One of the occasional commenters here, and a kindly man from across the pond, Russ, wrote this which I thought would be worth repeating, with his permission (the video, by the way, IS bizarre):
This is a response I made to one of my cousins, Chad, a Bible Belt Bible thumper, concerning a comment he made to my daughter about this video, abortion and President Obama.
Chad,
I, too, think this is a truly bizarre video, but I don’t think the basic concern is the strangeness of the video.
You said, “I can’t help but wonder why he [President Obama], and all of the people who voted for him, would want to celebrate the barbaric destruction of human life.”
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that Christians have never shied away from killing anyone when it suits their purposes, and that includes those not yet born. Christians have always celebrated their own barbaric destruction of human life. From the inception of Christianity, Christians have happily massacred infidels as well as other Christians they considered heretics. During the centuries-long Inquisitions Christians killed millions. The belt buckles of Hitler’s Nazi Party were emblazoned with “Gott Mit Uns.” Today, in the US several hundred children of Christian Science parents will die from easily remedied medical concerns due only to the fact that their parents are Christians of that particular type. In Africa, as I write this, some Christian parent or clergyman is killing a child with his own hands, and many others are being tortured or maimed, only because of the influence of the Bible verse, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” on the fundamentalist Christian mind. Under the Roman Catholic influence parents have permitted the rape of their children for as long as there has been a Roman Catholic church, and it continues today especially where secular controls are not strong enough to rein in the Christian church’s institutionally sanctioned rape of the innocent. Christians in Africa are intentionally perpetuating the AIDS plague, which is killing millions, by destroying the condoms that are donated by the WHO and others. Past and present, Christians have always celebrated their own barbaric destruction of human life. The barbaric destruction of human life is even celebrated in the Christian’s moral guidebook, The Holy Bible.
It seems that much of the time Christian concern for a life stops at birth. Christians seem to have significantly diminished concern for the already birthed. Here in the US Christians want to make sure poor people with children do not have access to health care, and they want to deny access to health care to households headed by gay people. Christians don’t seem to be very caring or loving or concerned for the welfare of others.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that here in the US it is Christians themselves who take advantage of this legal right at a higher rate than any other religious identification. It’s not Hindus; it’s not Muslims; it’s not even non-believers. It’s Christians. Roman Catholic Christians and fundamentalist Christians run neck-and-neck every year for the highest abortion rates out of all US religious identifications. Christians need safe legal abortions. Christians are not going to stop having unprotected sex that results in conception, so they need, and use, their right to safe legal abortions. Nearly every abortion in the US is had by a Christian who has been encouraged to have that abortion by some other Christian, and it is an abortion performed by yet another Christian. It is Christians themselves who create the need for abortions, encourage others to have them and perform the procedures.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that Roe vs Wade was enacted by Christians in a country that was well over 90 percent Christian. Every single US President has self-identified as Christian, including President Obama. At the time Roe v Wade was made law every US Senator and every US Representative self-identified as Christian. So the law was put in place by Christians who recognized the need for a majority-Christian society to have access to safe abortions.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that it is Christians themselves who create the need for abortions. When Christians nurture ignorance of human reproduction, discourage the use of contraceptives, and psychologically abuse those who get pregnant outside marriage, they set up ideal conditions for abortions to be sought after. Add this to the fact that Christians want to destroy any social safety net that would help care for the child of a single mother and it is obvious that Christians are pushing woman toward getting pregnant as well as having abortions.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that Roe v Wade obligates no one to have an abortion. Christians could stop having unprotected sex, but they won’t. Christians could take every pregnancy full-term, but they won’t.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that some of the billions of dollars that Christians pour into their religious enterprise every year could be diverted to guaranteeing support for Christian child-mothers. For instance, the expenditures by Christians for a single anti-abortion rally in Washington, D. C. amount to millions and millions of dollars. What does it cost for 250,000 Christians to travel to DC? What’s the cost of their food? Lodging? The advertising? Printing costs? Or, just the parking fees? It can easily cost a quarter of a million dollars to rear a child from birth through high school, but Christians like rallies more than they care for children who are already born. What does an anti-gay rights rally cost? US Christians donate hundreds of billions of dollars a year to their Christian social clubs they call churches, but only a small fraction of it – less than ten percent overall – goes to any humanitarian cause. The rest of it goes into salaries, insurances, advertising, settling child-rape trials(currently Christians are paying out about 3 billion a year for this), buying up properties, vehicle fleets, retirement packages, deposits to offshore accounts, and other costs associated with the Christian religious industry. But, notice that their billions spent for all these things do not quell the need for Christians to have access to safe legal abortions. If abortion is such an important issue, apparently all that money is being misspent.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that it does not appear as though any of the power Christians claim to have at their disposal has any affect. Obviously, all the pooled monetary resources does essentially zip. Prayer clearly is doing nothing. Christians acknowledge the powerlessness of prayer when they throw so much money at things. For all the millions upon millions of prayers Christians pray each day, Christians still need safe legal abortions. Prayer does not work to stop unprotected sex by Christians. Prayer does not work to stop abortions gotten by Christians. Being Christian, with faith, belief and God on their side, does not work to stop abortion. So, anti-abortion Christians turn to the only influence they have at their disposal to stop all those gotten-almost-exclusively-by-Christians abortions: secular law.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that overturning Roe v Wade will not stop Christian woman from getting abortions, nor will it stop the also-Christian influences that so often coerce a woman to abort. Overturning Roe v Wade will simply make abortions move from the safety of the operating theater into the unsafe back-alley. It seems that this is what anti-abortion Christians want. Did abortions happen prior to Roe v Wade? Yep. Who got them then? Young Christian women. Why? Coercion by Christian social influences, mostly. Will overturning Roe v Wade change that? No.
If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that you railing against abortion – again an almost entirely Christian undertaking in the US – is also you railing against other Christians and is an acknowledgement that not all Christians imagine their god and their Christianity the way you imagine yours. Christians are not all getting the same messages. That Christians disagree with Christians tells us that none of you is listening to anything reliable, so reproductive matters, including sex, contraception, and abortion should remain matters of personal choice. If Christianity was binding on anyone; if Christianity had force, power or influence; and, if the Christian claims of answered prayers, miracles and changed lives were true, we would see the abortion rate by US Christians, and thus the entire US abortion rate drop to essentially zero. Obviously, the over two hundred million Americans self-identifying as Christians are not all on the same page, and many millions of those same US Christians see the god they like as one that leaves abortion up to their own personal decision-making.
