Dobson, the Heritage Foundation, and the Poor

Katie at Faith and Public Life made this argument quite well in her post today, so I’m not going to repeat a lot of her points.  But a quick summary of what has led to all the chatter about James Dobson is that he just launched another attack on Rich Cizik and other members of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, which includes such leftist pastors as Joel Hunter (brief head of the Christian Coalition), Leith Anderson (Pres of NAE), Jim Ball (head of EEN), and Rick Warren (author of a Purpose Driven Life).  Why is Dobson so upset? Because so many of his fellow evangelicals are saying Christians have a responsibility to be good stewards of God’s Creation and should care about global climate change.

Back in the summer, Dobson and the Heritage foundation argued that evangelicals should spurn the “creation care movement” for two reasons.  First, the science does not support the belief that global warming is real.  But more importantly, Christians should not worry about global climate change because…wait for it…doing so will hurt the poor!

Now that even George Bush is saying that global warming is real, Dobson has dropped that part of the argument.  So all that is left is the most egregious part of his argument:  we should pollute to help the poor.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I wouldn’t have taken the time to write this if it weren’t for the fact that it wasn’t until Dobson and the Heritage Foundation needed to defend pollution that they started championing the poor.

I did a search though Heritage Foundation reports, and I could not find any reports that mention the poor in the title except for the report linked above arguing that we should do anything about climate change.  And during the budget debates last year, when Sojourners and others were arguing that the budget was a moral issue and that Christians should be speaking up about the poor, Dobson’s Focus on the Family responded that we shouldn’t be wasting time asking policy leaders to consider the poor, especially not when less than 0.5% of all abortions take place in the third trimester: “It’s not a question of the poor not being important or that meeting their needs is not important. But whether or not a baby is killed in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, that is less important than help for the poor? We would respectfully disagree with that.”

So when it comes to a question of whether we should give tax cuts to the wealthy and kick new mothers and pregnant women off Medicaid, then the poor are not a priority and shouldn’t be considered in the debate.  But when we are faced with the question of whether we should reduce our greenhouse emissions and be good stewards of God’s Creation, then the cry rings out loud and clear from the halls of Focus on the Family, “for the sake of the poor whom Christ commanded we care for, PLEASE POLLUTE!”  Am I the only one who thinks this sort of argument rings a little hollow?