the glory and the horror

Please, please, explain to me how this is going to create more of a culture of life?

From the Washington Post:

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

“We have been communicating with his transition staff” almost daily, Richards said. “We expect to see a real change.”

Also, Obama has changed his transition website, but just a few days ago, it read thusly (thanks Google cache):

Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.

This is not a culture of life. It is a culture that will encourage more murder. If he chooses to remove restrictions, increasing access to abortion, he is increasing access to murder. That is NOT a culture of life.

I pray that God gives him wisdom and convicts him of his sin in this area.

Where is the hope? I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. Where is the hope? The hope that each of us has is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed, or what great things we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people, and that’s where our hope is in this country; that’s where our hope is in life.

- Chuck Colson, from the prologue to Steven Curtis Chapman’s Heaven in the Real World

The power of the Holy Spirit changes the hearts and minds of men, such that the people who were once in rebellion are now drawn to see their purpose in Christ, to be reconciled to the Father. That is our hope. When hearts and minds are radically transformed by the Holy Spirit, only then can we truly make a difference in our society. We cannot think that the efforts of a pagan governments are sufficient to address the problems of this world. They are a poor substitute, and worse, some actually actively suppress the Gospel at times.

Our hope is in Christ. It was before the election, and remains so after the election.

May the Lord use this to glorify His name and bring more people to a greater understanding of His grace and our purpose.

For those who have been following the last few posts, please consider your voting issues in terms of priorities. There will be no ideal candidate for the Christian. There will be better and worse candidates.

The question is which will implement a government most in line with basic Christian principles. In Scripture, what does God explicitly require of the government, and what does God explicitly require of His people?

Should the government make murder harder or easier to occur? Should the Church or the government have primary responsibility for taking care of the poor? Which takes higher priority – definitively protecting persons from murder, or attempting to protect them from poverty?

I am not Catholic, but this op-ed piece in Newsweek written by a Roman Catholic directed at pro-life Roman Catholics who support Obama is particularly cogent and applicable to evangelicals this election as well.

I think he makes spectacular points about the secondary nature of the purported “culture of life” that Obama will bring about, and his blatant lack of respect for unborn life.

As Cardinal George’s letter indicated, the Catholic Church’s teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion involves a first principle of justice that can be known by reason, that’s one of the building blocks of a just society, and that ought never be compromised—which is why, for example, Catholic legislators were morally obliged to oppose legal segregation (another practice once upheld by a Supreme Court decision that denied human beings the full protection of the laws). Questions of war and peace, social-welfare policy, environmental policy and economic policy, on the other hand, are matters of prudential judgment on which people who affirm the same principles of Catholic social doctrine can reasonably differ. The pro-life, pro-Obama Catholics are thus putting the full weigh of their moral argument on contingent prudential judgments that, by definition, cannot bear that weight.

While I do not appeal to the same sources of authority, I think the reasoning is still consistent and quite similar for evangelicals. While it is good to encourage good stewardship of the environment, to give generously and graciously to those in need, to show them the redemptive power of the Gospel in word and deed, all those things are done to people who are ALIVE. Abortion, and opening up wider access to abortion, immediately precludes any possibility of the above. Scripture has designated government to protect persons, and punish evildoers, not allow the murder of the most defenseless and voiceless. Life is more fundamental than quality of life.

Any person who does not govern with that understanding will never have my vote.

As people have probably figured out if you read my blog or know me at all, I tend to be a fairly classic conservative in terms of not liking tons of federal government involvement in things, not being a huge fan of large entitlement programs, pro-life, pro-capital punishment (justly administered), and so on.

So Senator Obama is not exactly my cup of tea. That’s pretty easy for me.

However, there has been a clear shift among certain segments of Christendom that claim to be evangelical and pro-life, yet have swung pretty far into Obama-fandom, something which I don’t really understand.

Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton and a member of the President’s Council for Bioethics, recently wrote a very well-written, insightful and indicting article on Senator Obama’s positions and actions, in the form of sponsored legislation, as they relate to the sanctity of life, especially the unborn.

