What about abortion?

Plus Trump's hurricane lies

I have been open about my decision to support Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election, One frequent objection I get is that a true Christian and pro-life conservative cannot vote for Harris because of abortion. I used to think the same way, but even though I’m still pro-life, that argument holds less sway than it used to.

For starters, a lot of people make the case that abortion is the be-all and end-all of moral issues, but that isn’t necessarily the case. For example, a commenter on the platform formerly known as Twitter recently cited Proverbs 6:16-19 as a scripture text that proved voting Harris was incompatible with Christianity.

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Here’s what the verse says:

There are six things the Lord hates,
    seven that are detestable to him:
        haughty eyes,
        a lying tongue,
        hands that shed innocent blood,
         a heart that devises wicked schemes,
        feet that are quick to rush into evil,
         a false witness who pours out lies
        and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

The Twitter user focused on the “hands that shed innocent blood” phrase, but note that this example is third on the list of things the Lord hates. I freely acknowledge that shedding innocent blood is evil and I included elective abortion in that category, but taking the verse in context, “haughty eyes” (pride) and “a lying tongue” rank higher on the list of abominations (to use the King James translation). The Twitter commenter ignored how aptly those sins apply to the Republican candidate that he was supporting.

We should ask ourselves why the author of Proverbs places the sins of pride and dishonesty higher up the list of abominations than shedding innocent blood. It may be that God hates these sins because they often lead to the shedding of blood, but at the very least, it should make us reconsider the importance of these actions that too many of us often wink at and rationalize away.

And continuing on, the other bullet points on the list of things the Lord hates also scream “Trump!” A wicked heart, feet that rush to evil, a false witness, and stirring up conflict are all descriptors that warn us against support for Donald Trump, so why do so many Christians double down on The Former Guy and myopically focus on abortion while ignoring a plethora of other sins committed by the right?

If I had to guess, I’d say the reason is multifaceted. For one thing, abortion is a graphic sin that grips the imagination. It is difficult to justify or not have an emotional response to what abortion actually is: Brutally killing an unborn baby.

In our world of confirmation bias, it isn’t uncommon to talk to people who don’t believe that Trump is a liar. They either don’t hear the truth or discount it because they don’t like the source. The truth is not subjective but our acceptance of it can be.

But I think the focus is also the product of decades of intimate relations between the Christian Right and the Republican Party. The Christian Right has become so focused on abortion as a visible example of American sin that it has compromised it’s principles so that anyone who claims to be anti-abortion is considered to be automatically morally superior to anyone who is pro-choice.

But is that really the case? Take Donald Trump (please!). In recent years, Trump’s pro-life mask has slipped and he has increasingly let his pro-choice roots show. Much has been made of Minnesota’s abortion law that allegedly let babies that survived abortions be left to die. As it turns out, that is not the case since, as MPR News explains, Minnesota law still requires doctors to care for infants born alive but provides for palliative care for infants that will not survive despite the best efforts of doctors.

At any rate, even if Minnesota law did allow doctors to butcher infants that miraculously survived an abortion, that would be fine with Trump under his state-rights position on the issue. Per Trump, whatever a state wants to do on the issue is fine with him. (The new Republican platform also moves away from opposition to same-sex marriage.)

Is it true that any anti-abortion candidate is better than any pro-choice candidate? Consider a reductio ad absurdum in which Hitler is a candidate. He advocates for genocide against the Jews and other Untermenschen, but he’s anti-abortion because he wants to birth as many Aryan babies as possible. Would Hitler be a more moral candidate than, say, Kamala Harris? If you think so, your moral compass is bent.

If you acknowledge that other issues can outweigh abortion, then it becomes a matter of personal priorities and understanding as to where to draw the line. Is bearing false witness against the immigrant community and stoking racial hatred a sufficient reason to vote for a pro-choice candidate? How about provoking an attack on Congress while attempting to steal an election? I could go on adding weight to the scales.

Trump has other moral failings far beyond these. Aside from exhibiting a number of the abominations cited in Proverbs, Trump has been credibly accused of sexual assault and was found civilly liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll. If the church is rallying around someone determined by a jury to be a rapist just because he implausibly claims to be pro-life, the church has lost its way.

And then there is the fact that the anti-abortion voters have an outsized understanding of how the president affects abortion policy. I do think that Trump’s Supreme Court appointments were good ones (largely because he only picked from a shortlist created by the Federalist Society and didn’t pick his sister as he instinctively wanted to), but the victory in Dobbs has essentially removed the issue of abortion from the federal level and returned it to the states.

Pro-life voters should understand that if Kamala Harris wins, there will be no codification of Roe. Harris may desire this pro-abortion legislation, but Republicans are likely to control at least one house of Congress, rendering her desires moot. Even if Democrats narrowly retain control of Congress, it would take removal of the filibuster to pass such a bill and Democrats have been unwilling to take that step over the past four years.

Killing the filibuster would be extremely short-sighted by either party. It would enable the passage of bills by party-line votes in at least some cases, but it would also make it easier for the opposition to reverse those gains and enact their own priorities. The benefits of nuking the filibuster are probably overstated because both sides tend to lose a handful of moderates when they attempt to force through extremely partisan bills.

Pro-life voters should also understand that there will be no national abortion ban if Trump is elected. Trump does not want a national abortion ban, and even if he did, Republicans couldn’t pass one. To save time in explaining why, just reread the last two paragraphs and substitute “Trump” for “Harris” and “Republican” for “Democrat.”

What we have seen since Dobbs is the utter failure of Republican abortion policy. Despite the Supreme Court victory and passage of a number of state laws restricting abortion, the US abortion rate reversed a long-term decline during the term of the vaunted “pro-life” president, Donald J. Trump, and began to steadily increase. That increase has continued during the Biden Administration and will likely continue regardless of who becomes president next year.

