From the interview with Charles Gibson, it appears that Sarah Palin is entirely on board with John McCain’s foreign policy — a foreign policy that I am not on board with. I am not a neocon, and I have no sympathy with the broader neocon objectives, which can be described as a democratic and secular system of globally-managed markets. I am not that kind of capitalist. If Adam Smith’s invisible hand is the right hand of Jesus Christ, then we are good and so is capitalism. If it is not, then we are in a world of hurt.
But from her “no exceptions” anti-abortion stand, backed up with her personal choices and commitments, Sarah Palin is pro-life in a way that I have not seen in any politician on the national stage in my adult life. The reason I am even contemplating coming out of the third party wilderness is that abortion is the issue for me. If we get that wrong, everything else is wrong with it.
From these two data, the question is often asked, “What is the difference between killing American babies in the abortion mills and killing (for example) Iraqi babies in one of our bombing campaigns?” If blood matters in politics, does it not matter equally in both places? And the answer is no.
In making this argument, I am not arguing (for example) for a military attack on Iran. Just as an aside — if Obama gets the wheels back on his campaign, and it looks like he is likely to win, then don’t be surprised at an attack on Iran from Israel or the United States, or both. If it continues to look as though McCain is going to do okay, then expect the problem of Iran to be passed on to the next administration.
There are, in my mind, many compelling reasons for us to not launch such an attack on Iran — but that is not my point here. What I am arguing here is that, even with this disagreement of mine with this kind of Middle East adventurism, the issues of abortion and war are not morally equivalent. I wouldn’t support a candidate who opposed abortion on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but supported it the rest of the time. Such a position would be characterized by basic moral contradictions. But the same is not true of someone who opposes abortion, period, but who supports a war that I believe to be unnecessary. Here is why.
I write this as someone who has been in the military, as one who has been around the military in various ways for many years, and as someone who knows godly Christians in the military who have passed on to me the nature of the rules of engagement in our current campaigns.
In abortion, innocent children are the avowed target. Killing the children is the entire point of the process. The military phrase collateral damage can be used in calloused ways, but the phrase nevertheless points to the fact that when children are killed, it was not the point of the mission. If the mission could have been accomplished without that killing, then sincere efforts would have been made to do it that way.
Second, the fact that abortion kills an unborn child is (for Christians) not a question of fact. No one disputes what is in fact occurring. There are not two schools of thought — one maintaining that abortion destroys a fetus and the other maintaining that it does not destroy a fetus. The facts of the case are undisputed. If you believe, as Christians do, that the unborn bear the image of God, then the thing is settled. If you are a Christian and you deny that the unborn are created in the image of God, then you need to start taking better care of your soul — because you are losing it.
In a war, one of the first casualties is the truth. Atrocity stories are one of the first indications that an actual war has broken out. Both sides tell them, and both sides deny them. In other words, if someone tells you that 50,000 children were incinerated in the fighting at Fallujah, you don’t know if that is true. Atrocities can and do occur, but it is not possible to simply take a report of such an event and put it in the bank. With the atrocity of abortion, the facts are not disputed. With a war, the facts are hotly disputed, which means they have to be investigated before any action can be taken on that basis.
Third, with abortion, the godliest and the saintliest among us have borne consistent testimony for decades to the evil of abortion. Their testimony is true, and their courage in the opposition of this carnage has been honorable. Moreover, their testimony is consistent. For example, pro-life advocates haven’t opposed abortions, while inconsistently advocating infanticide or euthanasia. The paper-thin objection that pro-lifers are inconsistent in opposing abortion because they generally support the death penalty is risible. We oppose killing innocents who have not had their day in court, and support killing guilty people who have had their day in court, and you want to make that into an inconsistency? Better luck next time.
But when it comes to lurid stories of atrocities committed by our military, those stories overwhelmingly come from people who are “pro-choice,” from those supporting the dismemberment of infants in the womb. Why on earth should I believe anything they say? Where is their ethos? Covered in the blood of innocents, that’s where it is. This is especially highlighted when I talk to Christians who have been on our battlefields (and whose moral compass works and everything), and they tell me that this is not the way it is at all. I trust them, and I don’t trust those who openly tell me that they don’t respect innocent human life in the womb.
So we have to keep our moral bearings when we talk about the “politics of blood.” The situations that are frequently compared in such a facile way are not really comparable at all. So then, mark me down as one who disagrees with the McCain/Palin foreign policy as a matter of political principle and policy. Don’t like it at all. But I support their willingness to defend unborn children, and I support this because of basic biblical morality. That disagreement and that support are not operating on the same level.