Webloggin » Christian Right + Abortion = Hillary Clinton

I recently had an e-mail exchange with Windham, Maine Pastor Joseph Swank, a seemingly rather well connected blogger who wrote an article entitled, Never Vote For An Abortion Candidate. While most of the article was making sure it was clear that he believed abortion to be wrong, he did manage to touch on his subject - that his moral conviction on abortion would not allow him to vote for any candidate who is not pro-life. His solution is to sit the election out.

There has been a lot of talk in recent months about the Religious Right coming to terms with a Rudy Giuliani campaign in the general election next year. Some of the talk has been geared toward putting up a third party candidate; some of the talk has been about staying home on election day.

A betting man with a sense of reality (sorry, Ron Paul supporters) would place his money on Giuliani being the GOP nominee. I can’t say that he’s my first preference but the reality is that he is proving himself to be the best overall candidate. If he wins the party nomination it will be because he deserves it.

Yes, I have some reservations about Rudy Giuliani, as any pro-life, pro-marriage conservative would. Pastor Swanks and I probably want the same thing for this country, and I’m sure it’s not only limited to abortion. But with all due respect to the well-intended pastor, I deplore his approach on so many levels, and as I described to him, that approach will leave the pro-life cause in darkness for years to come.

Six Supreme Court Justices will be 70 or older before the next President completes his or her first year in office (one will be just shy of 90). A two term president could realistically leave a decades long footprint on our society when he or she appoints close to half of the court. Can someone who shares Pastor Swanks position please explain to me how a Hillary dominated Supreme Court will advance the pro-life cause in any way?

Opting out of participation in 2008 (whether through not voting or voting for a 3rd party candidate) will guarantee that Roe v. Wade is never addressed in our life time. This is what I seem to have failed to make Pastor Swank understand: any action that helps Hillary Clinton get elected will ensure years of a nationwide abortion policy.

Giuliani, on the other hand, is running with a rather unique position, what I call the authentic pro-choice position. It’s a position I have challenged people on before: the difference between being pro-choice and pro-abortion and how many pro-choice arguments are really pro-abortion arguements. Giuliani is campaigning on the theme that abortion is a legal necessity, that Roe v. Wade is a bad ruling, that it should be up to the States, that it should be discouraged and reduced and that he has a track record on reducing abortion and increasing adoption in New York. His real political position on abortion is his vow to nominate strict constructionists to the bench.

That should be what we’re focusing on. Instead of drilling Giuliani over and over about his position on abortion, we should be drilling him over and over about his position on federal court nominations, with emphasis on the Supreme Court. He needs to demonstrate over and over a consistency on issues like judicial activism and Constitutional interpretation. We need to know that he will veto any federal legislation that empowers or funds abortion and will lend support to overturning Roe v. Wade and support States Rights on this issue.

Other than that, there is no magic button to push that would give a president the ability to make abortion legal or illegal. A president simply does not have the power to directly make changes to abortion. It is a judicial issue and what happens to the courts will determine the future of a nationwide abortion policy in this country.

This is not the time for a large voting bloc to take the ball and go home. Some of us tried that in 2006 and as I promised back then, conservative agendas are on the sidelines and we’re struggling at this point to keep them from dying altogether.

Pastor Swank, with all due respect, can’t see the trees for the forest. He is convinced that Christ will hold it against him for voting for “murder” but failed to explain how sitting out the election is not doing just that, on a potentially larger scale. There are differences between Guiliani and Clinton, even on abortion.

But not only abortion. Do the Joseph Swanks of the world realize that staying home on abortion also means staying home on other key issues of life, including national security? He responded to this idea by saying, “the nation can dry up if need be but i won’t vote for a person who espouses murder.”

I have to wonder what truly motivates Pastor Swank because a person fighting for the value of life and decency would appreciate the fact that these things can only be achieved by trying to change the country and you don’t change the country (at least not for the better) by staying home on election day. Staying home on election day is what I want the other folks to do, what I want the pro-abortionists to do, not the pro-lifers.

If you have a building on fire and there are five people to resuce and you can save four of them by sacrificing one, do you let all five perish because your convictions prevent you from sacrificing the one? If you believe as Pastor Swank does, than you just might.

It doesn’t take conviction to not vote. It takes conviction to do what’s best, even if it doesn’t feel the best.

[Discuss this article with Otto over at The Otto Show...]