A reader is looking for a new strategy re: abortion

A reader is looking for a new strategy re: abortion June 29, 2016

He writes:

After what happened today at SCOTUS, and considering Trump’s list of Supreme Court nominees is real (he is a liar, but let’s consider that list is true for the sake of the argument), does he still fare worse than Hillary (who is expected to appoint at least 3 *young* very-liberal justices)?

I wholeheartedly agree with you that we should dump the GOP for using the unborn as human shields to do other things that cry to the heaven for vengeance. But we also need to operate strategically, don’t we?

Trump does not give a rat’s patoot about abortion. His list of SCOTUS candidates, like his “Christian conversion” is blather meant to mollify religious conservatives and tell them what he thinks they want to hear.  He was so unfamiliar with the people on his list that he did not know that one of them had spent a year mocking him on Facebook.  His last known position on abortion (after taking five different positions in three days) was that abortion should remain the law of the land, which is what he always said until he needed to lie Christian conservatives into buying his bushwah.  That’s why he is so filled with passionate intensity about yesterday’s decision that he maintains a stony silence.

SCOTUS, led by Republican appointees, both established and has consistently strengthened our abortion regime (thanks Anthony Kennedy!). Trying to deal with abortion via SCOTUS outlawing it is an absolute and total dead end–and especially via Trump. It will never ever ever happen. What will happen is that conservative prolife Christians will have all their energy siphoned away from the defense of the unborn and devoted to the defense of every evil, appalling, anti-Christian, racist, repellent thing Trump says and does.  Indeed, it is already happening, which is why conservative Christians are devoting their current energy, not to the unborn, but to making “diamond in the rough” defenses of Trump’s mockery of the disabled, calls for torture and the murder of civilians, or transparent impenitence.  If we don’t accept such behavior, we are told, we are judgmental Pharisees.  And such transparent lies only serve to make sure that when the Trumptanic goes down, it will suck down with it the last shreds of credibility for conservative prolife Christians.

So, yes, we need to think strategically. But that means thinking in terms of reducing demand for abortion, because reducing supply via overturning has been a losing battle that has resulted, not in the defeat of our abortion regime, but in training a generation of Catholics to go out and do battle with the Church on  every right wing culture of death priority. We say we want to fight abortion, but what we wind up doing is fighting the Church on the death penalty, unjust war, torture, gun violence, the living wage, refugees, and the environment.  That’s where our real time and energy goes.

If, instead, we simply embrace the Church’s consistent life ethic and (gasp) agree with lefties where they are right (that is, where they agree with the Church), we will discover that we gain the moral high ground again instead of continually prostituting ourselves to every evil policy the Trumpkin Right loves in the fantasy that Roe will be overturned Real Soon Now. When you agree with the Church’s Whole Life ethic, you can then say to the Left, “You’ve got it correct on torture, the death penalty, the living wage, unjust war, racism, refugees, and a host of other stuff. So why are you still so blind about the unborn?” There is no good answer to that. But at present, the Left can point to the fact that the Right is transparently full of crap and only regards the unborn as human shields for all the filth Trump really cares about–especially racism and misogyny.

That’s the new strategic thinking.


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