"Test everything; hold fast to what is good."
Praying that someone shoots the Satanic baby-killers; policies “marked by a deep mistrust of the people they target;” They Are Coming for Your Birth Control; marriage equality and antifeminism; “I can change my sexual preference tonight if I want to;” Richard Land falls upwards; “another generation of Tony Perkinses;” “JESUS + Mary;” and a sampling of recent ethnic/gender slurs from GOP officials.
This legislation matters first of all because it would protect the rights of pregnant workers. But it also matters because it tests the integrity of the pro-life movement. So far, that movement is failing that test.
What happened was an unmarried employee of San Diego Christian College turned up pregnant, so they fired her, allegedly for violating the “community covenant.” But then they allegedly offered her old job to her fiancé — the expectant father-to-be. If this woman had gotten an abortion, she’d still have her job. That’s what San Diego Christian College apparently wanted her to do. That’s certainly the incentive they’ve built into their “community covenant.”
Pregnant women have advocates in feminist groups like the National Women’s Law Center. In theory, “pro-life” groups should also be forceful advocates for the legal rights, legal protections, and social benefits that pregnant women need. But that help is not always forthcoming. Sadly, the pro-life movement seems more focused on imposing legal limits to the options facing pregnant women than on creating an environment in which such women have greater options, greater opportunities to thrive.
It doesn’t matter if the evangelical gazillionaire owners of Hobby Lobby believe that emergency contraception causes abortions. It does not do that. Nor does it matter if this belief is passionately sincere and sincerely passionate. Sincerity and passion won’t make it any less incorrect.
Is Richard Mourdock’s extreme politics the consequence of his odious theology? Or is his odious theology a consequence of his extreme politics? It doesn’t matter. Whichever one he latched onto first was bound to introduce the other. The two things require one another and cannot be separated. Politics twists theology which deforms politics which warps theology which …
Richard Mourdock et. al. are appealing to an expansive-but-shallow “all things work together for good” notion of divine providence to defend preventing rape victims from seeking abortions. They fail to notice that this same appeal to providence also means that every abortion must also be “something that God intended to happen.”
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