The Pro-life movement and Black Americans. The media tends to portray these two groups as very different. And they are. But there are some curious commonalities between the two groups. Most obviously, there are large numbers of Christians in both groups. More surprisingly, these two groups are by far the most suspicious of the COVID vaccine – although for different reasons.
Why do Pro-lifers and Blacks have this vaccine suspicion?
My name is Curtis Chang, and welcome to Redeeming Babel, where our mission is to provide Biblical thinking in a confusing world. In another video, I explained the history behind Black American distrust of vaccination. In this video, I turn to the Pro-life movement.
Pro-lifers fear that the vaccine is connected to abortion. And indeed there is a distant connection. But the consensus of leading Christian bioethicists is that this distant connection should not discourage pro life Christians from taking the vaccine. Pro lifers in fact have strong reasons to be pro-vaccine.
The cell line
To understand why this is the case, one must first understand what a cell line is. A cell line begins with some original cell taken from a human source, and then those original cells get replicated in labs over and over and over, often over decades. The cells that descend from that original cell make up the cell line. It is these descendant cells – the cell line – that gets used in biomedical research.
One of the most important cell lines used in COVID vaccine research is the HEK 293 cell line. No one knows the actual individual identity of HEK 293. The original cells were obtained in the Netherlands in 1973 by Dr. Frank Graham. Dr. Graham has reported that he cannot be sure whether the fetal remains came about through a miscarriage or an elective abortion. But it is quite possible – maybe even probable – that HEK 293 originated from an elective abortion.
For the sake of understanding the pro-life Christian’s worst fears, let’s assume this is the case.
This would mean that COVID vaccine research used cells that if you back far enough, can be trace an ancestry to a past abortion. Keep in mind that the vaccine ITSELF does not contain any fetal cells; it is the research PROCESS that used the cell line. And remember the cell line used today is not the actual original cell taken from a fetus. Those original cells are long gone. The HEK 293 cell line are the descendants of that original cell taken back in 1973.
The HEK 293 cell line has been used not just in vaccine research, but in most advanced medical treatments today. The biggest recent breakthroughs in treatment for diabetes, heart conditions, hepatitis, arthritis, lung disease, cancer and many other diseases all drew upon the HEK 293 cell line. In fact, if someone today did not want to touch the impact of the HEK 293 cell line at all, that person would almost have to disconnect from modern medicine entirely. If you have received any meaningful medical treatment in the past ten years, you most likely have already been impacted by the HEK 293 cell line. None of us can avoid this impact.
And this is where we have to make a key distinction: the distinction between impact and guilt. Impact does not equal guilt.
There can certainly be impact from a past sin. In fact, the Biblical concept of original sin is meant to say that none of us can avoid the impact of past sin. Sin originates a “cell line” of impact, if you will, that can extend down through the generations. Anyone who has a family of origin where there was abuse or addiction knows that this is true. Past sin makes an impact on subsequent generations.
But impact that gets passed on is not the same as current guilt. Let’s say, God forbid, you had a grandparent who was abusive. This fact will impact your family of origin and probably even you. But this does not mean that you automatically are an abuser. Impact gets passed on. But guilt does not. In the same manner, an act of abortion back in 1973 had a huge impact on all biomedical research, including COVID vaccine research. But this does not automatically make the COVID vaccine guilty.
So, as we think about the COVID vaccine from a pro-life perspective, let me emphasize three key points:
None of the vaccines contain any fetal tissue or offshoot
No actual cell taken directly from fetuses were used in research
None of the vaccines encourage more abortions for medical research
None of the vaccines contain any fetal tissue or offshoot
First, none of the vaccines contain any fetal cells or even any descendant cells. None of the vaccines contain the HEK 293 cell line itself. To repeat, the research process for the vaccine relied on the cell line, but the vaccine itself does not include the cell line. When someone gets injected with the vaccine, they are NOT getting injected with any fetal tissue or any cell line originating from fetal tissue.
No actual cell taken directly from fetuses were used in research
Second, no actual cells taken directly from fetuses were used in the research. When we talk about how the HEK 293 or other cell line were used in vaccine development, remember that we are not talking about the actual cells from an abortion that happened decades ago. The HEK 293 cells used today in labs are not the original cells. Those original cells are long gone. The cell line are descendants (usually modified at that) of those original cells.
