The Supreme Court Does the Pro-Life Movement a Favor

*Editorial Note: Pulpit & Pen continues in unrepentant sin and enabling of the ongoing sin of Jordan Hall. While it is my understanding that P&P does not plan to take down the content I contributed, any role I can play in reducing their traffic until they repent, I will. Thus I migrate this article here. 

The well-heeled professionals who lead the pro-life movement know what’s coming. This is how the game works: the pro-life leaders shamelessly raise money to “fight abortion” from the pew-sitting hoi polloi, then they use some of that money, (after making sure their yearly conferences, posh mutual-back-patting sessions in fancy hotels, and beer-soaked after-parties are funded), to lobby self-absorbed God-hating politicians who will listen to whoever’s dollar bills yell loudest. Those politicians then (occasionally) pass laws designed to make sure that mothers who murder their children can be taken more easily to a nearby hospital if the hit man’s knife slips. The pro-life leaders trumpet their victory. Church people donate more money. The pro-aborts grow bolder and richer while abandoning their junky old “clinics” in favor of fully modern, glitzy compounds whose entrances are (by design) that much farther from the public right-of-way. They comply with all relevant legal regulations, and all in all are a much less intimidating and forbidding presence in the community–and to the murderous mothers who feel the need to rip their child’s face off.

Then months later, a federal court or even SCOTUS strikes down the law, which allows the pro-life leaders to kick off yet another round of pleas for donations, but maybe this time with the tagline “EMERGENCY!!! Supreme Court strikes down Texas law! Give today to turn back the tide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”



Rinse and repeat.

A major plank of the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement is this: They say with their mouth that their goal is to abolish abortion entirely. They say they want to get there gradually. Sometimes they even show their hand to a surprising extent, saying things like “The devil got our country to this point by baby steps. We have to roll it back the same way”, (because as we all know, the Bible teaches that imitating the devil is a good and wise strategy.) But then their actions deliberately produce the precise opposite result – abolition gets further and further distant. Meanwhile, the consciences of the people of God are falsely assuaged (Jeremiah 8:5-12). The professionals have this under control. They just need another $100. Victory is just around the corner! Just need a couple more conservative SCOTUS judges!

Get real! Victory is not around the corner. We are not winning. Here’s a real and recent example – George W Bush had a relatively conservative SCOTUS and a fully Republican House and Senate. He allowed child sacrifice to expand in this nation. Trust not in
princesSupreme Court justices. Your voice is needed.
What is needed is state-wide consensus to abolish child sacrifice entirely, and then for the state government to ignore SCOTUS’ perversion of the Constitution when they strike down abolition.

Here’s the thing, though – the steel in the spine necessary to defy the federal beast won’t come in conjunction with regulation. It will only come when people repent and decide to do the right thing, period, come what may. The federal beast will strike back. They will cut funding. They will possibly send troops to impose the will of the wicked Washington DC elites against the will of the people. Will we back down at that point, or will we stand firm?

I can tell you this – nobody is going to risk that sort of confrontation when that which is in balance is some flimsy Swiss-cheese regulation that mandates that surgical abortuaries have hallways that are three feet wider than they currently are, and which say “you have to go to a place with wide hallways, and then it’s OK to murder your baby“. The spiritual power to look an evil government right in the eye and call them to repent and serve the true King, to trust in God, and then to say “But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up” (Daniel 3:18), will not come from compromising legislation that tries to use the devil’s methods against him, as if were wiser than the accuser who has been in the business of deceiving wiser and much longer-lived people than we for ~7000 years.

SCOTUS has just given the pro-life movement another opportunity to realise how not only their approach, but also the presuppositions that fuel it, are entirely backward. They trust in politicians while feigning allegiance to Jesus. Here God brings good out of evil by handing them yet another chance to do the right thing and take up abolition. Will they take it? Or will they waste another year and another million dead babies handing out “Pro-Life Leader of the Year” awards to each other?