I strongly urge you to read it, but here are a few quotes for those who don’t want to read it all:

In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

[Obama] has promised that ”the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (known as FOCA)… In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would ”sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.”

Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism, how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral principle, not just prudence. These questions reveal the character and judgment of each man. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect. Across the spectrum of pro-life concerns for the unborn, he would deny these small and vulnerable members of the human family the basic protection of the laws.

I don’t know how anyone who is pro-life could ever claim that Obama is in line with that position. I’m not saying that pro-life Christians must be single-issue voters, but I think John Piper said it well in this article:

No endorsement of any single issue qualifies a person to hold public office. Being pro-life does not make a person a good governor, mayor, or president. But there are numerous single issues that disqualify a person from public office.

If you’re a Christian and are considering voting for Obama, please prayerfully consider what that means for the millions of unborn children who have been murdered in the US, and the many more who will be murdered around the world should he become president. Our responsibility is to protect and care for those who cannot do so for themselves, and that includes interventions like adoption and crisis preganancy counseling, as well as preventing the government from making it easier to kill them.

International Justice Mission – 2008 Houston Benefit Dinner on 30 October 2008.

Our friend, Scott, let us know about this, and we’ll be attending. If anyone else is interested, you can register at the link above.

IJM is a Christian “human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression.” I first heard about them at Urbana almost a decade ago, and have been keeping track of their work. They work largely in the developing world, although when the need arises, they work in developed countries as well.

A quick blurb from their website points out their accomplishments in 2007.

In 2007, IJM casework brought tangible relief to 1663 victims of oppression.

* 267 people were freed from slavery
* 207 women and children were freed from forced prostitution
* 393 people received citizenship and 567 received upgraded legal status
* 172 people recovered illegally seized property
* 281 perpetrators were arrested

If you feel so led, please join us on the 30th.

I just wanted to highlight a new rule that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering implementing to protect the right of conscience for health care providers.

You can read more about it at The Center Blog, which my friend Isaac contributes to.

I think it is very important that the right of conscience, in general, and specifically in medicine, be preserved in the US. It is better to be free to live according to your conscience, and it would be nice to not have your medical license revoked simply because you are opposed to abortion or some other procedure.

LA Times Opinion – Bush never lied to us about Iraq

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

This is something that has bugged me for some time. While I’m not the biggest fan of Bush’s war in Iraq (and it is clear that the planners really underplanned this one), one count that I think he has clearly been exonerated on is the accusation that he DELIBERATELY and WILLFULLY misled the public. He was operating on the intelligence he had at the time, as did Congress in authorizing the use of force.

Now, if the intelligence was faulty, well, that’s another thing. That’s part of the nature of the beast. You’re trying to get information from a source that doesn’t want to give it to you, and they are parties who have a vested interest in disinformation as well. So what do you do? You go with what you have and you have to make decisions on the information you have. In this case, the information was wrong, but there was no way to know that from where Bush/Congress sat in 2002-2003.

The point is that the left is trying to score points by intentionally ignoring their own findings. There were multiple reports put out by Congress itself that said Bush did not intentionally mislead anyone. There is a significant difference between the morality of lying and just being mistaken.

Keep in mind that this opinion piece is written by the assistant editor of The New Republic, a well-known center-left magazine.

The relative parity of the various candidates this late in the primary season is probably something we haven’t seen in a while. Super Tuesday may actually not help much, at the rate the other primaries are being divvied up.

This could be a very interesting year, because this may signal a change among the electorate, showing that they’re just not that interested in the options available this year and/or are so divided that it leaves room for something or someone else to step in.

I’m not actually advocating a third party candidate, but it seems to this uneducated observer that unless Super Tuesday obviously goes for one candidate in each party, which I seriously doubt, then we’ve probably got some interesting developments in the internal party discussions for each side.

I know some of my readers don’t like to characterize themselves as single-issue voters, but I thought I’d throw this out for your perusal.

Frankly, it sickens me.

Obama is the most pro-abortion candidate ever

That, coupled with my leanings towards libertarianism, and I can basically promise you I will not be voting for Obama.