The analogy I like to use is the railroad lines that connect my home state of California to the rest of the country. Most goods that we Californians import today from the rest of the country come to us on railroad lines that were originally laid down in the building of the First Transcontinental railroad. That origin story is filled with racist treatment of the first Chinese Americans, my ancestors. They were discriminated against horribly, given the most dangerous jobs, and were periodically lynched by mobs, like in the horrible Rock Spring Massacre.
Today’s transportation lines into California are like the fetal cell lines that developed the COVID vaccine. They are not evil in their current state and usage, but they run on tracks that follow lines first laid down by previous institutional sin. And none of us can avoid being touched by those lines.
None of the vaccines encourage more abortions for medical research
Finally, it is important to emphasize that none of the COVID vaccines encourage more abortions for medical research.
In fact, the fact that HEK 293 has been so widely studied and used for decades means that most researchers rely on it and other long established cell lines. They are not motivated to obtain new cell lines from new fetuses. And government regulations strongly discourage any researcher trying to do so, especially from aborted fetuses. This point is key to the difference between impact and guilt. Because it means that current vaccine research, while it has been impacted by past abortion, is not guilty of promoting current abortions.
All of these facts have led to a consensus among the leading Christian bioethicists. The consensus is that Christians – including pro-life Christians – are encouraged to take the COVID vaccines. The Vatican – which as studied this issue extensively – has given its approval. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has similarly approved. Leading conservative bioethicists, like those associated with pro life foundations such as the Heritage Foundation have also joined in the approval.
I agree with this chorus of thinkers. I believe that every pro-life Christian should take the COVID vaccine.
Imaging redemption
Indeed, I suggest that the COVID vaccine can serve as an image of God’s redemption. Redemption is God’s ultimate answer to the problem of original sin. Redemption is taking something that originated in a wrongful state, and reworking that thing into something good. The Bible tells us that in his death and resurrection, Jesus redeemed human sin.
1 Corinthians 15:22 puts it this way:
“For as all die in Adam, so also all shall be made alive in Christ.”
1 Corinthians 15:22
In other words, Adam’s original sin had an impact on us all. We are descendants of his spiritual cell line, so to speak. But the origins of that spiritual cell line, that began in death, is not the final verdict. The spiritual line of Adam has been reworked by Jesus. What began as a story of sin and death has been reworked into a story of forgiveness and life. That is what it means to be “made alive in Christ.” That is redemption.
The idea that what began in death could be reworked into life is hard for the human mind to grasp. This is why we need images of redemption in the world. We need examples that can serve as metaphors of what Jesus accomplished, that show us, “Jesus’ redemption is kind of like that…”
I propose that the COVID vaccine is an image of redemption. Yes, the vaccine may have a distant origin story in abortion. But that past has been reworked and redeemed into something that saves life. We can point to the vaccine and say, “Jesus redemption is kind of like that.” And indeed, the production of a vaccine in less than a year is really a miracle. Something like this has never happened this quickly. I personally believe God’s redemptive power was present in the process.
My invitation to Pro-life Christians who distrust the COVID vaccine is this: please remember that the Christian story is the story of redemption. Every one of us has a origin story in sin. None of us can avoid this. Yet each one of us has had our story reworked by Jesus into new life. That’s what it ultimately means to be pro-life. To be pro life is to be pro redemption. And to be pro redemption, in my view, means being pro vaccine.
The vaccine is ultimately a redemption story. Let’s be part of that story.
SCATHING Dissents Push Back On Extremist Texas Decision
The liberal wing of the court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, wrote individual dissenting opinions against Texas’s new abortion ban.
Five Justices Did This Because They Could
Emergency appeals have become the tool of choice for the conservative movement.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court was so eager to nullify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent securing the right to abortion, that it didn’t even wait for oral arguments.
Instead, in the middle of the night, five of the high court’s conservatives issued a brief, unsigned order allowing a Texas law that bans abortion at six weeks. The law also gives private citizens the authority to sue anyone who “knowingly … aids or abets” an abortion and rewards them with $10,000 if successful, essentially placing a bounty on anyone wishing to end a pregnancy, and anyone who might help them. Texas is now rewarding residents who snitch to the state on the most intimate details of other people’s lives.
“Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “The Court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.”