Now therefore, O kings, show discernment; take warning, O judges of the earth.Worship the LORD with reverence and rejoice with trembling. Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way, for His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

–Psalm 2:10-12

"Be lukewarm and spewed"

Steve Hays renews his ill-advised critique of immediatism by... branching off into all sorts of issues that are not all that pertinent to immediatism.
\\It's revealing how abolitionists think their agitation gives them bragging rights\\

It's an uncharitable and in fact incorrect interpretation of my words to think that I/we have some sort of bragging rights.
Yet let the Lord protect us from such an attitude, to be sure!
Perhaps Steve thinks that the Apostle Paul was trying to claim bragging rights in Philippians 3 or 2 Corinthians 10-11.


\\Abortion isn't the only important issue that Christians need to be involved with\\


Nobody has said it is. Yet we have made the case again and again why the murder of 60 million and counting humans over the course of 42 years and counting should take a very, very high priority over even something like whether the gaystapo gets to tell 501c3 organisations whom they should marry.
Euthanasia - get back to me when it's legal to shoot senior citizens in the head willy-nilly and the death rate surpasses a few thousand a year. I'm not trying to sound callous here, but I actually think Steve is the one who is being callous and turning a blind eye toward child sacrifice. Nobody is saying that we should do nothing about those other things - those ought to be combated with immediatist calls to repentance and the Gospel of Jesus Christ the same as abortion ought to be. The Word of God is the weapon.
Steve also misses the fact that all of these are intertwined in many ways. Attack the powers of darkness in one area and you diminish it elsewhere too. But you have to use godly weapons and wisdom, not the worldly kind.


\\We need to resist secular totalitarianism in its various manifestations.\\

Ironic that Steve says this in defense of the pro life movement, which "resists secular totalitarianism" while teaming up with atheists, papists, eastern conciliarists, and other pagans.


\\the church has different body parts. Different members have different gifts. All Christians don't have the same duties or calling\\

Have this kind of discussion long enough with people and you can see this coming a mile away.
Steve runs afoul of the Bible at this point.

"Calling" is not the same as "gifting". And Steve needs to prove, not assume, that
1) variously gifted people can't address abortion with the Gospel
2) variously gifted people shouldn't address abortion with the Gospel
3) certain giftings mean you don't have an obligation to love your preborn neighbor who is being murdered down the street.


\\There's a need for Bible scholars, ethicists, and apologists.\\

A few, sure. Most churchgoing people are not in position to be those things, and that majority is too busy watching movies, amusing themselves, and "attending services" to do much of anything about anything, let alone sacrifice for the good of their neighbors being taken away to death.


\\Anti-abortion activism isn't the only way of loving your neighbor. \\

What about your preborn neighbor, 1.2 million or more of whom will die this year alone?


\\Visiting shut-ins and nursing home residents is a godly activity. Or caring for enfeebled parents.\\

Is Steve assuming these are mutually exclusive?


\\Moreover, it's very time-consuming just to be a breadwinner, as well as a husband and father\\

1) What does this have to do with immediatism, again?
2) Don't I know it! I have three children, one a newborn with Down Syndrome, two jobs, a 35 mile commute to the main one, and all the worries and difficulties of anyone else. I make time to speak up for my preborn neighbors, and all around me I see armchair QBs like Steve who whine they don't have time.
3) And this:

Steve Hays and escaping from morality

Jill Stanek, of pro-life, lazy PR stunt, and compromise-with-evil fame, has interacted at some length on this here note on immediatism by Russell Hunter. She posted an article by Steve Hays at Triablogue.


Steve has a lot of good to him, but in questions of immediatism/incrementalism he has shown that he is a very poor commentator. Either he just plain doesn't get it or he has some emotional investment that leads him into mistake after mistake.
Interestingly, as far as I can tell, Steve blogs or talks (in his capacity as employed by a seminary) an amazingly high amount of time. It's not as if he's in the thick of the fight, actually loving his preborn neighbors who are being ripped apart in his own locality. Jill may do silly PR stunts like sit in Boehner's office for some worthless ban, but that's not all she does. I'm more inclined to listen to what she says than what Steve says.

Nevertheless, I'll deal with this low-quality article. Steve's errors are as follows:

\\Incrementalists aren't really saving babies here and now\\

I never said they aren't. I said this:
"You actually have no idea whether it does."


