Frederica Mathewes-Green articulates the classic Christian Consistent Life position

Frederica Mathewes-Green articulates the classic Christian Consistent Life position June 30, 2016

over at National Review:

“There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters?”

When conservative Christians rejected the classic Christian Whole Life position in favor of pitting abortion against the rest of the Church’s teaching on the dignity of the human person whenever it bumped up against GOP Culture of Death priorities, they sacrificed the power to make this argument to lots of other Frederica Mathewes-Greens.

That is why the only term that adequately describes the conservative “prolife” movement after 43 years is “failure”. We still have the most permissive abortion regime on the planet and our reward for our prostitution to the GOP is Donald Trump.

A friend who is a programmer once remarked that computers don’t do what you want them to do. Computers do what you design them to do. If you don’t like what a system you have designed is doing, re-design it. The prolife movement is a political system. It has been designed, not to do what we want it to do, but what its designers designed it to do. Its GOP designers designed it, not to end abortion, but to make prolifers vote GOP and support GOP Culture of Death priorities, using the unborn as human shields for that. It has functioned very very well for its designers. It has functioned very, very poorly for the unborn and for prolife people to whom the designers have consistently lied for 35 years.

If we are serious about being prolife, we should rethink our approach and see how to do it better. If we are content to be useful idiots for a party that holds us in contempt, we should stay the course.


Browse Our Archives