Also remarkable was that the Supreme Court acted through its “shadow docket,” the decisions the justices make regarding emergency appeals such as death-penalty cases. Under normal procedure, cases take time to work their way through the lower courts, and are received at the Supreme Court with extensive records, briefs, and oral arguments. Ideally, this allows the justices to ensure that their hugely consequential decisions are properly informed and made as carefully as possible, weighing all the relevant legal and constitutional issues. But there are some circumstances in which the Court needs to act quickly to prevent some imminent or irreversible harm. There’s nothing inherently sinister about that. The shadow docket, though, now resembles a venue where the conservative legal movement can get speedy service from its friends on the Court.
Over the past few years, the cases on the shadow docket have risen in significance, with the justices quietly making major changes to American law without the scrutiny or attention that comes with holding oral arguments or writing major opinions. Trump-administration attorneys found the Court’s conservative majority delighted to allow many of their most controversial policies to go forward. Under President Joe Biden, by contrast, the conservative justices have acted rapidly to block administration decisions, or to force Trump-era policies to remain in place.
“The term shadow is meant to evoke the understanding that what the Court is doing is not the way that decision making on an ordinary merits docket would happen,” says Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU who clerked for Sotomayor while she was a federal judge. “I think it’s clear that it has become a shadowy way to effect substantive decisions in cases where the Court, in the light of day, would be more reluctant to move aggressively.”
The shadow docket has been a tremendously successful venue for the right. Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has closely followed the shadow docket, counts at least 41 requests for “emergency relief” submitted to the Court from the Trump administration, compared with eight under the Obama and Bush administrations combined. And he counts only four occasions during the Trump administration on which the Court denied “the government’s request outright.” That deference has not continued into the Biden administration.
“During the Trump administration, it was on the shadow docket that basically all of Trump’s controversial immigration policies affecting millions of people were allowed to go into effect, including the travel ban,” Vladeck told me. “During the Biden administration … perhaps the biggest shadow-docket ruling so far was the ruling last week that froze and effectively killed the CDC’s revised eviction moratorium.”
Under Trump, the justices allowed policies such as the administration’s travel ban targeted at mostly Muslim nations, its prohibition against trans people serving in the military, and its restrictions on asylum to go into effect. Under Biden, they have barred the administration’s attempt to prevent evictions because of the coronavirus pandemic and accepted a lower-court ruling demanding that the White House reimpose the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced migrants into “precarious conditions in dangerous Mexican border cities where thousands became victims of kidnappings, rapes and extortion,” according to The Washington Post. The decision compels the Biden administration to renegotiate an agreement with a foreign country reached during a prior administration; deference to the president’s constitutional authority to set foreign policy, which the justices had memorably cited in Trump-era cases, was suddenly absent.
“What is so troubling about this trend is its continuing acceleration, not in volume, but in quality,” Vladeck said. “The Court seems increasingly untroubled by deciding big questions that affect lots of people this way.” Having a conservative-dominated tribunal determine such questions, however, is an ideal arrangement for a party that has not won a majority of the votes in a presidential election since Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man, and that sees the popular majorities that vote against it as composed of illegitimate semi-citizens who have no right to govern.
The shadow docket has begun to look less like a place for emergency cases than one where the Republican-appointed justices can implement their preferred policies without having to go through the tedious formalities of following legal procedure, developing arguments consistent with precedent, or withstanding public scrutiny. And so after initially allowing the Texas law banning abortion before most women know they are actually pregnant to go into effect, five conservative justices told Republican-controlled states they could disregard Roe while insisting that wasn’t what they were doing at all.
Instead, the justices in the majority argued in their unsigned opinion that because the case presented “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions,” their hands were tied. This is ludicrously dishonest. If Texas passed a law granting $10,000 bounties to private citizens if they sued anyone who held or enabled an indoor church service during the pandemic, the Court’s conservative wing would not feign confusion about whether the constitutional right to freedom of worship had been violated because of the supposed novelty of the scheme.
This ruling is less a description of a complex legal challenge than a road map. As Mary Ziegler writes, the Texas law was strategically designed to evade legal restrictions, and the majority read the script that was handed to it. Republican-run legislatures now know that they can pass such laws and the Supreme Court will pretend to be unable to block them.
Among the Republican appointees, only Chief Justice John Roberts had enough respect for the right’s purported doctrines of judicial minimalism to vote to wait for the case to reach the high court through normal procedural channels. Ironically, though, the unsigned majority decision reflects a careful study of Roberts’s years of successfully managing the Court’s reputation. The decision does not say “Roe is hereby overruled,” but it tells states exactly how they can effectively ban abortion if they want to. In that, it echoes Roberts’s own tendency to hide his preferred outcomes behind legal technicalities, the better to mime fidelity to constitutional principle.
