My Open Message To The Evangelicals

Wanted to share a dialog I've been having with an evangelical who first piqued my interest by suggesting that God may be using Glenn Beck as a channel. Obviously, I couldn't let a comment like "The Bible is replete with God using some of the least of us as examples to glorify Him" go unmocked. But then, after I called him a tw*t and a maniac and generally mocked evangelicals, something odd happened... it's never happened to me before but I had a fairly reasoned argument with a conservative. An evangelical conservative at that!

We covered issues like voting Republican. I wondered why evangelicals are always so keen to let abortion dominate their decision-making process when it comes to voting. "Really," I asked not unreasonably, "is this the only issue you ponder when you head to the polling station? Don't you give a sh*t about, I don't know, schools, jobs, taxes, etc.?"

I also wondered why they weren't cottoning on to the fact that abortion isn't going away any time soon and that Reps are only pretending they'd ever reverse Roe v. Wade as a carrot to attract evangelical votes. Evangelical guy replied by suggesting that poverty is the Democrat's equivalent of abortion - i.e., something they pretend to care about to motivate the base. I want to recycle my answer and post it here as an open message to all pro-lifers who keep on voting Republican and probably will in November:

I've heard the Democrats' position on poverty equated with the Republican's position on abortion before as if they're each party's special 'bait-and-switch' issue to motivate their respective bases. But it ain't the same.

"For ye have the poor always with you" I heard somewhere... but standards of living and opportunities for the poor can be improved and do, at least incrementally, under Democrat administrations and (I'd give Nixon credit) some Republican ones too. But abortion is either legal or it's not. There can't be incremental change. Those babies are either dead or they ain't.

So what have Republicans done to make evangelicals happy on abortion? Roe v. Wade was passed into law by a Republican chief justice presiding over a majority Republican Supreme Court. The case was brought to court, argued and decided under a Republican administration. It was still legal after two terms of 'pro-life' Reagan. It's still legal after two terms of 'pro-life' Bush.

But a Democrat could hold up the civil rights act, the minimum wage, free public education, the 8-hr work day, compulsory overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, equal pay, blah blah as examples of Democrats working toward eliminating poverty. But what could a Republican hold up to demonstrate their commitment to ending abortion? Why bother voting for them if you're a single-issue, pro-life evangelical?