Stupid Christians and Abortion Politics
By: William B. Turner
Tags: Abortion, Christians, 2016 Election, Donald Trump

Donald Trump

The Christian obsession with abortion is bad for our country.

All of the really bad policy decisions in the United States since at least 1981 have come from Republicans. Ronald Reagan started the era of enormous budget deficits with his dumb “supply side” tax cut, which stirred some economic growth, but in old fashioned, Keynesian ways, no matter what his “conservative” sheep say.

Bill Clinton balanced the budget with a small tax increase before Republicans gained control of Congress in his first midterm election. He signed the Republicans’ “welfare reform” law and their repeal of the Glass — Steagall Act, a New Deal banking law, both of which were bad ideas that he might have resisted more strongly, but they were characteristically Republican ideas.

Then George W. Bush let the September 11 attacks happen and used the outpouring of support he enjoyed during a (real) emergency to conceal his malfeasance with the invasion of Afghanistan. He then lied to the public to gin up support for the invasion of Iraq, which some have called the biggest mistake in U.S. history. He also pushed two tax cuts and reversed the budget surpluses that Clinton had achieved, returning us to the deficits Reagan created.

Most of us are not incapable of learning. There is in the United States, however, a powerful rump of people who refuse to learn anything and so keep voting for Republicans even though Republican policies are bad for the country. The keys to this stupidity are that the rump is mostly Christian and obsessed with abortion.

The Democrats are honest about believing that women should be able to terminate a pregnancy if they choose. This honesty allows Republicans to win Christian votes just by pandering on abortion alone. So it is that Trump voters supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a good Catholic who has taken the position of opponents of abortion rights with respect to contraceptives (but has only two children of his own).

Republicans, of courses, are greedy and mean spirited. Opponents of abortion rights often gush about their supposed concern for “the unborn,” but their actions routinely betray the reality that they really just want to control everyone else’s sex life (everyone except their own leaders, whom they leave free to molest children pretty much at will). So Kavanaugh repeated uncritically the absurd claim of a Catholic group that contraceptives induce abortions, which is consistent with the official Catholic Church position that all contraceptive use is immoral.

As one would expect, making contraceptives widely available is by far the most effective way to reduce abortion, so anyone who rationally wants to minimize abortion would also advocate distribution of contraceptives.

The Christian position of opposing both abortion rights and distribution of contraceptives is irrational. Reliably taking an irrational position on a policy question allows elected officials to win votes by advocating all manner of irrational policies, as Republicans routinely do. They continue to bruit this fantasy that tax cuts pay for themselves despite overwhelming historical evidence that they do not. They support “abstinence only” sex education, even though all of the evidence shows that it does not work.

The sole rationality behind everything the Republican Party does is to protect the wealth and privilege of the wealthy and privileged. A lot of good Christians are poor, mostly because Christianity is the default option in the United States, so poor people are Christian, but they do not help themselves when they give money to their churches so that their pastors can buy huge houses and airplanes.

Christian irrationality is bad for the country.