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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.
The surface content of this speech isn't hard to address: Being strongly against abortion and understanding it to be actual infanticide means judging your peers, judging your friends, judging your family, and in some cases judging yourself. And judgement (which Christians especially have to understand) isn't free righteousness: it means burning bridges or having them burned for you, it means condemning your society in general, and it means permanently ending your ability to be mentally at ease with the state of the world around you, because abortion isn't a faraway war with dubious link to your circle of responsibilities, but something that most likely happens near you and is perpetrated by people you know and have to find productive ways to engage with regardless. It's not very different from being a child and realizing your parents are terrible people. Especially when you will (and, as a Christian, should) continue to love them through their ugliness.
I don't expect any pro-choicer to be wowed by these considerations, but why would they be? That's not the substance of the question. That's whether abortion is bad. Which is all anyone cares about here, and that's the real problem with this sermon. Pro-lifers are supposed to oppose abortion because it's systemic infanticide; if (as the sermon pretends) the problem is that people are relishing in righteous feelings over serious righteous conduct, why isn't the main fault that they're instrumentalizing what should be a serious cause for personal gain? The whole frame makes no sense without assuming that pro-lifers are wrong on the substance first (or that would necessarily be the most important thing) and should care more about this pastor's pet causes instead. The speech is blatantly about laundering those ideas and not interrogating anyone's sinful hearts. It's not just the usual annoying and self-indulgent partisan fap session, but essentially dishonest in presentation.
The other points just obviously don't have substance. How are orphans and widows being thrown under the bus? No one knows. What specifically do you want to question about "patriarchy"? No one knows. The idea unifying these examples is that abortion is suspect because it's one issue that does not revolve around finding and justifying the debts you owe to other people, and that this is sort of the "legitimate default attitude" if you're a morally serious person. You probably feel it's hard to address decisively because this is a very peculiar idea that doesn't get defended as seriously as it would have to be.
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