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I wonder if any of you sometimes feel that someone of the outgroup just made a good move or just a good point (in other words, produced useful propaganda) in the culture war that takes you by surprise. A long time ago I noticed some liberals quoting a statement from a Christian pastor regarding abortion and I now decided to trace it back to the original source. According to Snopes it’s from pastor Dave Barnhart of the Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 2018:
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
I have to say that even though I doubt I’d ever agree with him on these issues, it sounds kind of…witty? Snappy? Clever? It all comes across as on point. It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it. If I had to find something about it to nitpick, the only thing I can come up with is that the people who usually resent the patriarchy, condescension and political incorrectness are normally suburban middle-class college-educated white liberal culture warriors and their mulatto allies of similar backgrounds, not any of the groups the pastor mentioned, especially not widows. I can’t even tell why he brought them up at all; maybe it seemed to be a better idea than to bring up single mothers. And I might also argue that yeah, advocating for groups that are morally complicated as hell is probably not a good political move. Which also makes me sound kind of an asshole though.
I don't know what pro-life people Pastor Barnhart knows, but the ones I've known are the same people doing a bunch of stuff to help out single mothers ("widows," lol), and adopt or foster abandoned children ("orphans" would be way easier to help, there's a lot of court input around the kids that is a huge drag on these relationships. My impression is that actual orphans are usually immediately adopted, often by relatives).
Balancing the needs of the current community and the needs of lawbreakers is indeed complicated, and I'm not surprised that what is mostly a coalition of mothers or would be mothers doesn't have a good solution for that.
Once I tried going to an Arab church, where the pastor spent the whole homily complaining about men who prefer to smoke hookah with their friends, rather than going to church. He didn't seem to be addressing them directly, so I suppose they were not there that morning, either. Did he think their wives and daughters would go home and shame them, and they would start coming again? Seems unlikely. We didn't go back. This feels like that. Somewhere, there are probably some people who might be like he describes. It's a big country, with a lot of different flavors of hypocrite in it. But aiming sermons at someone, somewhere, hoping it'll be shared on social media until they find it seems... bad. Immoral, maybe. In dereliction of his duty as a pastor. My impression of him as a pastor, based on this, is very, very poor.
Earlier this year my aunt shared a Facebook post from Dan Rather saying something like, "Last time I checked, pro-lifers weren't lining up to adopt children."
Having higher standards than Dan Rather, I took a few minutes to look it up, and found, as I expected, that evangelicals do adopt a lot of children, but also that the media have been running occasional hit pieces on evangelical adoption for at least a decade.
Yeah, even in the 90s that take was significantly behind the times in the US, when Christians were adopting toddlers from Korea, Africa, and former USSR countries, but then there were scandals about how many of those children weren't actually "unwanted" either, their relatives were lied to by adoption agencies.
I've known several families try to adopt, and one ended up with a toddler after many years in the process, another ended up with a surrogate carrying an IVF fetus from another family, and one still hasn't succeeded at adopting, despite being willing to adopt older kids, siblings, and go through the court process with parents who are unable to keep them.
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