde’s path through college and law school was interrupted, as were those of an entire generation, by service in World War II. He stayed in the Naval Reserve until 1968. He was renowned before he arrived in Congress for his oratorical skills, honed as a trial lawyer after obtaining his law degree at Loyola-Chicago in 1969.

Hyde was conservative in a broad sense, on issues both domestic and foreign, but then-House leader Bob Michel of Illinois said he was not an ideologue, but “a pragmatist and a doer.” Hyde was motivated by the economic needs of the poor and saw abortion as a turning away from meeting those needs and respect for the “innocence of a child.” He supported congressional action on family leave, voted for a ban on assault weapons, fought the international drug cartels, and chaired the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment action on Bill Clinton. Respected on both sides of the aisle, it is difficult even now to fully capture the impact of his House floor speeches on abortion. Disagree with him as many members did, his speeches, nearly always the last words of the debate, brought legislators on both sides of the question to the floor to listen intently to his summary of the issues at stake.

During my own decades in Washington and time on Capitol Hill after arriving in Washington in1978, I had the honor of meeting Hyde and working with him on various issues. His wife Jeanne, the mother of his three children, worked at the White House the same years as I did in the Reagan correspondence shop. Jeanne shared Henry’s empathy for others and, in fact, was the “designated drafter” for any communiques from that shop that required a compassionate and compelling touch.

An odd thing occurred after the Reagan years in our relationship as allies and friends. Jeanne fell mortally ill soon after her term of service in the White House. In 1992, I was working for Family Research Council. One morning on the drive to work, though I had known she was sick and in a local nursing home, a sudden concern for her struck me, and I turned the car around and drove to the home.

Awkwardly, when I arrived, I was admitted to her bedside, and there were Henry and the entire family. It proved to be her last day. She was not conscious, and prayers and love were being offered. I stayed awhile and expressed my sympathy — but before I departed, everyone was ushered out so the staff could attend to her medically. For a brief time, the only time in years of working with Henry, I sat with him and his family. The congressman spoke softly, and I probably mentioned how we leaned on Jeanne to address the hard and sorrowful stuff that came in via letters to President Reagan. I just remember Henry saying his only regret in life was the time he missed with Jeanne while dealing with the things his public life deemed more important.

In the long run, perhaps, letters over a courthouse entrance are the kind of things some deem important. And they are — but more for the rest of us than for the person remembered. If the people of the Chicago area want to do right, they wouldn’t be far from the mark if they renamed their local air transport facility the Hyde-O’Hare International Airport. It would then honor two veterans of World War II, two champions who defended freedom and the lives of their fellow citizens.

In the same spirit, the national Republican Party should honor him anew as well. Renaming a room in the Capitol would serve. Lincoln and Hyde stood tall above their times, speaking for the least of these among us and bearing witness to the truth. No party has ever had a grander purpose.