\\Since that counterfactual never played out, he has no idea how many babies his preferred alternative would have saved\\

The astute reader will note I never made that positive claim. I'm responding to Steve and other incrementalists on their own grounds - the claim that immediatists abandon babies and that they save more. I ask for evidence that this claim is true. They respond with "You can't show that YOUR way saves more EITHER!"
Thus proving my point.


\\Alan doesn't specify what he means by "from the beginning." Is that an allusion to Roe v. Wade? \\

Yes.


\\Even if abortion opponents had deployed abolitionist tactics from the start (i.e. 1973), that's utterly irrelevant to what should be done at present.\\

Hmmm, I don't see why it's "utterly irrelevant". It might not map automatically onto what we do now, but then again it might. Does God change His prescriptions for how people are to deal with individual or corporate sin based on how many years have passed? Isn't it the case that we see again and again the calls to repentance become MORE strident and urgent, not less, the longer the sin obtains?


\\Suppose a ferry hits a sandbar and capsizes because the captain was drunk. I can swim, but many passengers can't. I can rescue some of them, but not all of them. \\

Disanalogous for the same reason the burning building analogy is.
http://blog.abolishhumanabortion.com/2013/03/immediatism-compromise-and-question-of.html


\\Suppose Raoul Wallenberg is about to issue passports to Jews and set up safe houses to protect them. \\

We have also already dealt with this.
http://blog.abolishhumanabortion.com/2015/02/would-aha-denounce-raoul-wallenberg.html
Steve rebutted our own article, here: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/02/leaves-without-fruit.html
However, it was of such poor quality that we decided ignoring it would be a better use of our time. It breaks no new ground, responds substantively to none of our points, and trades on numerous strawmen, the likes of which Steve has repeated over and over in talking about AHA and immediatism, sadly.


\\We could just as well say that if only presidents nominated social conservatives to the court in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, that would have saved far more lives than prolife efforts after the fact. But even if that's true, so what? How does that alternate history have any bearing on what prolifers should do right now? \\

IT DOESN'T BECAUSE IT'S PRAGMATISM.
That's what we keep saying! We should do what the Bible says instead!


\\How old were Scott Klusendorf and Jill Stanek in 1973? It's not as if they were in a position to do something different 42 years ago\\

The problem is not the people but the principles to which they adhere and according to which they act.



\\Even if some action might have been more successful had it been tried earlier, it doesn't follow that it would still be effective if attempted at a later date\\

"effective" - Pragmatism again, relying on human action and will rather than trusting in the providence of God.


\\incremental legislation is actually saving lives\\

PROVE that rather than asserting it.


\\Restrictions on abortion save real babies who'd otherwise die absent any restrictions whatsoever. That's not hypothetical. That's what's happening. Concrete results. The babies aren't "chimæræ."\\

I said the gains are. The gains in this case being what is gained in this fight by incrementalism vs by immediatism.
And again, Steve and Jill need to prove they're saving a significant number of babies, not just assert it.
Further, again, they need to show they're saving MORE by their preferred method than by immediatism, especially if they want to twist and torture the Bible to say that Jesus thinks that the right response to sin is to tell people to sin a little bit less, but only if they have the votes.


\\He doesn't know that AHA will succeed. In fact, he has no tangible evidence that it will probably succeed. It's all wishful thinking.\\

Duty belongs to us; results belong to God. That's what "reliant on the providence of God" means.
Jonah didn't know that Nineveh would repent. Might've been more advisable, humanly speaking, to go to Nineveh and tell them to stop killing each other; wounding, stealing from, and raping each other he'd get to later. Gotta make sure you have the votes.
If by "wishful thinking", Steve means that I believe I'm supposed to walk by faith and say what God says and let God make whatever He will out of that, I'm guilty.


\\The "gains" had reference to saving babies, but he redefines the "losses" as "compromise with evil."\\

Steve misunderstands what I meant by "gains", so his point here is moot.


\\saving the imaginary moral purity of abolitionists is the real priority\\

Here Steve says "imaginary moral purity"; what this means is that we will not compromise with evil and we will call all men to repent, right now, no matter what their sin is. Why is it bad to remain morally pure?


\\Not to be tainted by alleged moral compromise is their ultimate objective.\\

It's not "alleged". It's ACTUAL.
Also James 1:27Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

I know Steve believes in God, but he forgets to believe Him in these questions.