*culture is not optional

“The irony about the election of our first black president, an irony which I wish did not exist, is that while blacks have risen from the indignities and injustice of slavery in which their bodies were sold and consumed as property, and have endured segregation and second-class citizen status and racial discrimination, and have now one of their own elected to the highest office in the land, this very president-elect, Barack Obama, will increase the death toll among black human beings if he fulfills his promise to enact a Freedom of Choice Act, which will serve as a firewall around Roe v. Wade, the Dred Scott decision of our times.”

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2008/11/post-election-c.html

Thanks for your response, Jeff. I know a lot of Christians—including African Americans—who voted for Barack Obama are deeply pained about the numbers of abortions in the United States, no matter what they believe about how abortion should be approached from a legislative angle. Seems like every four years, we all need to recommit ourselves to work together across racial, political and religious lines to work to significantly reduce abortions, which is work we can do now instead of just waiting for a drastic reversal that may or may not happen.

Just a brief addition to my last comment—I suppose abortion, as well as racism, could be seen as another issue for which there’s no stopping or standing along a sign-posted way to a common goal: no abortions.

I have a problem with those that honestly believe abortion to truly morally repugnant yet support candidates who believe that it should be legal for women to choose to kill babies because those candidates supposedly have some more holistic “pro-life” platform or because they like the rest of the candidate’s platform.

Can you imagine the following scenario?

Lynching is legal and left up to the individual to decide to lynch or not lynch. Candidate A says he would love to see lynchings decrease but rather than ban the practice, he thinks a more holistic approach would be to develop programs and education to address the root causes of the practice with the hope that some day lynchings would be safe, legal, and rare.

Does making something illegal automatically decrease its incidence. Of course not. But the logic of the above statement is clearly ludicrous, yet this is precisely Sen. Obama’s stance. Can you imagine the “progressives” at cino voting for such a candidate because they liked the rest of his platform? The only reason we aren’t similarly horrified if one were to replace “lynchings” with “abortion” is because we have been co-opted by non-Christian thinking on these matters.

Now, back to a central point of your essay and my original response and that is the need for action in addition to words. What will President-Elect Obama’s actions be? If he says he wants to reduce abortions yet promises to sign the Freedom of Choice Act if brought to his desk, if he plans opening the funding gates on Embryonic Stem Cell Research, if he reverses the “Mexico City” policy which prohibits taxpayer dollars from funding groups that perform or promote abortions overseas.

We will have to wait and see. But if he follows through with those promises, I hope to see the “progressives” here at cino call him out on such “actions”.

Kirstin,

Just for clarification, I would like to add that I am all for holistic approaches. Because I am for a legal ban on abortion, does not mean that I would de-emphasize education, crisis pregnancy care, single mother support, addressing poverty and healthcare, and most of all, Gospel transformation in individual hearts. How those things are achieved is open for debate, but I do not question the need for them. I fully agree that we can’t merely say that we are for banning abortion in our words, and not take action in these other areas. This is a valid critique of some in the Christian Right.

However, I simply can’t imagine supporting a candidate who did not share the moral imperative of seeking to legally ban this genocidal practice regardless of anything else he or she stands for.

I apologize for derailing this onto abortion. That was not my intent. Rather, I was attempting to connect to your point about walking the talk and I thought that the Mere Comments piece appropriately tied the “action” of abortion in with the question of how racism continues to “corrode our institutions” as you so well put it.

Thanks for acknowledging that this is somewhat of a derailment of the discussion suggested by the article. If someone wants to suggest it, we can take this somewhere else, but until then…

Your lynching scenario is interesting, Jeff, and does put a different spin on the topic. I think you’re right that people would have a much harder time supporting a ‘moderate’ position when it came to hanging people. I think it helps explain why some pro-life Christians (maybe an unfortunately small percentage) also cannot in good conscience support war and capital punishment. Should any kind of killing be “safe, legal and rare”?

However, I think there is an important difference in enforcing legislation between lynching and abortion. Let me pre-emptively say that I don’t think the difficulty of enforcing an abortion ban should justify abortion’s perpetuation, but I’m just pointing this out to illustrate the limits of your parallel and how going beyond those limits exposes a whole new realm of considerations.

If abortion were illegal, imagine a desperate woman who secretly contracts with a doctor for an abortion, but the doctor is actually an undercover cop—does the woman get arrested and forced to have her child in prison? And what happens to the child when such a mother is likely deemed unfit to care for the baby she intended to abort? There’s something devastatingly sad about such a situation, and perhaps that’s a situation we need to be willing to struggle with. But it doesn’t come into play with legal enforcement against lynching, which just prevents people from hanging other people and doesn’t result in new, needy lives.

Are there any resources you know of that are wrestling imaginatively with problems like this—as in all of the situations that would need to be addressed if Roe vs. Wade were ever overturned and other legislation were to take its place? Because legislation may be a starting point, but there are a lot of other questions that will require lots of thought, creativity and compassion, which isn’t usually part of the conversations I hear around this topic.

I would also hope that progressives who participate on this online community would continue to advocate with Obama’s administration for pro-life causes across the board, whether they voted for him or not. I’m also aware that not everyone who watches this site thinks that overturning Roe vs. Wade would be the ultimate solution many hope it would be. But for those who would advocate for that as a part of the solution, perhaps this is the place to dream creatively about how to deal with the new challenges such an overturning would present, in addition to maintaining the discussion about what can be done right now to affirm life under all circumstances.

Kirstin, thank you for your article. I’m encouraged by your exortation not to stop or stand, here. I am deeply moved, also, to the point I hardly know what to say.

I found a link today to Stanley Hauerwas’ thoughts (pre-election) on Obama.  I thought you might find the link interesting.

Thank you for your words, Denise. I’m encouraged and humbled.

The piece you linked to is interesting, indeed, and applicable on a number of levels. Also interesting: commenter Michael Iafrate was a presenter at Practicing Resurrection this year on DIY music.

One of the ways in which the Hauerwas piece is a good reminder within this discussion is that in itself, choosing a topic of discussion is not neutral, but can be used as a tool of distraction. I think that often happens when it comes to racism: it’s an uncomfortable contentious topic, so we simply deflect the conversation to another subject—often another important subject and often we don’t realize we’re doing it, but…