I'm sure many people who read today's HuffPo piece by Christine Wicker titled "If You Love Jesus, Vote for Obama" (link) won't appreciate it, won't get it.  I do.  Though I wouldn't tell anyone that a love of Jesus requires voting for any particular candidate (which, by the way, is what many on the religious right actually do), I'm in agreement with much of what Wicker writes in the article.  For example:

After more than 20 years during which the Religious Right has been the dominant ethical and moral voice in the public square, the reputation of American Christians is at an all time low, especially among young people. As the political ambitions of the most right wing Christians have soared, the influence of Christian teachings on popular culture has plummeted.

I recommend following the link above and reading the whole piece.  Personally, I like Wicker's article because it expresses in a clever and provocative way ("If you love Jesus, vote for" is certainly provocative language) something that I believe to be true: the strong association of the religious right with the political far right is a liability in accomplishing the mission of the church among about half of the population.

I think there is a real danger for the stink of politics to mask the beautiful aroma of the gospel.  Look at the way the current campaign has inevitably ended up in the gutter despite the initial promise of a different kind of campaign from these two candidates.  And the way people like Dobson wield political power is so distasteful to me. And the culture war? That's the way to engage outsiders? There's a reason why they like Jesus but not the church.

I don't think the answer is for the religious left to become the new religious right in the political realm, but I think it would be very healthy for it to be more obvious that Christianity and Republicanism are not synonymous.

A friend recently wrote:

This election ignore all the lies about obama is a terrorist, or obama is anti christ, or obama will destroy the u.s. those things are ridiculous and they are gonna continue to go out of conrtol. but here's one thing that is true and is equally as disturbing:

In a failed abortion situation, when the baby survives, the question is what do you do with that baby? The united states congress voted on this and there was a general consensus that it was wrong to just let that baby die. However, Obama did not feel the same way. He voted for letting the baby die. Hillary Clinton voted to let the baby live. This is not propaganda, google this, I'll even give you what Obama said to defend his side:

"that we live in a pluralistic society, and that I can't impose my religious views on another."
-Obama

Its not a matter of religion, it's a matter of the right to life, the most important right in America. Some people will argue in the case where a baby will harm the health of the mother that the abortion is fair. But in a failed abortion the baby is outside of the mother and if everyone shared Obama's view they just let the baby lay out to die.

This is an extremely ugly and graphic topic, but I think its necessary to hear. Maybe McCain is old, pretty boring, and just kind of a weird guy, but he at least has never in his 200 years of congress life voted against life.

If you don't like either just do what I'm doing write in Ron Paul.

Ron Paul: Youtube him

As a HuffPo article (of course, sympathetic to Obama) points out (link), my friend's summary gets some of the facts wrong (e.g., Obama's vote was in the Illinois senate not the US senate and there are reasons other than a disregard for life that may have prompted Obama to vote against the Illinois bill).  That's not to say that Obama's position/votes related to abortion don't bother me.

Regardless, I see in this appeal from my friend (and most conversation about abortion) a perpetuation of the focus on ideology rather than practicality.  The American public is pretty evenly divided between the view that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare and that it should be illegal and rare. Ideologically those two views are very different, but practically they are very similar. Both parties focus on ideology as a wedge issue, dig in to give no ground, and as a result do things that don't help.  Rather than focus on ideological differences, an approach that has led to stalemate with little hope for significant change in the foreseeable future, I'm more interested in both sides focusing on where they agree and can work together to do practical things to reduce the abortion rate.

Some examples are suggested in an article by Tony Campolo: Pro-Life Democrats Call for an Abortion Reduction Plank

There was an interesting article about the UN Population Fund and pregnant women in Africa recently in the New York Times.  It's available here. It questions whether the policy of the US government not to release $34 million in funds allocated by Congress for the UN Population Fund is really a "pro-life" policy in practical terms.  The UN Population Fund has been accused of supporting forced abortions and sterilizations in China, and therefore the US government refused to support the fund in recent years.  The Population Fund denies the accusation, a denial that seems credible to me.  The article argues that the move of the US government is not pro-life because of the loss of life that will result from less funding for the organization's activities in Africa such as equipping maternity hospitals and promoting contraception and safe child birth.  African women have a 1 in 16 chance of dying in childbirth.  Tragic.

On a related note, Steven Chapman made an interesting point about the "morning-after pill" in his column.  He argues that the typical "pro-life" opposition to Plan B is actually not pro-life.  Rather than being "abortion in disguise," Chapman claims that:

The best scientific evidence we have indicates that the morning-after pill serves to block fertilization, while having no effect on implantation. That makes it contraception, not abortion.  As a longtime pro-lifer, I think anti-abortion groups had solid grounds to oppose the morning-after pill when its function was unclear--as I did. But given what we now know, it's a grave mistake to keep opposing it. In fact, there are grounds for celebration: A drug once believed to produce abortion is found to prevent abortion.

Regarding the concern that the pill may have abortifacient properties, he writes:

The drug...can prevent pregnancy by impeding sperm and by delaying ovulation, but it has "not been shown to cause a post-fertilization event--a change in the uterus that could interfere with implantation of a fertilized egg."   There is no way to be 100 percent sure that emergency contraception never interferes with implantation. But the mere possibility of an adverse event is a poor reason to reject its use.  After all, breast-feeding is known to cause uterine changes that can prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted. No one in the pro-life movement would say mothers should therefore abstain from nursing. Just as nursing is morally and ethically permissible because it advances worthy purposes, so is the morning-after pill. [emphasis mine, JDM]

Even conventional birth control pills have come under attack as causing abortions.  A friend recently sent us an email warning and linked to an article criticizing the pill.

To conclude his article, Chapman writes:

If emergency contraception were widely and easily available, it could prevent a lot of pregnancies that would otherwise end, tragically, in abortion. That's reason enough for the FDA to approve over-the-counter sales. For anyone who believes in the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, Plan B is not an enemy but an ally.