Source: Guttmacher Institute

The reason for this is simple. The pro-life movement placed its emphasis on obtaining a top-down edict that would make abortion illegal without winning the hearts and minds of Americans on the issue. Pro-life groups did make some gains in persuading people that abortion was wrong through education and the use of technology to show life in the womb, but those gains have been largely reversed by the blowback from Dobbs.

Pro-life voters are in denial if they think that the Republican Party isn’t in the process of shunting them aside. The GOP is trying to have its cake and eat it too by keeping pro-life voters in the fold while increasingly trying to carve out a pro-choice position. Pro-life voters might want to ask themselves why not a single red state has banned abortion outright in the wake of Dobbs.

The bottom line for me is that Trump’s claims to be pro-life (or more accurately, anti-abortion, because the two are not the same) do not excuse his rampant corruption and dishonesty. It would be insane to vote for an authoritarian who tears down our constitutional guardrails on the flimsy premise that “at least he doesn’t support abortion.” That’s especially true given Trump’s increasingly wishy-washy positions on abortion and the fact that neither potential president is going to have much of an effect on the issue.

The conundrum for the pro-life reminds me of another Bible verse. In Matthew 16:26, Jesus cautioned, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Political gains are fleeting, but the tradeoffs made to win them can be a problem for much, much longer.

I’m not saying that positions on abortion (especially elective abortion) should not be considered when deciding which candidate to vote for. I am saying that a candidate’s position on abortion should not be viewed in isolation and used to excuse other serious problems with that candidate.

With all other things being equal, I’d pick a pro-life candidate over a pro-choice one, but the other things are seldom equal. That’s especially true in these times of political realignment in which the Democratic Party is moving back toward the center while Republicans embrace their radical (and somewhat leftist) wing.

HURRICANE LIES: I want to say a quick word about some of the claims that Donald Trump has made regarding the response to Hurricane Helene. I know a lot of people impacted by this storm, some of whom have only recently regained power, but Trump’s claims that the FEMA response is incompetent don’t mesh with reality.

No one expected the storm to drop as much as 24 inches of rain on North Carolina and Tennessee where mountains and hills channeled the water toward settlements rather than allowing it to disperse as I experienced in the flat Texas prairie during Hurricane Harvey, a Trump-era storm that also saw people homeless and without power for weeks after the storm. Large hurricanes typically entail long cleanups as Hurricane Milton may be about to demonstrate once again.

Here are a few points to consider:

• Republican Senator Thom Tillis attacked the conspiracy theories and falsehoods about the recovery, saying, “We have the resources that we need, we’re going to have to go back and pass more resources.”

• Georgia Governor Brian Kemp disputed Trump’s claim that he could not reach the Biden Administration after the storm.

• The stopgap spending bill passed to avoid a government shutdown in September did not include supplemental aid for FEMA because of deficit concerns. In the wake of the storm, Speaker Mike Johnson said the existing funding for FEMA was sufficient and has so far refused to call a special session to appropriate more money.

• Claims that the Biden Administration diverted FEMA money to care for illegal immigrants are false. As Forbes explains, the money for the storm recovery is in FEMA’s Disaster Relief fund. The money for migrants was appropriated to a separate fund, the Shelter and Services Program. Again, Congress appropriates money, not the president, and spending bills must start in the House.

• Ironically, the Washington Post reports that Trump did what he accuses Biden of doing. In 2019, the Trump Administration notified Congress during the hurricane season that it was diverting $155 million from FEMA’s Disaster Relief fund to pay for immigration detention space and temporary locations for asylum hearings. There is no evidence that the Biden Administration made a similar transfer.

• The Biden Administration is not restricting FEMA payouts to $750. The $750 payments are immediate aid for short-term needs. Disaster victims can apply for more substantial aid. This is a longstanding part of the program.

• The private helicopter pilot threatened with arrest was not warned away by FEMA or any other federal authority but by the fire chief from Lake Lure, NC. I have only seen the pilot’s side of the story, but it is standard practice for the FAA to declare Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs), which are basically no-fly zones for unauthorized aircraft, over disaster areas. TFRs prevent pilots from sight-seeing in affected areas and from interfering with emergency efforts. Disaster relief flights can be challenging and dangerous and should not be attempted by novices. DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg said, “No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.”

• Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-some insane asylum) tweeted, “They can control the weather” implying that someone (the JOOOS?) steered the hurricane to North Carolina. Aside from the dubious logic that would make Biden-Harris want to inflict a disaster on a swing state where Democrats are gaining ground, this technology exists only inside MTG’s head. It also defies logic that the government has the technological wherewithal to direct a hurricane but not mount an effective response.

• Last but not least, those pictures of Trump wading through floodwaters are AI-generated fakes. However, the picture below of Abraham Lincoln assisting in rescue efforts is totally genuine.

Twitter screenshot

Trump’s lies about the hurricane response are undoubtedly intended to destroy trust in the Biden-Harris Administration, but Trump is literally playing with people’s lives. People who don’t believe the government is responding to the disaster won’t get the help they need. What was it the verse said about pouring out lies, stirring up conflict, and shedding innocent blood?

HOUSE MOVES TOWARD DEMS: The Cook Political Report moved five congressional races in the Democratic direction. Control of the House and Senate is still a tossup.

ELECTORAL UPDATE: Today’s Electoral College update is unchanged. Real Clear Politics shows a tie in Pennsylvania, but FiveThirtyEight shows a Harris lead. North Carolina is nearly as close, but Trump is holding on to a fraction-of-a-point lead.

Looking back over the Electoral Updates from the past few weeks, it’s easy to see how stagnant the race is.

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