Why abortion matters...

People wonder why we can't just "get over it" and often we're slandered as religious nuts or rubes attached to a single issue. But what a politicians believes about abortion matters, and often in a transcending way.

First it says something about the person's own spiritual and religious life. A person who claims Christianity as their faith and supports abortion is a person who either is willfully ignorant of the historic and continuing understanding of the Faith on this issue or is a person who's faith, in the end, is of the kind where it doesn't matter much in their day to day existence. That speaks to their character, whether their convictions are firm or malleable and what they would be willing to sacrifice in the short term for the sake of their own power and prestige.

Secondly a politician's stand on abortion says something about how they view the power of government. Our constitution was founded on the idea that human rights come, not from governments, but from God and that the government is instituted to protect those rights. This reasoning is why slavery, rightly, collapsed. The people who were enslaved were clearly human and thus were endowed, like everyone, with rights from God, rights that superseded the whims of politicians or courts, rights that needed to be recognized.

Whether you're the person who buys a pack of condoms or a scientist in the lab peering into the small smallest crevice of the human genome the debate over the beginning of life is over. At conception an entity is created and that entity, despite its size or appearance is human, a being awaiting only nine months of safety and care to emerge. Therefore that being, despite its pre-born status, has human rights. Just as slavery was morally wrong because the humanity of the slaves could not be denied so abortion is wrong for the same cause. A politician who supports abortion is saying, like the slave holders before them, that rights are bestowed by government, not God, and that government can decide that certain people are not allowed the full spectrum of rights not because of their behavior but because of their essence. This is a radical departure from the vision of the Founders of this country and people often hear the "choice" rhetoric without hearing the sinister implications behind it. Without the basic right to life of all humans every other right, every other ideal of our country, is meaningless.

It is quite true that the Faith is about more than the politics of abortion. There is a wide spectrum of issues about which our Faith can guide us and they all should be addressed. Each Christian, before they are anything else, is a member of the Kingdom of God and each should participate in the civil affairs of their nation with Kingdom values transcending all others. But very few issues cut to the heart of a person's inner most reality then the issue of abortion, where life and death can be decided on a whim and over 50 million have already perished by "choice".