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John Bolton at the GOP Convention July 20, 2016.@AmbJohnBolton / Twitter

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 23, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – President Donald Trump’s Thursday announcement that he is replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton was greeted with derision from Planned Parenthood. 

Thanking McMaster for an “outstanding job,” Trump confirmed that Bolton will take over starting April 9.

On Friday morning, Planned Parenthood Action Fund tweeted that Bolton was “yet another extreme ideologue in the Trump-Pence administration's ongoing parade of dangerous appointees.”

Bolton has contemplated running for president in the past, which has given him the opportunity to detail his broader political philosophy, which is only partially pro-life and not entirely conservative.

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In an interview with National Review’s Robert Costa, he identified himself as a “Goldwater conservative” who opposes abortion “except in the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother,” but supports same-sex “marriage.” He also told The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove that he supported Obama’s repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy that barred homosexual soldiers from openly identifying themselves as such.

However, in 2006, Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson and Jim Daly concluded after a private meeting with Bolton that Senate Democrats opposed his nomination as ambassador because he was “pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality,” and agreed with conservatives on “condom distribution and abstinence and other things.”

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins called Bolton an “excellent pick.” Twitchy reports that several other prominent conservatives also cheered the announcement, including commentator Ben Shapiro, National Review editor Rich Lowry, American Commitment president Phil Kerpen, and author Brad Thor.

McMaster has not taken public positions on issues such as abortion, marriage, or religious freedom. But as LifeSiteNews has previously covered, many conservatives suspect that he, along with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, played a key role in purging conservatives from advisory positions in the Trump administration.

Chief among them was Dr. Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to the president and a popular conservative commentator on Fox News and social media. Others included top Trump adviser Steve Bannon and national security advisers Rich Higgins, K.T. McFarland, and others—all of whom advocated strong support for Israel and aggressive opposition to Iran.

At the same time, McMaster retained several holdovers from the Obama administration and promoted former Obama officials such as Kris Bauman, who once said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for “inciting” Palestinian terrorist attacks.

These staffing decisions reflect McMaster’s own agreement with former President Barack Obama on Islam. At a February 2017 National Security Council meeting, he declared that Muslim terrorists were distorting Islam rather than applying it, and therefore the “radical Islamic terrorism” label was unhelpful to policymaking.

Consequently, PJ Media’s David Steinberg noted last year, one would be “hard pressed” to identify a McMaster hire who agreed with Trump’s “willingness to treat Islamic doctrine as the root cause of terror and related Mideast strife.”

By contrast, Bolton advocates a hawkish, pro-Israel foreign policy, and his political action committee hosts a petition calling on Americans to devote the “full weight and power of the free world” to destroying “radical Islam.”