Being Pro-Life Under a Pro-Choice President
Today Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. John Piper posted on his blog an excerpt from a sermon he preached in 1993 just before Clinton was to be sworn in as president. The content is relevant for us today. I have included it below. You can get the full sermon here:
The text was 1 Peter 2:17, “Honor the king.” I closed with eight ways to honor a pro-choice president. The seventh was this:
We will honor you by expecting from you straightforward answers to straightforward questions. We would not expect this from a con-man, but we do expect it from an honorable man.
For example,
- Are you willing to explain why a baby’s right not to be killed is less important than a woman’s right not to be pregnant?
- Or are you willing to explain why most cities have laws forbidding cruelty to animals, but you oppose laws forbidding cruelty to human fetuses? Are they not at least living animals?
- Or are you willing to explain why government is unwilling to take away the so-called right to abortion on demand even though it harms the unborn child; yet government is increasingly willing to take away the right to smoke, precisely because it harms innocent non-smokers, killing 3,000 non-smokers a year from cancer and as many as 40,000 non-smokers a year from other diseases?
- And if you say that everything hangs on whether the fetus is a human child, are you willing to go before national television in the oval office and defend your support for the "Freedom of Choice Act" by holding in your hand a 21 week old fetus and explaining why this little one does not have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to life? Are you willing to say to parents in this church who lost a child at that age and held him in their hands, this being in your hands is not and was not a child with any rights of its own under God or under law?
Perhaps you have good answers to each of these questions. We will honor you by expecting you to defend your position forthrightly in the public eye.
You have immense power as President of the United States. To wield it against the protection of the unborn without giving a public accounting in view of moral and scientific reality would be dishonorable. We will honor you by expecting better.
Robert
I love theology and the challenge of making deep teachings non-boring. Let's face it, most of the time we hear theological teaching, it really is boring. Does it really have to be that way? Nope.
