WASHINGTON, D.C.
The lobby and corridors of this hotel were crowded with Catholic school kids when we checked in yesterday. St. Vincent de Paul of Perryville, Missouri, was the most visible contingent — dozens of kids wearing blue-and-gold letterman’s jackets — but the annual March for Life brings groups from all around the country, not all of them Catholic. On my way down to the lobby to go out for a smoke this morning, I noticed one of the kids was wearing a nametag with the familiar Episcopalian (or Anglican) symbol: Red cross on a white field with the St. Andrew’s cross in blue. “Episcoplian?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
“Wow, I didn’t realize there were still pro-life Episcopalians.”
Out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, the boy joined a group of about a dozen kids, and I spoke to one of the adult leaders, who told me they are from St. Michael’s Christian Academy of San Clemente, California.
Seeing so many fine young Christians who support the cause of life is very encouraging to me. I’ve spent the past several months of researching radical feminism and being immersed in such evil can be psychologically disorienting. “Has the whole world gone crazy?” I find myself asking, knowing how many millions of taxpayer dollars are spent to propagate this weird ideology in colleges and universities. “Is our civilization utterly doomed?”
The March for Life reminds me that there is still hope. There are still people who have not been deceived and corrupted. Unfortunately, however, there is the problem of Congress.
Pro-life conservatives were livid this morning after the House GOP leadership demonstrated its incompetence yesterday:
Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court legalizing abortion on demand throughout pregnancy. The pro-life movement commemorates this day with marches, worship services and lobbying for bills to protect unborn children. Pro-lifers were promised by the Republican leaders they just helped elect and re-elect that the House of Representatives would pass a bill today banning most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a point after which infants can feel pain and survive if born prematurely.
The legislation has been passed by the House in the previous Congress and is extremely popular in national polling. “One of the clearest messages from Gallup trends,” the polling firm reported, “is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.” A Washington Post/ABC survey showed that 64 percent of Americans favor limiting abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy or earlier. . . .
We’re one of just a small handful of countries, including notorious human rights violators North Korea and China, that allow late-term abortion.
And yet somehow the Republicans managed to make a disaster of passing the bill. Instead of passing the legislation and sending it to the Republican-controlled Senate, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act was pulled at the last minute and replaced with a bill that bans taxpayer funding of abortion.
What in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks just happened? It takes a special combination of incompetence and cowardice to miss an easy lay-up like this, but apparently the new Republican Congress has it in spades. . . .
If Republicans can’t pass wildly popular legislation protecting innocent unborn children, what’s going to happen when they face difficult legislative battles? . . .
You can read the rest. What happened is that two Republican members — including Rep. Renee Ellmers, whose election campaign in 2010 I strongly supported — decided at the last minute that they didn’t like some language in the bill. The problem, as I see it, is not with the bill, and not even with Ellmers. The problem is that the leadership doesn’t know how to whip the caucus properly and make sure they’ve got 100% support on crucial votes. Tom DeLay never would have let a trainwreck like this happen. Organizational incompetence is perhaps even more dangerous than ideological wobbling in a situation like this.
Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”
The lack of vision among some of our leaders is disappointing, but the people who “keepeth the law” are still happy. When I went out for another smoke, I encountered a group of about 20 people from Voice of Truth, a church near the central Georgia town of Dublin:
Voice of Truth is a non-denominational church where the Word of God is taught and preached. The church was formed when several Christian families felt called by God to reach out to the unchurched in our community. God has blessed us and we have grown in a few short years to a congregation of more than two hundred.
Preaching the Word of God and reaching out to “the unchurched”? Of course God will always bless that kind of work. I spoke to the leaders of the church, including brothers Phil and Keith Mills. They hold to a very basic Bible-focused theology, the kind you don’t need a Ph.D. to understand. As they were ready to leave for the march, they asked me to walk with them a little way. Phil explained that he and his brother were once a couple of young hellbound sinners, “just as bad as we could be.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I used to be a Democrat myself.”