“Although the Court denies the applicants’ request for emergency relief today, the Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue,” Roberts wrote in his dissent. But because five justices allowed the law to go into effect—and by implication, laws in any other state that wishes to emulate Texas—Roe has been neutralized. The only question is whether that decision is temporary, and whether the Court will eventually enact any restraints on the particular legal scheme Texas has pioneered.
“I don’t think those in the reproductive-rights community who are sounding the alarm that [the Court] really effectively overruled Roe in Texas are being hyperbolic,” Murray told me yesterday, prior to the Court’s written opinion. “The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States allows a law that patently contradicts its own statements about the right to an abortion to go into effect is essentially the Court signaling that it does not care about this right and it does not think this right should exist.”
Neutralizing Roe through normal channels would have taken time, and the Supreme Court’s conservatives did not want to wait. Thanks to the shadow docket, they didn’t have to. Five conservative justices invalidated the constitutional right to an abortion simply because they could, because they felt like it, and because they don’t believe anyone can stop them.
Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
The Excesses of Antiracist Education
In my last column I tried to describe part of the current controversy over race and K-12 education — the part that turns on whether it’s possible to tell a fuller historical story about slavery and segregation while also retaining a broadly patriotic understanding of America’s founding and development.
In this column I will try to describe the part of the controversy that concerns how we teach about racism today. It’s probably the more intense debate, driving both progressive zeal and conservative backlash.
Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing. One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.
In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.
Still, this kind of vision would, on its own, face inevitable conservative resistance on several grounds: that it overstates the challenges facing minorities in America today; that it seems to de-emphasize personal responsibility; that it implies policy responses (racial quotas, reparations) that are racially discriminatory, arguably unconstitutional and definitely threatening to the white middle class.
But the basic claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence behind it, and the idea that schools should teach about it in some way is probably a winning argument for progressives. (Almost half of college Republicans, in a recent poll, supported teaching about how “patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other institutions.”) Especially since not every application of the structural-racist diagnosis implies left-wing policy conclusions: The pro-life and school choice movements, for instance, regularly invoke the impact of past progressive racism on disproportionately high African-American abortion rates and underperforming public schools.
What’s really inflaming today’s fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.
First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.
Second, there is a Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect “equity” may be a form of structural racism itself.
The first idea is associated with Robin DiAngelo, the second with Ibram X. Kendi, and they converge in places like the work of Tema Okun, whose presentations train educators to see “white-supremacy culture” at work in traditional measures of academic attainment.
The impulses these ideas encourage take different forms in different institutions, but they usually circle around to similar goals. First, the attempt to use racial-education programs to construct a stronger sense of shared white identity, on the apparent theory that making Americans of European ancestry think of themselves as defined by a toxic “whiteness” will lead to its purgation. Second, the deconstruction of standards that manifest racial disparities, on the apparent theory that if we stop using gifted courses or standardized tests, the inequities they reveal will cease to matter.
These goals, it should be stressed, don’t follow necessarily from the theory of structural racism. The first idea arguably betrays the theory’s key insight, that you can have “racism without racists,” by deliberately trying to increase individual racial guilt. The second extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.
But precisely because they don’t follow from modest and defensible conceptions of systemic racism, smart progressives in the media often retreat to those modest conceptions when challenged by conservatives — without acknowledging that the dubious conceptions are a big part of what’s been amplifying controversy, and conjuring up dubious Republican legislation in response.
Here one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.
That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.
Why are conservatives pro-life?
No they’re not.
They’re pro-birth.
Once that kids pops out of its mom, they’re on their own.
Because clearly this is how Jesus would’ve liked his followers treating the poor and downtrodden, by shitting on them and blaming them for their poverty, whilst doing nothing to actually help them escape the trap of poverty.
“For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, ‘You sit here in a good place,’ and say to the poor man, ‘You stand there,’ or ‘Sit here at my footstool.’ Have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?”-James verse 2:2-4
Perhaps conservatives need reminders? 15 Bible Verses About Helping the Poor You Need to Know (luke1428.com)
9 Quotes From Jesus On Why We Must Help The Poor – THE BORGEN PROJECT (borgenmagazine.com)
It’s sad when Pagans like me, have values more closely related to Jesus, than actual self-proclaimed “Christian traditionalists”. That’s just sad.
