Had Enough Yet?

Many of my fellow Christians who are also politically conservative see abortion as a non-negotiable issue. It is not hard to understand. Unborn children epitomize the concept of "the least of us". They are the most vulnerable, most powerless in our society and have served as a political football for decades.

For those of my political and faith persuasion our concern for the unborn means that we are expected and obligated to show up in droves on election day to vote for Republicans. No matter how incompetent or odious the GOP candidate might be, the alternative is almost certainly an avowedly  pro-abortion Democrat, someone who is somewhere on the spectrum between reluctantly supporting abortion and wildly enthusiastic about abortion as a secular sacrament.

So understandably many Christians were cheered by the rather lopsided win for Republicans in the elections last fall. Perhaps a new era was dawning and the GOP would finally actually respond to our faithful support by making substantive policy changes to protect the unborn.

Nope.

Today the GOP House of Representatives, with an overwhelming majority largely sent to Congress by people like me, botched and failed to advance a very popular bill preventing abortion after 20 weeks. This should have been an easy bill to pass but it was completely bungled (assuming it wasn't callously sabotaged by the GOP, something that seems pretty likely).

The social media backlash has been swift, angry and exhibits a sense of being fed-up. Ross Douthat tweeted:

The idea that GOP is a party of moneyed interests posing as a culturally conservative party is, um, not always without empirical support.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 22, 2015

Mollie Hemmingway wrote a scathing piece, Why Everyone Should Be Terrified By The GOP’s Abortion Bill Debacle, including video from two female Republican supporting the bill when it didn't matter before helping to block it today.

Here is a poorly kept secret. The GOP establishment leadership doesn't really care about abortion except as a flashy, emotional issue that drivs voters to the polls. What they mostly care about is keeping their moneyed donors happy. Rod Dreher had this to say "Once again, social conservatives are useful idiots for the Koch Party." Pretty much.

It might be time to divorce the Republican party and to disavow these vain attempts at soft theonomy and realize that we are getting played as chumps by politicians. We are making very little progress in actual protection of the unborn while at the same time being unequally yoked with the party of preemptive war and capital punishment.

The historical Anabaptists look wiser every day.