URGENT: Call on President-elect Trump to keep his pro-life promises! Sign the petition now.
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November 9, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – We pro-lifers have been saying it for decades, and working to make it even truer: America is a fundamentally pro-life country. Its cultural and Constitutional DNA are coded with deep respect for the human person as the free image of God, no matter what lies the appointed judges on our courts decide to tell us. We might sin like other people in our nations, but in the long run we lean toward justice. The moment that Americans saw Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Riders brutalized by police for their peaceful protests, segregation's fate was sealed. And I believe that the release of the Planned Parenthood videos drove the first nails into the coffin of Roe v. Wade.
Donald Trump was not the first choice of most pro-lifers. But I believe that his conversion on our issue was heartfelt and sincere. The fact that for all his embrace of other socially liberal positions, he came around to support for our country's most vulnerable people, says much about our culture. It says that it's moving our way, that even someone as contrarian and stubborn as Donald Trump can get the message. He can come around and see that basic goodness is on our side. In the last debate, when he talked about partial birth abortion, what was visible on his face was deep and natural disgust—in contrast to Clinton's robotic recital of false talking points.
I think that Donald Trump will help defund Planned Parenthood, every dollar. I think he will stick to his promise of choosing constitutional conservatives for the courts. Beyond what I think is his newfound but real conviction, I believe that he will reward us for rallying behind him—despite the many excellent excuses he offered us to walk away, in the form of his crass comments and dubious past.
What should prolifers do now? We should thank God for sparing us the ruthless abuse of power which Hillary Clinton would have employed to silence us. When we're finished with that thanksgiving, we should revert to our natural state – as a ruthlessly focused special interest group with only one job: protecting the interests of unborn Americans, the handicapped, and the terminally ill. If you are innocent and threatened by violence, we are your advocate. We take no other stands, and bow to no outside pressure. We won't listen to bishops who smoosh together our crucial and urgent cause as of equal weight to items on their “seamless garment” wish list. We won't get sucked into support for foreign wars that backfire and end up turning millions of Christians into refugees. Let others debate the climate or the best levels of spending for Medicaid. We are there to protect the weak from doctors who will kill them. That's quite enough.
Just as the National Rifle Association rewards those who back its policies and punishes those who betray it, so we should treat every politician, regardless of party. As I wrote in “The Prolife Art of War,” we have for too long failed to adopt this level of professionalism and seriousness, and our cause has suffered for it.
Beyond legislative battles, we must work to convert the culture. The sexual revolutionaries were able in one generation to take “abortion” from being a profanity no one uttered in mixed company, and dress it up as a fundamental right of every American. They didn't accomplish that via clever legal reasoning—at least not at first. No, first they scorched the earth with a thousand movies and popular songs, TV shows and phony popular science, to convince the West that sex really ought to be a harmless leisure activity—kind of like bridge, or Canasta. Then they trumped up a phony population panic. It was only once both these falsehoods had lodged in the minds of elites and leaked down into the culture, that something as monstrous as abortion could win in the courts. Now it's our task to backwards-engineer that process and reverse it.
I hope you will join me in holding Donald Trump accountable for his promises, and in making the culture an ever friendlier place for that fragile and persecuted creature: the human person.