197 viewsView 7 upvotesView shares
A lot of typical liberal backwards logic posted in these replies so far , based on emotional response and excusing selfishness.
The answer to your question is explained with the word conservative…..to conserve , to protect something important from harm or destruction. We protect the innocent unborn who are unable to speak for themselves because of their situation. Protect the sanctity of life from its beginning and its will to survive. Preserve and protect traditional values when so many want to destroy them out of ignorance. We stand for individual liberty , but not at the expense of snuffing
… (more)
Thanks for the A2A. I think it’s a misnomer that is common. We’re so used to having conservatives in this country that we forget they are mostly gone. But let’s go with your question.
It was not originally a Republican position. The Eastern Republican Party had little to do with the position that was mostly a Catholic one.
Then, in short, the Republicans saw how they could attract more voters (they were theminority party at the time) if they found a way to include Southern Democrats better than the Democrats did. Post-Civil Rights Act.
So they did, and along with the Southern Dems came a whole bu
… (more)
They aren’t.
If they were, they’d support a strong social security and welfare state, adoption as an alternative, universal maternal care and paid maternal leaves, good schooling and good sexual education and cheap contraceptives. Oh, and they’d oppose death penalty.
Being pro-birth is not being pro-life.
16.7K viewsView 1,464 upvotesView shares179 comments from Alexander Finnegan and moreNot all conservatives are pro-life. Here in the US, pro-life is a position that has been adopted by the Republican Party. A conservative supports a party that represents the best chance of delivering the greatest number of conservative policies. He/she believes, overall, that conservative principles are best for the country and of the two major parties, the Republican Party is best positioned to deliver . Like all political affiliations, left and right, members agree with some of the positions and disagree with others.
Now if you asked, “Why does the Republican Party adopt a pro-life position?”
… (more)
The easy answer in American politics is that of the culture war.
After WW2 in the West, there was a general feeling among intellectuals of the right and the left that there was something wrong in the modern world that had led to so much death and lost of human life. That the ideas, beliefs and principles that had driven the west since the time of the enlightenment were fundamentally flawed. Looking for new solutions, you started to begin to see the left and right diverge.
On the left you began to see a push towards what is today called postmodernism. This was a collection or set of ideas that em
… (more)
They aren’t. They are anti choice. The “pro life movement” is founded in two things the right excells at. Men telling women what they can and can’t do and religion telling people what they can and can’t do. Science isn’t behind the anti choice movement, a great deal of philosophy isn’t behind anti choice, and the Bible itself is completely silent on the subject of abortion (unless you count the times God commands the Israelites to cut babies from their mother’s wombs as pro abortion) but the right is anti choice. They don’t care about a childs’ quality of life as long as the women pump out tho
… (more)
During the Reagan administration, one of his political advisors named Karl Rove, you may remember him, worked on political strategy with Reagan. Remember that Reagan made Nixon’s strategy of switching the Republican party’s voter base from primarily urban to rural. It was determined that rural voters could be made to respond to a wedge issue of abortion. That started the Republican love affair with saving fetuses. Meanwhile, the US infant mortality rate soared and is to this day a scandal that is getting worse; proof that Republicans don’t care about babies; they only care about votes.
Abortion
… (more)
12 comments from Samuel Liu and moreThey aren’t.
They are pro-forced birth.
If they were authentically “pro-life”, they would oppose both war and the death penalty. They would work to reduce the more than 50% of our discretionary spending that goes to the Pentagon. They would support programs that provide healthcare and nutritional support to impoverished communities. They would support universal healthcare as a basic human right. They would support measures to reduce and mitigate climate change, which could kill millions in the future.
The fact that such measures are almost universally OPPOSED by conservatives puts the lie to the
… (more)
3 comments from Daniel Black and moreRelated QuestionsWhy is it so hard for people who are pro-life and pro-choice to see the other side’s view?To all the pro life people out there. Why is it that pro life people preach that life starts at conception but they are more angry at late term abortions? Do they think there is a difference between a 12 week abortion and a 40 week abortion?If pro-life conservatives truly value and respect the constitution, why don’t they legally support pro-choice policy and support their pro-life beliefs by praying for the mothers? Isn’t that the best of both worlds?How do pro-choice people view pro-lifers?Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Why?What do pro-choicers not “get” about pro-lifers?Why do some pro-life women have abortions and profess to still be pro-life?As a liberal, do you understand why conservatives are pro-life and against abortion?If pro lifers don’t support the right to abortion, why don’t they just not get one and leave the ones that do alone?Why should I be pro-choice or pro-life?Ask questionOnce that kids pops out of its mom, they’re on their own.
