Manufactured right wing outrage is more out of control than ever
Last week, on the 48th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Biden Administration announced its commitment to making sure everyone has access to reproductive health care. Noting that the right to choose has been under attack for the last four years, the White House statement affirmed that the Biden-Harris Administration “is committed to codifying Roe v. Wade and appointing judges that respect foundational precedents like Roe.”
This is one of the reasons the religious right refused, and in many cases still refuses, to accept Joe Biden’s victory. One guy who had a really hard time accepting it was Jack Hibbs, pastor of Calvary Chapel of Chino, Calif., who collapsed into a blubbering pile of mush the Sunday after the election was called. “Please! God, you are pro-life. And one man is, and one man is not,” he sobbed. “Would you be pro-life for us?”
Apparently, God’s answer was no. If Hibbs was calling on the God of the Bible, there’s no evidence that God has ever been against abortion. Evangelicals just jump to the conclusion that abortion is murder because of a single verse in which God tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.”
Other than that, the only other biblical passage that even comes close to saying anything about abortion is an obscure law that imposes a monetary penalty for someone who causes the loss of a pregnancy during a physical altercation.
The church itself was ambivalent about abortion until just before the 1980 election, when Republicans strategist Paul Weyrich came upon the idea to use it as an issue to turn fundamentalist Christians against Democrat Jimmy Carter, America’s first openly born-again president—who also happened to be pro-choice. Thus began a half century of manufactured right-wing anti-abortion outrage.
