I used to link a lot to the brave, challenging, must-read columns from Bible Girl, aka Julie Lyons, who was editor of the Dallas Observer, our local alt-weekly. Bible Girl is a white Pentecostal who has for many years worshiped at a black church. She's fearlessly honest in her writing, and her weekly blog column was always a treat. But some time ago, Julie left the paper, and I quit seeing her column.
Well, she's back with a column about why, even though she remembers a Nigerian pastor prophesying in 2001 that after the Bush years, God would give America a black president, and even though she's a pro-life D will not consider voting Republican until the GOP gets serious about what she regards as racial justice, she will not vote for Barack Obama. The reason? Abortion. Excerpt:
It is interesting how Scripture virtually ignores a king’s political or military accomplishments. Jeroboam II, for example, presided over a time of great prosperity and influence for Israel. Yet the Bible dismisses these things in a few brusque sentences. Jeroboam II ultimately failed in keeping God’s commands, and he was judged to be evil. Because he called evil good, he caused the people to do evil as well. End of story; over and out.Which brings me to abortion again. I’m one of those people who was never passionate about this issue until I had a child of my own -- kind of like the folks who don’t care about famine in faraway places until they see the pictures of starving children. God touched my conscience one day concerning abortion; today I passionately oppose it and call myself a pro-life Democrat.
I see it as an elemental thing: the value of life. You couldn’t identify an issue that cuts to the core more than that.
I won’t say I’m the deepest thinker on this subject. It’s just simple to me. I will put no other god before me, neither will I play God and make decisions reserved solely for him. Every time man has been given the power to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, hideous things have resulted.
The Middle Passage. The Holocaust. The Nazis’ extermination of the mentally retarded and gypsies. Genocide in Armenia, Rwanda, Darfur. The executions of innocents in Texas and other states. Abortion.
More:
Yet I can’t escape the words of Kings. God will judge a leader by one thing: his faithfulness to God’s Word on matters for which the Christian position is clear.No, that’s not a fashionable concept these days. It won’t win me many friends in the circles I travel. I do understand that we don’t live in a theocracy; our nation is governed by a constitution. As voters, we deal in a continuum of hope and reality. We don’t get everything we want.
Well, whoever said the world would understand or approve of followers of Jesus Christ?
I believe that Barack Obama will be our next president; the hand of God is upon him. If you read Kings, though, that can cut many ways.
But I will not give him my vote.
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"Neither do zygotes or embryos"
Um, what exactly do you think you started life as, if not an embryo?
Um, what exactly do you think you started life as, if not an embryo?
I am not one now. I also presumably "started life" as a sperm and an egg, made of atoms that come from a supernova and passed through a billion organisms (as did yours), but that too is only incidental.
The ideology you are trying to justify toward embryos is vitalist on the one hand, and one of vicarious or narcissistic identification with them on the other.
My professional work is in developmental biology/embryology. Embryos are beautiful, they are intricate. It easy to project wishful thoughts upon them. But there are many things easily imagined about them which are not reality or intellectually serious. Things that mostly come from, and from a desire to sustain, ancient fertility cultic beliefs and determinisms.
Rob G,
When or where have I EVER said we want "sexual freedom without any attendant responsibility."???
Still waiting...
"Embryos are beautiful, they are intricate..."
Good of you to notice. Now why would you want to destroy one?
Maybe it would be helpful to think of the whole issue this way: A painting starts with a canvas. Destroy that canvas at any stage in the game, and you destroy the artwork.
Life starts with an embryo. Destroy what develops at any stage, and you've destroyed life. Destroying life -- knowingly and willfully -- is murder. Murder is unacceptable in our society.
Except when it comes to babies.
Good of you to notice. Now why would you want to destroy one?
They are, like all material things in of themselves, mere forms.
Maybe it would be helpful to think of the whole issue this way: A painting starts with a canvas. Destroy that canvas at any stage in the game, and you destroy the artwork.
If I burn down a warehouse full of canvas, how many future Rembrandts and Picassos and Rauschenbergs and Joe Smith paintings have I destroyed? Zero.
The fallacy in that analogy is the one of Calvinist determinism. Perhaps every single aborted fetus was destined to be worse than Adolf Hitler, but the Divine Plan is such that almost every single one does not make it.
Life starts with an embryo. Destroy what develops at any stage, and you've destroyed life. Destroying life -- knowingly and willfully -- is murder. Murder is unacceptable in our society. Except when it comes to babies.
More games with semantics and magical thinking. Not a single one of these sentences is a truth that can stand up on its own, and the aggregate is diminuition and misdefinition of the term, and idea of, life. If any of it were true an omelette would consist of a massacre of chickens.
Show me that a human embryo has a soul, rather than you wishfully pretending that it does. Show me how it differs from a caviar egg or a monkey embryo.
Human beings have always limited their own numbers. The means have never been pretty, but they reflect the imperfection of people and of the world they lived in. To say that we can suspend the practices is to say that perfection has been reached- or at least, that we will hold people we don't like to it.
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