Hardly wishing to defend Kristof I would nevertheless point
out that this author seems to be somewhat ignorant of Conservative ethics of
yesteryear. Yes, he briefly mentioned Kristof's assertion that conservatives
only began to care about abortion in the 1960's and 1970's, but he doesn't
interact with it. Instead he turns to Church History.
In terms of Church History the Church's record on 'life'
issues is rather mixed and the subject is something of a tangle. The testimony
of Scripture and the Early Church is pretty clear and personally I am content
to leave it there. The New Testament and the Early Church were clearly against
abortion and killing of any kind for that matter.
After chuckling my way through the comments I guess I'll risk
sounding 'liberal' to point out that Conservatives are largely ignorant of
their own past and their past views of race, education, housing, immigration
and certainly birth control and eugenics. There are whole chapters of American
social history that have been whitewashed and ignored and for those that do not
have memories which extend past the birth of the Christian Right in the 1980s
and 1990s, the past will seem strange indeed.
While I don't think Protestant Evangelicals (let's be a
little more specific than just 'Christian') were necessarily championing
abortion before Roe v. Wade, the truth is, it wasn't an issue of great
importance. Falwell and other early architects of the Christian Right are on
the record in admitting this. It was a Catholic issue. Why?
Well, that's another story and it goes back to the issues
surrounding massive Catholic immigration and battles over everything from
education to local politics in the early 20th century. This is why
many conservative, Nativist-minded and even professing Christian people
(whatever is meant by that) supported birth control as a means of suppressing
the non-Anglo Saxon Protestant populations. It's a shameful chapter and a
confusing one.
The answer isn't to revise the history but to learn from it
and in this case understand what set of beliefs drove the Church to the point
that many within it embraced this type of thinking.
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