Because clearly this is how Jesus would’ve liked his followers treating the poor and downtrodden, by shitting on them and blaming them for their poverty, whilst doing nothing to actually help them escape the trap of poverty.
“For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, ‘You sit here in a good place,’ and say to the poor man, ‘You stand there,’ or ‘Sit here at my footstool.’ Have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?”-James verse 2:2-4
Perhaps conservatives need reminders? 15 Bible Verses About Helping the Poor You Need to Know (luke1428.com)
9 Quotes From Jesus On Why We Must Help The Poor – THE BORGEN PROJECT (borgenmagazine.com)
It’s sad when Pagans like me, have values more closely related to Jesus, than actual self-proclaimed “Christian traditionalists”. That’s just sad.
197 viewsView 7 upvotesView shares
A lot of typical liberal backwards logic posted in these replies so far , based on emotional response and excusing selfishness.
The answer to your question is explained with the word conservative…..to conserve , to protect something important from harm or destruction. We protect the innocent unborn who are unable to speak for themselves because of their situation. Protect the sanctity of life from its beginning and its will to survive. Preserve and protect traditional values when so many want to destroy them out of ignorance. We stand for individual liberty , but not at the expense of snuffing
… (more)
Thanks for the A2A. I think it’s a misnomer that is common. We’re so used to having conservatives in this country that we forget they are mostly gone. But let’s go with your question.
It was not originally a Republican position. The Eastern Republican Party had little to do with the position that was mostly a Catholic one.
Then, in short, the Republicans saw how they could attract more voters (they were theminority party at the time) if they found a way to include Southern Democrats better than the Democrats did. Post-Civil Rights Act.
So they did, and along with the Southern Dems came a whole bu
… (more)
They aren’t.
If they were, they’d support a strong social security and welfare state, adoption as an alternative, universal maternal care and paid maternal leaves, good schooling and good sexual education and cheap contraceptives. Oh, and they’d oppose death penalty.
Being pro-birth is not being pro-life.
16.7K viewsView 1,464 upvotesView shares179 comments from Alexander Finnegan and moreNot all conservatives are pro-life. Here in the US, pro-life is a position that has been adopted by the Republican Party. A conservative supports a party that represents the best chance of delivering the greatest number of conservative policies. He/she believes, overall, that conservative principles are best for the country and of the two major parties, the Republican Party is best positioned to deliver . Like all political affiliations, left and right, members agree with some of the positions and disagree with others.
Now if you asked, “Why does the Republican Party adopt a pro-life position?”
… (more)
The easy answer in American politics is that of the culture war.
After WW2 in the West, there was a general feeling among intellectuals of the right and the left that there was something wrong in the modern world that had led to so much death and lost of human life. That the ideas, beliefs and principles that had driven the west since the time of the enlightenment were fundamentally flawed. Looking for new solutions, you started to begin to see the left and right diverge.
On the left you began to see a push towards what is today called postmodernism. This was a collection or set of ideas that em
… (more)
They aren’t. They are anti choice. The “pro life movement” is founded in two things the right excells at. Men telling women what they can and can’t do and religion telling people what they can and can’t do. Science isn’t behind the anti choice movement, a great deal of philosophy isn’t behind anti choice, and the Bible itself is completely silent on the subject of abortion (unless you count the times God commands the Israelites to cut babies from their mother’s wombs as pro abortion) but the right is anti choice. They don’t care about a childs’ quality of life as long as the women pump out tho
… (more)
During the Reagan administration, one of his political advisors named Karl Rove, you may remember him, worked on political strategy with Reagan. Remember that Reagan made Nixon’s strategy of switching the Republican party’s voter base from primarily urban to rural. It was determined that rural voters could be made to respond to a wedge issue of abortion. That started the Republican love affair with saving fetuses. Meanwhile, the US infant mortality rate soared and is to this day a scandal that is getting worse; proof that Republicans don’t care about babies; they only care about votes.
