Top 10 Public Controversies that Don’t Cost 825,000 Innocent Lives Per Year

Top 10 Public Controversies that Don’t Cost 825,000 Innocent Lives Per Year September 5, 2012

 

Some of my sophisticated progressive Christian friends are rather fond of mocking simple folks like myself as “single-issue voters.”  I know I’m only a caveman lawyer, and this complex world frightens and confuses me, but after scratching my noggin and using the Google for a bit, I came up with a list of 10 progressive policy controversies that don’t cost 825,000 innocent lives per year.

1. The Romney/Ryan Medicare Plan;

2. The Bush tax cuts;

3. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision;

4. The war in Afghanistan;

5. Repealing Obamacare;

6. Fracking;

7. Cap and Trade;

8. Gay marriage;

9. Welfare reform; and

10. Revising Dodd-Frank

Curiously, the only other issue I could think of with a potential human toll approaching the actual toll of abortion was permitting a genocidal Iranian dictatorship to develop a nuclear arsenal.  Sadly, most of the progressive Christians I know are on the wrong side of that issue also.

While I think “single-issue voting” is generally unwise (the world is somewhat complex, after all), it does ultimately depend on what that single issue is.  In other words, we have to maintain a sense of proportion.  In fact, maintaining a sense of proportion is one of the central challenges of our political era — when minor kerfuffles dominate news cycles, slight changes in cost curves are met with apocalyptic arguments, and we constantly fall for the politics of distraction and division.

Of course the issues listed above matter.  They matter a great deal.  But we’ll never make true headway for life if we allow less important considerations to dominate our thinking.  In short, demand that your elected representatives be pro-life as an absolute pre-condition for your support.  Vow to never vote for a pro-abortion politician.  Then let’s argue about the other issues.  Believe me, we’ll still disagree, but at least our country will have abandoned its most barbaric practice.


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