I work from home quite a bit know so I have the luxury of being able to listen to the radio or c-span while I am home. I especially appreciated c-span because they look as issue in depth by spending significant time on a point. Today I am listening to a George Washington panel on the 2004 Presidential election.
One of the panelists, Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster said something that stopped me in my tracks:
…I don’t think we should cede the faith terrain either and I think it is very telling for example that, you know, having grown up in the beginning of the Vietnam War the clergy lead the anti-war movement. There is no clergy to speak of in this anti-war movement. (responding questioner) exactly, led the civil rights movement. Where are the churches in the, in what I believe to be the civil rights movement of our time which is gay rights. Where is the church voice? And I think one thing that many of us need to work harder on is - I think we have been cowed away from using our faith and our voice on faith because it has been used in way by the conservative faith that has been intimidating, but we need to bring it to the table and I know many of you may have read, which I think is just so articulate in this is Jim Wallace who, you
know, wrote the book “Who speaks for God” and he has a passage in there where he says, you know, what would Jesus ask if he got to pose a question at debate? Do think he would be asking questions on things like partial-birth abortion [Note: said with a scornful look], no, he would ask the question, or at least my faith tells me he would ask a question on, you know, what have done for the poor? What have you the children lately? and we need to recapture that.
If this is how you want to recapture the faith terrain more power to you. As I have said before I am a Roman Catholic, so to me Jesus is God. So what she is trying to have me believe is that God would ignore the fact that an estimated 1.3 million babies are killed each year in the US (or an estimated 40 million since Roe v. Wade) and ask about the poor, the children!!! How could God ask about the children and ignore that they being killed in massive numbers!
I was reading an article about partial-birth abortion in Harper's magazine yesterday and I am pretty sure God would have something to say about that.
So go on, stick with this position and continue to be baffled that the Catholic vote and because of it the Hispanic vote bleed over to the Republicans.