Abortion
… (more)
12 comments from Samuel Liu and moreThey aren’t.
They are pro-forced birth.
If they were authentically “pro-life”, they would oppose both war and the death penalty. They would work to reduce the more than 50% of our discretionary spending that goes to the Pentagon. They would support programs that provide healthcare and nutritional support to impoverished communities. They would support universal healthcare as a basic human right. They would support measures to reduce and mitigate climate change, which could kill millions in the future.
The fact that such measures are almost universally OPPOSED by conservatives puts the lie to the
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3 comments from Daniel Black and moreRelated QuestionsWhy is it so hard for people who are pro-life and pro-choice to see the other side’s view?To all the pro life people out there. Why is it that pro life people preach that life starts at conception but they are more angry at late term abortions? Do they think there is a difference between a 12 week abortion and a 40 week abortion?If pro-life conservatives truly value and respect the constitution, why don’t they legally support pro-choice policy and support their pro-life beliefs by praying for the mothers? Isn’t that the best of both worlds?How do pro-choice people view pro-lifers?Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Why?What do pro-choicers not “get” about pro-lifers?Why do some pro-life women have abortions and profess to still be pro-life?As a liberal, do you understand why conservatives are pro-life and against abortion?If pro lifers don’t support the right to abortion, why don’t they just not get one and leave the ones that do alone?Why should I be pro-choice or pro-life?Ask question
Short answer:
From Roe v Wade, January 1973, until roughly 1979, conservatives, including and especially evangelicals, were virtually silent on the decision. Six years and not a peep, at last in opposition. The Southern Baptist Convention actually issued a statement of support for Roe (which they have since repented of). In the late 70s, a man named Francis Schaeffer, an otherwise brilliant theologian and apologist, who really thought the ruling was an execrable legal decision (with which I personally concur), joined forces with the Republican party to bring attention to the abortion issue. Recent medicine and science had made major breakthroughs in the area of when human life—“personhood”— began, and Schaeffer sincerely felt abortion on demand was equal to the Holocaust. *
Meanwhile, another issue was stewing among the right: Bob Jones University and hundreds of so-called “Christian academies,” private schools set up to skirt anti-segregation laws, were about to lose their tax exempt status under the Carter (Democrat) Justice Department because of their racist policies (no interracial dating allowed-Bob Jones U.-for example). With Republicans still smarting from the Nixon Watergate scandal, they needed an issue that would galvanize conservative evangelicals—what would go on to become the “Moral Majority”—in opposition to Democrats. Problem was, at this time, most evangelicals, especially southern ones, still tended to vote Democrat. The idea was to use the Bob Jones and Christian academy cases, but that proved problematic as racial tensions were finally ameliorating somewhat in the aftermath of the turbulent 60s. Bob Jones was TOO polarizing.
Enter:
Dead babies. LOTS of them. Nothing shocks the conscience like garbage bins full of dead fetuses and late term aborted babies. But how to motivate Protestants? Frankie Scaheffer, Francis’ son, told NPR,
… The very fact that the Catholics were talking about this meant that maybe it’s wrong, because Catholics can never be right about anything. … Theoretically, because the Catholics were against abortion at first made Dad very suspicious of the issue. …
But his suspicion of it was also mirrored with people like Jerry Falwell and [Pat] Robertson and these other guys who at first said the same thing when he came to them. … Their whole reaction was: “What do you mean? That’s a Catholic deal. Why would we take a stand on that when we believe in contraception and all these other things? Isn’t that part and parcel of the same deal?”
So in the early days of the pro-life movement, most of the religious leaders … didn’t want anything to do with what Dad was doing, because they said: “That’s a Catholic thing. We’re all about Jesus Christ and a personal relationship with the Savior. Why would we want to be sidetracked on this stuff?” …
If it had gone slightly differently, we would have had a completely different history of the United States at this point. There would have been no Ronald Reagan, no George Bush, no religious right, no evangelical groups to back these people. It was on a knife edge there in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Could have gone either way.
And I think the reason why the pro-life movement took off and became huge actually had nothing to do with abortion. It became huge because it was, “We’ve got to draw the line somewhere against all this secular encroachment on our religious culture founded by Puritans.” …
A lot of people were just waiting to draw the line somewhere against this rising tide of secularism they felt encroaching on their space. They wanted to fight back. No one had showed them how, because you had to have an issue around which to coalesce, and abortion was a handy issue.
