I voted early (barely) this afternoon. I did not vote for any pro-life candidates. I didn’t do so because I’m not pro-life, I didn’t do so because there aren’t any pro-life candidates. You can’t call yourself pro-life if you have a placard in one hand that says you want to protect the unborn, but you have a gun in the other hand shooting anybody you don’t like. And that’s pretty much the state of the union.
I saw an interview recently with the director of a pregnancy clinic in the area. She was asked how she thought about the unborn issue politically. She said several things I want to unpack.
I am going to speak truth as a believer
Excellent, and we should. But if we’re going to do that, we need to speak all the truth, not just one tiny piece of it. The truth how about how we should treat foreigners, which includes not killing them. The truth about how much God hates corruption, and bribes, and injustice. The truth that killing someone who is born is at a minimum just as bad as killing someone who is unborn. The problem I have with our current moment is I don’t hear anyone in the church speaking any of those truths.
I pray and look at what the Bible says.
Again excellent, and again, we should. But, again, we need to look at what the Bible says about everything, not just one single thing. The Bible has plenty to say about all of the above things. When someone prays about all of that and votes accordingly, great. But if I only pray about one thing, and vote accordingly, not great. Bad, even.
This party has said they will affirm this life, and I want to stand with them.
See above. Here’s a small part of what they stand for.
- They stand for cutting off USAID to millions of people who needed the money to survive. They’re killing people they don’t care about to save money. (The saving money is a front—they’re just killing people they don’t care about.)
- They stand for cutting medical care to US citizens. People who don’t have access to medical care die from treatable conditions. They’re killing people they don’t care about just for spite. (They hate ACA, mostly because a black man enacted it.)
- They stand for shooting and running over foreigners in the street. Indiscriminately, with no accountability. They’re killing people they don’t care about, who they view as beneath them.
- They stand for shooting boats, and people, out of the water with no trial, no recourse, and, once again, no accountability.
So, if you want to stand with them, you can, but what you can’t do is try to wrap it in “they’re pro-life” when they are clearly anti-any-life-they-don’t-like. (It is also obvious from what happened before the 2020 election that most of their stance on the unborn is one of convenience, i.e. vote-getting, not one of conviction. So you can stand with them, but they’re not standing with you.)
Also before the 2020 election, someone I know, referring to “you can’t legislate morality,” said that “someone’s morality is being legislated.” Except it’s not—the saying is 100% accurate. You can’t legislate morality. All you can do is legislate someone’s view of morality. And, as has been proven time and again and again and again and again—hence the saying—that doesn’t do anything to stop the (alleged or real) immorality. The proof, if you need it (you really shouldn’t; see Prohibition, telling teenagers not to have sex, et al), was in something the director said elsewhere in the interview. Repealing Roe v. Wade has made zero difference in the number of abortions. In fact, abortions have gone up. The new bugaboo this time isn’t Roe v. Wade, it’s the abortion pill. And if we solve that problem, it will be something else. But none of those things are the problem, and getting rid of those things will not solve the problem, as has, again, been proven by where we are right now.
The problem is sin. This world is broken. We are broken. Another statistic from the director: the majority of the women getting abortions are Christian. Pogo would be proud: we have met the enemy and he is us. The solution to sin is not a law—see the entire Old Testament. The solution is Jesus, and a worldview that includes following Jesus in everything. The director, and the clinic she directs, and the thousands(?) of clinics like it, are doing great work at doing just that: adjusting the worldviews of the people who come to them. Each of us who are believers need to be about the same thing.
If you’re thinking you know how I voted, you don’t. The point of this isn’t that I’m against your party. The point of this is what I started with—there are no pro-life candidates. There are no candidates I want to stand with. They are all (within four decimal places) corrupt and cruel and godless. What irritates me is the messaging that only focuses on one thing when there are hundreds of other things that are Biblical, that God cares about, that we should care about, and that we should condemn, publicly, just as strongly as we do that one thing. Then we can we do what we should do—pray about all of it and do what God tells us to do. Regardless of whether we like it.
Next time we’ll talk about something less controversial, like why the University of Texas and Texas A&M and the Dallas Cowboys are so terrible at football this year. (It’s not controversial because it’s not just true this year, it’s true every year.)