Regarding the Abortion Issue

The New Republic has posted a valuable essay by Damon Linker, author of The Theocons, discussing why the religious right will not fade quietly into the sunset after this election. The single issue that prompts millions of evangelicals to vote lock-step with the right is abortion. Linker offers some advice to president-elect Obama. Here's some of it:

Obama could follow the lead of Bill Clinton in combining a stalwart defense of the right to choose with an acknowledgement that the decision to have an abortion is a choice that troubles the consciences of many millions of Americans--including many millions who steadfastly support abortion rights. Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" served him well in this regard, but surely an orator as gifted as Obama could forge an even finer phrase or passage of prose to capture the often tragic moral complexities surrounding this most divisive of issues.

I agree with Linker that finding some middle ground on the abortion issue is what Obama needs to do to address the concerns and allay the fears of American evangelicals. I disagree, at this late stage in the struggle, that "an even finer phrase or passage of prose" will be enough to make a difference.

Most evangelicals in America are too lazy to reseach both sides of an issue. They rely on authority figures to do their thinking for them.

Obama has the weight of office, but his rhetoric on this issue holds no weight in their thinking. The people whose rhetoric holds weight with them on this issue are their pastors. Most of them have already made up their minds. Their positions are now so rigid that foetal life increasingly trumphs maternal life.

Should any evangelicals decide to examine the complexities of this issue, I have a couple podcasts to recommend. They are an interview (split into two parts) that I did with a member of a church I once pastored. Here and here are links to my 11/28/99 "Religious Talk" radio interview with Rose Pena.

On Summum Foetii

Kudos to Ethics Daily for calling attention to the extremes to which some opponents of abortion will go to hold their position.

On several occassions I have held discussions with men who refused to concede that abortion is permissible to save the life of the mother. For them, the defense of foetal life seems to be equated with their summum bonum.

So far, I've not held such a discussion with a woman.

Falwell, Baptist Press Perpetuate Moral Majority Myth

Baptist Press is quoting Jonathan Falwell perpetuating a myth about the origins of the Moral Majority. Jonathan says,

When Dad started the Moral Majority back in the late '70s, he had a vision, he had a plan to bring our country to the point where abortion on demand would no longer be legal.

The truth is that the Moral Majority began with a conversation between Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Moral Majority. Weyrich was encouraging Falwell to lead a movement of evangelicals into secular politics. Here's what Weyrich said according to Rice University Sociologist William Martin, author of With God and Our Side and the companion PBS documentary series by the same name:

Paul Weyrich emphatically asserted that, "what galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation." Weyrich explained that while Christians were troubled about abortion, school prayer, and the ERA, they felt able to deal with those on a private basis. They could avoid having abortions, put their children in Christian schools, and run their families the way they wanted to, all without having to be concerned about public policy. But the IRS threat, "enraged the Christian community and they looked upon it as interference from government, and suddenly it dawned on them that they were not going to be able to be left alone to teach their children as they pleased. It was at that moment that conservatives made the linkage between their opposition to government interference and the interests of the evangelical movement, which now saw itself on the defensive and under attack by the government. That was what brought those people into the political process. It was not the other things." (With God on Our Side, p. 173)