I think what proves my point is the way similar issues have been used subsequently. I mean, what does gay rights have to do with abortion? Nothing. So why are the same people fighting about that and using the same techniques? What does health care reform have to do with euthanasia? Nothing. Why are they using the same thing?
Because the secular culture is going to take your children away; they‘re not going to heaven with you. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. We have to fight back, so you pick a handy club with which to beat the society around you into submission. …
And if Dad had come down the pike and written a book and passionately had a series of seminars saying that we have to stop our kids listening to rock ‘n’ roll, and we’ve got to get an amendment in the United States Constitution saying, you know, anything with a drum beat has to be made unconstitutional, it may sound crazy, but it could have been that. …
God In America – Interview: Frank Schaeffer
“We sat down with [Rep.] Jack Kemp [R-N.Y.], [Vice President] Gerald Ford, the Bush family, [Ronald] Reagan and other people, and they said: ‘We’ll help you. We believe in this. Just make sure we keep getting elected and we’ll roll Roe v. Wade back.’ …” (Ibid.)
What was a moral issue, a religious one, now became political. I am pro-life (ALL life, and for maintaining that life well after birth). I believe abortion on demand is a grievous evil. I have MUCH to question about the actual “pro-life” beliefs of the Bushes, Kemp, Falwell, Reagan, et. al., at the beginning; they obviously didn’t give much of a damn prior to meeting Schaeffer. But their scheme worked. It has taken almost 40 years, but the seed planted by the Moral Majority is showing fruit. The Right now has the chance to overturn Roe. But I recognize that in a kind of twisted way, the adoption of abortion as a moral/political shibboleth (along with gay rights) set the stage for the pursuit of a kind of Christian “sharia law” to be enshrined in our judicial process. Too many people on the right will say they want strict Constitutionalists on the bench, but what they really want are jurists who will interpret the Constitution through the lens of the Bible. Even as a pro-life, if liberal leaning, Independent Christian, this scares the bejesus out of me.
*Highly recommended article: Harvard Law Journal concludes: The preborn child is a constitutional person
Republicans don’t care about Police, Veterans, Unborn as People, only as Props
Former police officer, and current Democratic Congresswoman, Val Demings took Jim Jordan to task over his hypocrisy on police. John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
“Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) was midway through an impassioned speech on Tuesday accusing Republicans of using police officers as “pawns” in their efforts to amend a hate-crime bill when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) interrupted to object.”
Why is everyone so concerned about Tucker Carlson and the “Great Replacement” theory of ‘white genocide’ which seems to be taking over the Republican party?
The “Great Replacement” theory is something that has been talked about for a while in Europe and is a big deal there. I know as I have friends and relatives who talk about it and use it as a way to justify limiting immigration. So it is not a nothing thing.
Tucker is leading the charge and expect to see more of the ‘replacement’ theory in the future and most of all for him and $$, he and the Murdochs will get viewers on this one
The changing demographics of the US, Trump’s decisive loss, the diversity of the Democratic party and the stroking of white angst, mean people like Tucker are going to be pounding this more and more in the future.
In Europe the debate is a struggle, some countries are openly against any form of immigration like Hungary and even the UK’s Brexit turn is clearly at least in part to limit immigration.
The Great Replacement or white genocide theory is something you all can look up but basically it is a fear of being out populated by non white, non Christians though you could put in anything in the US other than white evangelicals are not welcome.
In my circle, if you are not Republican for instance you are a baby killer so it can become extreme and this is just the latest in a multi century nativist approach in the US that will be rearing it’s head up again and again.
Ultimately the importance to the US will be to use this to limit immigration which is what it has done in Europe. That I don’t see changing in fact ‘replacement theory’ will gather steam in the US in the next few years and will become one of the next code words for anti anything other than white evangelical Christians.
Welcome America to the next version of culture wars that are gradually engulfing the world. On the opposite side you are going to have ‘American’ values which will be about evolving values which are inclusive and moving towards secularism and away from religion and race and even European culture as a background.
Much will be made of this in the future but now that Tucker has introduced this and Murdoch’s son has provided tacit endorsement, it matters not that it is considered also anti-semitic by the ADL, what matters is Republican voters will gladly embrace this as their next theory to support in the wake of Trump losses which mean even more voter suppression and an increasing reliance on those Trump/McConnell judges and SCOTUS to ‘protect’ them in the future.