Abortion: Black and White, or Shades of Gray?
- Jan 15, 2008 - 6 -
{REL[4506][photo]2XCJ8VZ6REL}Liberals can use loaded phrases such as “take over” and “wield the levers of power.” I prefer the phrase “being salt and light.” I prefer to speak of “seeking to change evil public policy,” such as the policy of permitting and even subsidizing the wholesale taking of innocent human life. All the Democratic Party has to do to stop this tremendous electoral advantage for the Republicans is become pro-life. That’s all. Then the two parties can compete over the best way to be pro-life in the same way that both parties are competing over the best way to bring about racial reconciliation. Both are committed to racial reconciliation. The only disagreement is over the best way to achieve it.
However, as long as one party remains a pro-life party and the other party remains a pro-choice or pro-abortion party, abortion will be a partisan issue. That’s not the pro-lifers’ fault. It’s not the Republican Party’s fault. It’s the fault of people who want to deny an entire class of human beings (the unborn) Fundamental legal protections they rightly demand for themselves. It is the fault of people who, to protect abortion, have abandoned the Judeo-Christian and American belief in the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each member of the human family. And it is the fault of the Democratic Party—and formerly pro-life politicians, such as Edward Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Richard Gephardt, and Al Gore—for caving in to their pressure.
The Religious Left, such as Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis, and Jack Danforth, like to refer to themselves as moderate Christians versus intolerant right-wingers. Are they more moderate in their theology? Yes. Are they more moderate in their behavior? I protest. When Jim Wallis writes a book called God’s Politics, it would seem that he is proposing his own views as the answer to the question he raised in an earlier book, Who Speaks for God?
Those who criticize the Religious Right for being intolerant sound distinctly intolerant while doing so. Noted legal scholar and author Stephen Carter has said that the one prejudice a person can safely get away with in America today is to stereotype, caricature, and be prejudiced against Evangelicals.
Liberals have been losing their grip on the levers of power. They have been challenged concerning the moral high ground in this society, and they are fiercely on the defensive. That is why they put up such a big fight over Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination: they lost the Congress, they lost the presidency, and now they have lost their last refuge, the Supreme Court.
You can resist the will of the people for a while, but eventually the will of the people will prevail. Every two years President Carter, Senator Danforth, Jim Wallis, and their followers get an opportunity to make their arguments and convince the American people they’re right. I’m perfectly content to leave the decision to the will of the people in every election cycle.
God is not neutral about abortion. God is not neutral about marriage. God is not neutral about pornography. Conservatives believe that God has a side, that everything is not relative, that good and evil are real and it is possible to distinguish between them just as we distinguish between noonday and midnight. Moral issues cannot be neatly filed away under shades of gray. That is the big difference between liberals and conservatives.
Richard Land is the president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a vice-chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. This article is excerpted from his book The Divided States of America? What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match! (Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2007), available at familybookstore.net. His column appears Tuesdays at ERLC.com.
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1 On Jan 17th, 2008, at 9:57pm, Rick Hudgins JR. wrote:
First, have you even read Wallis’ book, Dr. Land? It is a critique of the extremes of both sides of the theological/political spectrum.
More importantly, though, I think you are unfairly characterizing an entire political party, Dr. Land, and making grand character assumptions in the process. Even as a registered (pro-choice) Independent, I take offense at your placing wholesale blame for the institution of abortion solely on one political party; you are almost reducing the party as the causation for its [abortion’s] implementation. It would be more accurate, I believe, to place the “blame” on the individual members of the Supreme Court responsible for deciding the Roe decision and establishing the right-to-privacy as precedent.
We will necessarily disagree about the so-called “moral” issues of our day (funny, you never mention protecting the innocent children in Iraq, or the innocent children suffering from hunger right in our own great big American backyard.)
2 On Jan 20th, 2008, at 4:49am, David Hedden wrote:
Right on, Dr. Land. It’s sad that the Democrats have a pro-abortion litmus test for their candidates at the national level. I have a democrat friend who serves in the state senate who is unapologetically pro-life and pro-family and who gets my vote as a registered republican every election.
3 On Jan 22nd, 2008, at 7:03pm, Rick Hudgins Jr. wrote:
My point: not all Democrats are pro-choice and not all Republicans are “pro-life” (especially if you consider the current war fervor generally pervasive among the Republican party, its approval of the use of torture of suspected terrorists, its emphasis on the destruction of the so-called “Welfare State” by cutting essential, legitimate government programs to families in need (not very “pro-life” to me), its glorification of capital punishment, its opposition to (violent) hate crime legislation, and so on and so forth. My problem with conservative Evangelicals is their generally inconsistent stance as being “pro-life.” It seems to me that their emphasis on being “pro-life” extends until….birth. After that, one is on one’s own until, of course, to quote George Carlin, “they meet military age.”
4 On Feb 21st, 2008, at 3:00am, Raymond Reinhold Holmes wrote:
The abortion movement in the United States was started by a Nazi woman named Margret Sanger who helped Hitler murder Jews during WWII by means of abortion. Nazis used it in order to eliminate what they called inferior races
and were targetting Blacks and Orientals after they finished with the Jews. The Nazi Movement was founded upon Darwinism/ evolution and they were out to create a Master Race.
Planned Parenthood was founded by Margret Sanger and it uses the same excuse to murder babies inside the womb that Hitler used to exterminate 6,000,000 Jews. If the victims are denied their humanity, then no crime has been committed. Abortion is cold blooded murder because life begins inside the womb! It grieves my heart that we are forced to pay taxes to support an organization that was started by a Nazi! Did our brave soldiers sacrifice their lives during WWII for nothing?
5 On Feb 21st, 2008, at 11:35pm, Richard Hudgins, Jr. wrote:
Check your facts:
Planned Parenthood was formed under the direction of Mary Dennett, an American birth control activist and ***pacifist***in 1916 (well before Hitler had gained any notoriety). It was started under the title the “National Birth Control League”. Dennett has no ties to the Nazi party. Sanger supported Eugenics, but I fail to see your connection between her and the Nazi party. She was a socialist, indeed, but had no definitive ties to the Third Reich. Please cite your sources.
Also, how do you prove that life begins “in the womb?”
Additionally, how dare you compare the intent of the extermination of an entire race of people to the intent that belies women’s personal medical decisions.
See Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2005). “Annual Report 2004–2005”.
“Kansas AG Kline Says Request For Late-Term Abortion Records Motivated By Protecting Children; Opponent Says It Violated Medical Privacy”, Medical News Today, 2006-09-4. Retrieved on 2006-09-10.
6 On Jun 29th, 2008, at 2:47pm, Josie Foster wrote:
I can find no source that credits Dennett with the formation of Planned Parenthood. Dennett founded the National Birth Control League, a separate organization from Sanger’s American Birth Control League. The latter later became Planned Parenthood. Please cite contrary sources to this information for clarification.