Saturday, March 1, 2008

More News about Barak H. Obama


Evangelicals for Barak H. Obama? See more discussion about the Democrat "wunderkind," BHO. See the post by Justin Taylor. He has some good discussion of Evangelicals and BHO.

1 comment:

Gina Marie Perpetua said...

While I maintain that Obama is certainly liberal and his stance on abortion is highly troublesome, there are some things about the article that irk me:

1) Citing Obama's new stance on the Teri Schiavo situation in order to elicit the sympathy of evangelicals isn't necessarily fair. For one, the Teri Schiavo incident isn't necessarily black/white. There is disagreement among evangelicals concerning the issue of playing God either by prolonging life longer than is necessary and ending life prematurely. However, there is a problem with the government having control over someone's feeding tube. But due to the laws in our own land it was technically the husband's legal right, though there is doubt about his moral right.

2) The civil war was about slavery to the extent that the issue was a key component in the state's rights debate. Abolitionists did not go to war; the governments of the confederacy and the union did in a conflict over state and federal rights. This is an unfair treatment of the facts of history for the sake of getting an emotional response from the reader. To say that we should go to war over abortion is hypocritical; don't we value life, even the life of the pro-choice person? How would we even begin to go to war over an issue that has no clear boundaries? Christian militarism is as dangerous as euthanasia in the hands of the government. Christians can make a much stronger, intellectual stimulating and emotionally gripping case for the pro-life movement without appealing to propaganda.

All this to say, I do find Obama's pro-life stance troublesome. I used to think that there were other moral issues besides abortion that the government should attend to, but that attitude leads to groups such as Sojourners, where issues such as poverty and foreign policy are moral issues (and they are because they involve ethics and are shaped by a person's morals), but abortion is considered a private issue. I find that highly unfair and a further devaluation of life.

In a government which is the people, Christians have two responsibilities to society: to affect the culture around them with the Gospel in order to change the lives and thinking of the people, and to be involved politically at every level, not just the presidential race. And culture is affected by love, not by propagandistic cries to a militaristic pro-life movement.