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I watched coverage of the Notre Dame debacle on Sunday and was struck by two things:
1) the erosion of both religious integrity and personal conviction.
2) the illogical framing of the abortion debate.
As someone who has studied the Bible extensively and owns every published version in circulation (and has studied various verses comparatively) I'm not going to engage in a Scripture battle of what God says about life in the womb, or when molecular biology says that life begins, or how the argument isn't, as my friend Katie has said, not "over when life begins; the debate is over when life is worthy of protection." I will simply say this: the biggest perceived threat to Christianity doesn't come from The Gays, or from Hollywood, or from booze, or from the "Rock of Love Bus"; it comes from within Christianity itself. The problem manifests itself in the people who warm the pews and praise God on Sundays but betray Him with their mouths and actions on Monday. The problem continues from this when our kids see hypocritical behavior from authority within the church. They see it in the egregious transgressions of those who eagerly clamor to lead the flock. They see it from a university that claims Catholicism yet honors a president who has made it a point to favor abortion groups with regards to policy, groups that go against a tenant of the Catholic faith.
The erosion of the religious integrity comes when you have people who cherry pick which of God's laws they want to follow and try to validate it with moral relativism.
This is why there is a decline in pastoral enrollment, why "for every American who joins the Catholic Church, four others leave."
To pass off responsibility for these misdeeds ignores the problem with those who claim the faith and perpetuates the hypocrisy. In my opinion, such Christians are no better than people like Pat Robertson or Benny Hinn, people who claim to talk for God and embarrass themselves whenever given the chance.
I'm also tired of the way in which people attempt to frame this issue. I'll come right out and say it, at the expense of losing popularity with those who can't tolerate diversity in opinion: I am also all for choice.
Completely and totally.
I am all for the woman's right to choose which form of birth control she wants to use, be it the birth control pill, the condom, or straight up pulling out; I am all for her deciding whether or not she wants to have sex on days when she is most fertile; I am all for her choice in eschewing sex completely, if that's what she wants to do. Supporting a woman's choice as to what happens with her body and supporting a kid's choice as to what happens with hers or his are not mutually exclusive things. The problem isn't with sex education, it's with apathy. Case in point: we've exponentially increased the amount spent on sex ed programs yet the teen birthrate has risen. People know how babies are made.
When President Obama said that we must find common ground I cringed a bit. This isn't Cap and Trade, it isn't an economic principle, it's not an opinion that either side holds; to find common ground one must back off a fundamental principle of what they believe.“The problem here is that we’re trivializing abortion,” said Rev. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life. It doesn't just trivialize abortion, it also trivializes the beliefs of either side to assume that they can just lay down fundamental beliefs for the sake of false political harmony.
Says Kim from the Mother of All Conservatives:
Yesterday, President Obama said in his commencement speech at Notre Dame that abortion is an issue over which we should just agree to disagree. This is a view that I and many others like me who see abortion as an abomination and a moral outrage can not accept. I can not just agree to disagree on the termination of a million innocent and defenseless human beings a year.
Additionally, the president's pledge to work to decrease the amount of abortions sent a very convoluted message. An interesting point from the American Daily Review:
If abortion is good, if the child inside of the mother is nothing more than a lifeless blob that won’t be missed, and is dispensable, then why seek to reduce the number of abortions? Obama, in an attempt to appeal to both sides of
