What Ever Happened to Pro-Life Conservatives?

 David Alan Black

Conservative evangelicals who oppose abortion are about to throw in their lot with George W. Bush for another four years in the White House.

I don’t get it. It was not so long ago that pro-lifers were an uncompromising bunch of people. Abortion was an evil to be opposed on every front. But today most evangelical voters have fallen for the “I’m pro-life because I say so” scam.

No pro-lifer should cast a vote for George W. Bush. At best he is a counterfeit pro-lifer and has done absolutely nothing to use his bully pulpit to make abortion a national issue. And if he is reelected he will continue to do nothing.

Only Michael Peroutka will prosecute abortionists nationwide by ignoring Roe v. Wade and by creating a national controversy over the issue. He alone would stand between the butcher and the baby, as Scott Whiteman has said. Millions of Americans would be captivated by the issue and perhaps even be persuaded to consider our side.

What is hard for me to figure out is why self-styled pro-lifers can mouth slogans without adding any substance to their claims. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that evangelical voters have sold their soul for ephemeral political pottage. Abortion is the premeditated murder of an innocent human being, pure and simple. It leads to unspeakable pain on behalf of those who approve and employ it. And no doubt about it: both Bush and Kerry will continue to support the legalization of the child-killing industry.

Bob Strodtbeck has noted both the importance of the issue and the lateness of the hour:

Pro-lifers are willing to accept these abuses of power because Mr. Bush will use their politically correct clichés at opportune moments. This concession on the part of pro-lifers, though, is in absolute defiance of the major principle that the framers of the Constitution used to develop legal limits on federal office holders – that is that human nature is self-serving and continually seeking personal aggrandizement.

The pro-life movement seems to be committed to gauging its influence by endorsements it gets from national political celebrities, but time has proven that those platitudes won’t stop babies from being killed. The movement’s support for the current president might even help to finish the work of destroying the U.S. Constitution that was so hideously forwarded by Roe.

Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of discernment and critical exercise, so dear to the Founders of our nation, now has no place in our total religious picture. We listen to sound bytes, glance at the biased media, and rush away, hoping to make up for our intellectual bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us.

At the risk of sounding trite, however, every cloud has a silver lining, and the positive benefit from an election year is that people are sometimes forced to take a stand on issues such as aborticide. Perhaps we should forget all the political sloganeering and just get back to the record. After all, “by their fruits ye shall know them.”

August 5, 2004

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book is Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.

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