Yesterday, we looked at the problem of trying to impose, well, not exactly Christian morals, but those fragments of Christian sexual ethics that appeal to right wing narcissistic misogynists with a fetish for nihilist power. It turns out that in a culture which is increasingly out of touch with even the most elementary aspects of the gospel (due largely to the spectacular failure of Christians who claim to be its greatest embodiments to live it) that people resent being pushed around by 13% of the population and forced under pain of prison and even death to knuckle under to their demands.
There was a time when the MAGA cult used to say stuff like “Love Them Both”. Consistent Life Ethic folk do still say that–and mean it. Their goal remains what it has always been, to win hearts and minds to love of the human person from conception to natural death.
But the MAGA Cult of death? That ship sailed long ago. The gospel exists to accessorize their lust for power now:
And as the Trump plans for authoritarian rule make clear, people like this look to imposition of tyranny on 87% of the population by the 13% by Any Means Necessary as their plan for ushering in the Prolife Millennium. And that will create a perfectly predictable backlash, particularly when, drunk with power in their own little MAGA fiefdoms, the Cult sees some small successes in sentencing post-abortive women to hard time and learns the exact wrong lesson: that infliction of cruelty on post-abortive women is the way to go:
Legislators in seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas—sought to add more tools to law enforcement officials’ arsenal this year when they introduced bills to allow people who get abortions to be prosecuted for murder. In all seven states, homicide is punishable by the death penalty. None of those bills have so far become law.
Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky introduced legislation to treat fetuses as people and allow abortions to be prosecuted as homicides. The bills either died in committee or failed to advance before the state’s legislative sessions ended.
Lawmakers in other states mounted similar attacks. In Missouri, Republican State Sen. Mike Moon introduced the “Abolition of Abortion” Act, which would give fetuses the same rights as people and allow murder charges to be filed against anyone who gets or performs an abortion. The bill was heard in May but did not advance further before Missouri’s legislative session ended.
Republican State Sen. Warren Hamilton in Oklahoma introduced a bill to strike language from the state’s criminal code prohibiting the prosecution of women for “the death of her own unborn child.” This would have allowed prosecutors to charge people who terminate pregnancies with felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $100,000 in fines. The bill did not advance before the end of Oklahoma’s legislative session. In Texas, former Republican State Rep. Bryan Slaton introduced a similar bill to treat fertilized embryos as people, thus allowing abortions to be treated the same as capital murder. Republican State Sen. Bob Hall introduced an identical bill in the state senate. The bills were referred to committee but did not advance further before the end of Texas’s legislative session.
In South Carolina, Republican State Rep. Rob Harris introduced a bill to change the definition of a “person” to include “an unborn child at every stage of development from fertilization until birth,” thus allowing people who get abortions to be charged with murder. The bill attracted 21 co-sponsors and advanced to committee but ultimately floundered amid outcry over the fact that, due to South Carolina’s existing homicide laws, the legislation would have allowed people to get the death penalty for having an abortion.
While none of these bills became law, the fact that they were introduced at all shows that abortion opponents are done pretending they don’t want to incarcerate or kill people who have abortions. Laws criminalizing abortion have already had severe consequences. When abortions are criminalized, people who become pregnant are forced into tragic circumstances. A woman in Texas was forced to give birth to a baby with no brain. Children have been forced to become mothers. Because Florida law prevented her from getting an abortion, Deborah Dobert was forced to carry to term a baby with no kidneys, despite knowing he would die upon birth. Her son, Milo, died in her arms shortly after he was born. “I watched my child take his first breath,” Dobert said, “and I held him as he took his last one.”
And make no mistake, they are learning that less as the numbers are coming in on the actual, real world results of the Dobbs decision. In the handful of Red states that are punishing abortions rather than doing a damn thing to help women in crisis pregnancies, the lesson the Cult is learning is that it “works”–for now. But because conservative fanatics are blind to the larger picture (that they are engaged in a war on 87% of the population) the long-term picture is not looking good for the MAGA “prolife” Cult of Death’s attempt to ram draconian punishments, insane travel restrictions, and harsh punishments on even miscarrying women down the throats of the overwhelming bulk of the population. Instead, they won some short-sighted battles, but have driven abortion rates up nationally, as well as galvanizing a huge percentage of the population against them who were once empathetic to the prolife cause. They have also sparked a host of strategies among opponents of the draconian plans for circumventing the mad schemes of Republicans to micromanage the lives of others. Listen and learn:
I know. I know. The fact that I am warning of the immense backlash the “prolife” cult of authoritarian power is preparing for itself instead focusing simply and solely on the babies who were not aborted means I am “secretly pro-abortion”. That is how this monomaniac heresy always proceeds and a huge part of why it constantly winds up using the unborn it claims to care about as human shields for a host of grave evils it supports in its slavery to the MAGA antichrist religion. But the reality is that I can and do regard abortion as gravely evil while also thinking that the imposition of an idiotic tyranny that is certain to backfire is the wrong way to achieve the protection of human life, just as I deeply believe the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ without thinking the way to foster adoration for the Blessed Sacrament is not to punish every American who believes no such thing.
All this goes back to a fundamental theological flaw in the “prolife” heresy now at war, not only with most Americans, but with the Church and the Holy Father: a disbelief in the power of grace to win hearts and minds and a choice to trust in law, force, fear, and punishment to usher in the Kingdom of God. It cannot and will never work. Deacon Nathan Allen is right:
The real battle all along was converting the culture, and the pro-life movement utterly blew that. By becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, they have made the task of converting the culture all that much harder. People don’t trust hypocrites, and anybody who was saying back in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president that character matters in our leaders, and then supported Trump, is a hypocrite.
And the supreme irony, of course, is that–as ever–everything Trump touches dies and everyone who puts their trust in him is betrayed. While the Cult hailed as “The Most Prolife President Ever” a man who is transparently uninterested in the dignity of human life…
…and prostituted themselves utterly for him, he could see plainly the folly and futility of their fantasy of abolishing abortion and said so to their faces. He did it because a) he knows their policies here are massively unpopular and b) he knows that no matter how much he insults them to their faces, they will still go on prostituting themselves to him because they have one monomaniac idea controlling them: Vote GOP or the Baby Gets It.
As a result, the “prolife” movement is carefully and systematically positioning itself for spectacular failure in the eyes of both God and man. It is a living breathing laboratory example of Screwtape’s observation:
To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return–that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.
And yet, as ever, God is ready to welcome back every person who has abandoned Christ to whore themselves out to nihilist power. But if history is any indication, the Cult will have to learn from its own self-inflicted suffering and loss before they hit bottom and look up.
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Mark these words: Before the decade is out, we will see women executed for miscarriages. It’s not if, it’s when. The regime the “pro-life” crowd intends to impose on us will be fundamentally no different at all than what the Taliban imposes on women in Afghanistan.
And that is why young people are abandoning Christianity by the million. It’s not because they simply disagree with its tenets or because they haven’t been sufficiently evangelized. It’s because the only version of it they will ever experience or witness in this country is grotesquely evil. It far more resembles Khmer Rouge ideology than anything described in the Gospels.