Fred Clark's memory of how and when conservative evangelicals lighted on abortion as the burning moral issue du jour matches mine:
In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.
Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.
Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.
That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.
In all my years growing up Southern Baptist, I never heard the word "abortion" mentioned once in church or Sunday School. Not once.
But as Fred Clark rightly says, "By the time of the 1988 elections, everyone in American evangelicalism was wholly opposed to legal abortion and everyone in American evangelicalism was pretending that this had always been the case." And now Southern Baptists vote in overwhelming percentages for Republican candidates because, as my cousins who are Southern Baptist ministers will freely tell you, God and the bible command us to vote for the party that upholds life (and opposes unholy same-sex marriage). The evangelical Christian right has become a powerhouse (and almost uniform) pro-Republican voting block primarily due to the claim that the GOP is the party of life, and real Christians must vote life and believe that a just-fertilized ovum has full human ontological status.
Because the bible says so.
And the "biblically-based" theocratic movement to conflate the Republican party with God and Christian truth and the defense of life has now become so . . . totally divorced from reality . . . that the legislature of one of the most Christian and most Republican and most solidly conservative states in the nation, Oklahoma, can invite a Baptist minister to preach to it and hear a sermon in which he says the following (this starts around 10:10):
Righteousness exalts the nation. I asked God would he let me say something else today. . . . We need to overturn the shedding of innocent blood in this land. Fifty-million babies. You know where they all are? All those babies on the crystal sea before God. I can see 'em out there on the sea: Coochie coo! And look at God the Father: Ahhh!
And so here's the situation in which a significant number of American citizens find ourselves as the 2012 elections approach: our state legislative bodies are overtly instructed by pastors representing peculiar and highly partisan religiopolitical stances to rule as outright theocratic bodies imposing "God's law" on all citizens, regardless of the philosophical or religious stances held by any citizens other than those of the theocratic ruling party.
And we're instructed to believe that every fetus ever aborted for any and all reasons and at any state of fetal development, from the very moment of conception forward, is a little baby floating on the crystal sea before God, crying, Coochie coo! as God the Father opens his arms to the floating babies and coos back, Ahhh! We're asked not only to believe this (and does the bible not say so, and who disbelieves the bible?) because the future of our nation depends on it.
We're asked to believe and act on this vision of the millions of babies crying, Coochie coo! on the crystal sea because God will punish us severely--God will take our lives--if we do not remember those 50 million floating, cooing babies. God will take our lives to punish us for failing to be pro-life. Just to show us what pro-life really means.
This is how crazy it has gotten now in the nation with the soul of a church. We Americans are asked, because God commands this of us through His chosen representatives in our land, to endorse, to build our lives and our laws, around a philosophy of creeping lifeism in which the ontological human status of pre-born babies is pushed ineluctably back to the moment of conception and then back further to the moment of pre-conception, since, as Pastor Aaron Fruh of Alabama has just maintained, "heterophobic" supporters of marriage equality are attacking "unborn children who will never see the light of day" when they argue for the right of same-sex couples to marry.
This is how crazy things have gotten now in the nation with the soul of a church, due to the alliance right-wing Catholics formed with right-wing evangelicals in the latter decades of the 20th century--with the active and ongoing complicity of Catholic centrists who claim to be all about careful reason and moderation and dispassionate civil discourse. We are asked to relinquish political and cultural control of our nation--religious freedom demands this, after all!--to people who command us to imagine that permitting people of the same sex to marry results in the murder of unconceived babies who will not have a chance even to reach the state of the 50 million aborted zygotes who float on the crystal sea before God crying, Coochie coo!
And we're expected to stretch our imaginations further and imagine that a woman whose brain had atrophied and whose body was being kept alive artificially by technological means was murdered by her husband, even when the results of a careful autopsy of the "murdered" woman proved what doctors had repeatedly and over the course of several years advised her family: that her brain had effectively died and her condition was irreversible.
But because I'm prone to fits of rationality and critical thinking, here's what I imagine, instead, as I listen to Pastors Ledbetter and Fruh--when I should be imagining fifty million babies floating on the crystal sea and crying, Coochie coo! And when I should be imagining a woman whose brain had atrophied being murdered when her husband chose to remove artificial means of life support that were keeping her body "alive." And when I need desperately to imagine, since my salvation depends on it, those tragic never-born babies murdered by heterophobic supporters of same-sex marriage:
When I should have all those holy imaginings firmly fixed in my head, I'll confess that I'm imagining, instead, that a significant percentage of my fellow citizens have plain taken leave of their senses. Because they've been relentlessly bombarded for so long now by such a steady, unremitting stream of "biblical" and "theological" inanity, much of it uttered by their religious teachers and echoed by political partisans allied to them, that they no longer know how to think straight.
How to distinguish fact from fiction, plain truth from moronic science and imbecilic philosophy. How to recognize when they're being gulled into voting "pro-life" by political leaders whose concern for zygotes floating on the crystal sea and crying, Coochie coo! is absolute and unshakable.
But who cry for war, war, and war again when post-born babies' lives are under consideration. And who do next to nothing to assure that post-born babies and their mothers have adequate nutrition, healthcare, opportunities for fulfilling human lives, sound educations, and good jobs. And who are therefore pro-life in no meaningful sense at all, except when never-born babies murdered by heterophobic supporters of gay marriage or aborted zygotes are the subject of the conversation.
And then it's all as plain and as pro-life as the nose on anyone's faces: it's all about God the Father crying, Ahhh! as fifty million murdered babies float on the crystal sea crying, Coochie coo! It's all about the bible and reason and natural law and religious freedom.
And who in his or her right mind would reject any of those good things?
(To appreciate Pastor Ledbetter's sermon fully, you really do have to watch it--if you can bear doing so. I dare you. And h/t to Fred Clark at Slactivist for first alerting me to Pastor Ledbetter's sermon.)
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