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A Car Fire of a Form Letter and the False Gospel of Elimination

A Car Fire of a Form Letter and the False Gospel of Elimination

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 7:59 pm by Mary Pezzulo

A Car Fire of a Form Letter and the False Gospel of Elimination 2017-02-24T19:59:30-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Because, what I see is a few pleasantries and four paragraphs about access to abortion, in response to a constituent writing to him about affordable daycare and maternity leave. In response to a question about how to give women more choices, he gave not just a pro-choice but a genuinely pro-abortion boilerplate.

It was Dave Barry who said that if you were stranded with a flat tire on the side of the road, a Republican wouldn’t stop to help you at all. A Democrat would do everything they could to help and would end up setting your car on fire. And as an answer to a question about maternity leave and daycare for a woman who stated she didn’t want an abortion, this letter definitely qualifies as a car fire.

I think this is what is wrong with our country, in a nutshell: both major political parties rely upon eliminating people for convenience. And eliminating people is something that a Christian must never do. People, to us, are Christ. Any time you seek to solve a problem by eliminating a person, you’re declaring you have no king but Cesar and abandoning Christ to die.

Look at the rhetoric of the Republican party– not just Trump but nearly all of them– back a thousand years ago in 2016 when this whole nightmare started. I watched those Republican debates. I heard men competing with one another about how aggressively they’d eliminate undocumented migrants, how they’d eliminate dangerous people in other countries, how quickly they’d kick the poor off of Medicaid and other services so they, too, could disappear. That was sin. That was selling Christ for a chance to become Caesar. And they seem to be making good on their promise as quickly as they can, all while cloaking themselves in the Lord’s Prayer and the trappings of religious liberty.

And what was our other option? Who were the people calling for preserving the social safety net, not working quite so hard to eliminate undocumented migrants or turn away refugees, and perhaps not bombing quite so many countries? They were people who act like Representative Kennedy here, who when asked about maternity leave and daycare are liable to spout four paragraphs about eliminating pregnancies.

Are all Republicans as horrendous as Trump? No. Some are worse and some are better. Are all Democrats as cluelessly bloodthirsty as this letter from Kennedy seems to suggest? No. Some are worse and some are better. Are Christians forbidden to have any commerce with any political party? No. It’s a perfectly legitimate choice to make a rational calculation about which of them would cause less misery and vote for that one, in spite of the sins they advocate, if you have proportionate reason, and I did, and it wasn’t 45. But we must never embrace any political party’s sins along with the hope that they cause less misery. And whichever group is in power has to be supported insofar as they do good, but relentlessly opposed when they try to do evil. We cannot accept the elimination of babies– nor can we accept the elimination of migrants, poor people and refugees.

We live in a culture of death. We have to be perfectly honest about the fact that all ends of our political spectrum embrace the elimination of persons as a viable answer, and we never can. If we’re not clear about this we’ll find ourselves abandoning Christ and sacrificing human beings to idols.

We can never embrace the false gospel of elimination. Ours is the Gospel of Christ.

(Image via Pixabay)

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