Reproductive Control & Anti-Abortion

Following the lead of Robert George.

Kudos to you, sir.

The latest anti-abortion film.

Late last month, after federal authorities arrested a Tennessee pastor on charges of aiding and abetting an international parental kidnapping, students at Liberty University Law School saw one of their exam questions come to life.

A report from the principally Catholic anti-contraception rally in Maryland reveals a constituency whose calls for religious freedom appear to be at the cost of freedom for all others.

In 2002, Catholic theologian Christine Gudorf predicted that “within a generation or two,” Catholic hierarchical teaching will change to encourage contraception in marriage and to allow some abortions.

In the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to require that insurance plans cover some non-abortion related reproductive health care, the bishops have launched a political campaign. Will US Catholics follow?

Macho, blind, dishonest, kidnapped by aliens. In recent years, detractors have spat plenty of venomous words at Beatriz Paredes, former national director of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “I abort you, Beatriz,” one editor even wrote in his takedown. A known feminist, Paredes stood by while her PRI colleagues in various states approved constitutional reforms declaring life as the moment of conception and penalizing the practice of abortion, leading to more investigations and arrests of women. While abortion was illegal before, it was practiced clandestinely without prosecutions in most places. Since 2008, 19 states have passed similar measures— most recently in Baja and San Luis Potosi just last month.

Jeffress thinks it’s fine to interrogate candidates’ religious beliefs. Indeed there may be times when it is legitimate to ask whether a candidate’s religious positions would have a direct impact on policy. Religious Right activist David Barton has declared that the Bible is opposed to progressive taxation, capital gains taxes, collective bargaining, and the minimum wage. It’s legitimate to ask whether candidates who praise Barton’s work—such as Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich—share those opinions. Similarly, when a presidential candidate like Bachmann calls a Christian Reconstructionist thinker her “mentor,” it is not religious bigotry to ask whether she shares his views about the Constitution and the roles of religion and government in society. But questioning the authenticity or soundness of a candidate’s religious views, for example to have Barton and Glenn Beck rail against what they believe are President Obama’s religious views on the nature of salvation, seems far less appropriate—or useful.

I call this campaign “theocratic” as a Baptist minister who holds all human life to be sacred. But issues around human life are not as simple as the “personhood” proponents believe.