politics

Pastor Dave Barnhart

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

The American version of Christianity has decided that a fetus is a person, and as such that an abortion is murder. They make it this emotional issue so that people don't think too hard about it and just reflexively think "I can't support murder!"

This is despite the Bible pretty explicitly defining life as beginning at the first breath, and treating causing a miscarriage as property damage.

It's part and parcel of the Republican party essentially taking over the church and getting people to equate "Republican" with "Christian".

Republicans are all about controlling what other people can and cannot do. Throw some evangelical "morality" on top of that and now a fetus is sacred and sex is sinful.

Because it ultimately makes poor people even poorer. It helps to shackle people to the slave life. It also helps feed the army with poor desperate people so they can keep fighting their wars.

Here's the issue: they say things like it's returning the right to the state, which is a lie but it sounds correct. That right never belonged to any state. It was a right held by the people, then states tried to remove it so the Supreme Court gave it (very limited) protections from encroachment.

It's always been a right that belonged to the people and any other rhetoric is trying to mislead. I've never heard a Democrat make this argument though, so they lost the election. They allowed Republicans to control the narrative while they squabled about how they want limits on abortion actually.

It's the same argument as slavery. The federal government needs to protect the rights of people because states are trying to restrict them, and it is not their right to do so.

It's a wedge issue. Its purpose is to align groups with the Republican party that might have otherwise chosen to support the only other viable party, the Democrats. The thinking goes like this:

Well, I can't support murder, so I have to vote for Republicans no matter what and ignore all other issues. What could be more important? I feel good closing my eyes now to feeding the poor, healing the sick, etc!

Christianity mate. I was raised evangelical, and it's insane. People "speak in tongues" believing that the Holy Ghost is summoning unknown words of power through them. When someone was outed as a homosexual in a church I was raised in, every adult would take turns placing their hands on either side of their head and casting out the demon of homosexuality. The Flood covered the whole Earth, God designed each animal as they are, etc.

The abortion/reproductive rights topic is religion made political.

Logic, facts and compassion are very secondary and ignored completely if there's a conflict with belief. The folks I grew up with would wholeheartedly say that behavior you and I would consider hateful was done out of love. When I left the church I discovered sayings like, "There's no hate like Christian love". That being said, there are good people and more people in each generation deprogram themselves and realize they'd rather be sane than saved (in the sense of evangelical salvation).

Trump has said he'd veto a national abortion ban, for whatever that's worth. And to answer your question, to most peo-life activists, abortion is murder. It's black and white to them.