Prolife people need to really understand something

Last updated on: December 17, 2015 at 12:09 am by Mark Shea

Prolife people need to really understand something 2015-12-16T23:30:29-07:00 Mark Shea

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You know that thing of how every election year, Republicans lie to you and say that “This is the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime! If we don’t elect Ura Prolife-Sucker (R-Everwhere) then the Most Evil Democrat Ever will win and will immediately turn the US into hell on earth!” (Recall that in 2008 Obama was going to inaugurate the End of Days by signing the Freedom of Choice Act the moment he was inaugurated–and that FOCA instantly vanished the moment he was inaugurated).

Well, the thing is, the Left has to play this game too with *their* base to stampede them to the voting booth. So every election year, PP and similar groups send out the panic-grams to the Faithful on the Left warning that this is the Most Important Election of our Time and only the faithful on the Left can stop the imminent destruction of our precious right to kill our children etc.

Right wingers sometimes read that as “We’ve got ’em on the run! We’re winning! We’re gonna overturn Roe!!!”

No. We’re not gonna overturn Roe. We’re gonna see a maintenance of Roe as we have seen for 40 years because it is in the interest of both parties to do so. Both gin up their bases with hysteria about it, both get money and votes from it and both would be insane (politically speaking) to alter the status quo.

Why? 20% of Americans want abortion abolished, 20% want abortion on demand for any reason without apology and 60% don’t like it, don’t want to outlaw it, and don’t want to think about it ever again. Both parties know that and exploit it for their mutual gain and benefit.

If you want to stop abortion, start thinking about how to change the culture, not overturn Roe, cuz that won’t happen. My recommendation is to begin with getting serious about not punishing poor people for having children but instead helping them make a living wage so they can support their children.

Understand: I’d love to see Roe overturned. I’d also like to see time travel and warp drive. But those won’t happen either. Should we keep praying for that day to come? Of course. But until our actions match instead of contradicting our prayers, we won’t see much change.

Our present strategy, stretching back 35 years, has been to vote for the lesser of two evils on the theory that this would somehow end in something other than evil. Result: the prolife movement has arrived at its present predicament of enslavement to a party that uses the unborn as human shields while it pursues (surprise!) evil. And now we see the spectacle of Catholics who spend most of their energy making war on the Church’s teaching when it comes to torture, the death penalty, unjust war, immigrants and a host of other issues in order to keep a “place at the table” of the party that exploits them. The alleged “core issues” are almost entirely ignored while the allege “prudential judgments” (gun zealotry, treating the poor like garbage, fighting the minimum wage, dogmatic opposition to any discussion of climate change) are plainly and obviously the *real* core non-negotiables.

And so, at the end of 35 years of conditioning by Movement Conservatism, the only people who have moved have been anti-abortion-but-not-prolife conservative Christians who have reached the point where their subculture prefers a swine like Donald Trump to Pope Francis, who they routinely smear as a Communist, a Stalinist, “Che Guevara’s pope”, a heretic and an enemy of the Faith.

Clearly, the Lesser of Two Evils strategy is an abject failure and needs to be discarded for a new approach.

What approach? Uncompromisingly embrace the Church’s *whole* teaching and be *more* prolife, not less. It’s that simple. Stop whittling away at and watering down the teaching of the Church in order to trim the gospel to fit the many many many ways in which the GOP chooses death.

Will we lose a place at the Table of our political kingmakers? Quite possibly. But then again, the apostles had no such place and they still conquered Rome.

Trust in Go, not princes. Believe and live the *whole* gospel of life, not just the bits you like.

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