Should Pro-Life Leaders Urge Fall Election Boycott?
Frank Anthony Pavone is a former Catholic priest and anti-abortion activist who was defrocked by the Vatican in 2022 for placing an aborted fetus on an altar. Pavone said that abortion was the “single-most issue” in the 2004 George W. Bush and John Kerry presidential election. Few have matched his relentless 50-year battle to save unborn babies.
Pavone was asked last week about his reaction to a high-profile pro-life leader’s announcement of withholding her support from Donald J. Trump in the fall election. He said though that position is “politically blind,” the moral position is that “no abortion can be justified.” He has defined the Democrat Party as God-hating and America-hating.
Does it make any sense under such circumstances for America’s prominent pro-life leaders to urge constituents to sit this election out? Leaders who do so, argues Pavone, are absolutely “clueless about how politics works.” The Nov. 5 presidential election is not about Trump and his stance on abortion but between Trump and the most radically pro-abortion presidential ticket in American history.
American Christendom pastors and spiritual leaders should likely be encouraging Christians to double down on their prayer lives regarding the election, along with asking God for mercy for the 65 million babies’ merciless deaths in the American holocaust. Trump, seemingly, is but the bulwark against an increasingly hostile and caustic culture threatening to take the nation down into the abyss of corruption and degeneration.
Pavone says the pro-life movement needs Trump to do just one thing: “Get elected.” Then he asks:
Has President Trump ever said that his appointment of hundreds of pro-life judges between 2017 and 2021 was a political blunder? Has he said reinstating the Mexico City Policy [thereby banning American taxpayer money from funding abortion] was a mistake?
Was depriving Planned Parenthood access to $63M per year from Title X programs by Trump not enough? Has he ever said that it was a mistake to have the Office of Conscience and Religious Rights—that he established under HHS to protect doctors and nurses from being forced to participate in abortion—a mistake? Or to get the United States into the Geneva Consensus, an alliance of pro-life countries? He hasn’t gone back on any of that, and he’ll do that all again.”
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Present-day evangelical and pro-life Catholic leaders advising Christians to stay home on Election Day have the hiss of the adversary’s agenda. I repeat my caution of 2022:
Evangelicals ought to think through what’s coming soon to their surroundings and prospects. Specifically, with the U.S. Supreme Court looking as if it may overturn Roe vs. Wade in the Dobbs vs. Jackson case, tremendous pressure will now be applied to state legislators and courts. The battle over snuffing out the lives of children in utero will move from the judiciary to the legislative branch of government, hence to a place where grassroots, precinct-level organizing determines success or failure.
Christians will have to take their civics game to a whole new level. Somebody’s values are going to reign supreme in the public square. If evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christians stay home from the voting booth, those “who speak perverse things” elect their candidates to public office. They then create and pass legislation involving profane precepts and moral obfuscation, bringing about anarchy as its “natural consequence and fitting punishment” to a spiritually apathetic nation.
Peachy Keenan is the pseudonym of a writer and mother living deep behind enemy lines. She identifies as a husbosexual, which means she is only attracted to people who identify as her husband! She is the author of “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War” and tweeted to Lila Rose last week:
Lila, there are other pressing issues that this election will determine. Kamala Harris will usher in the end of representative democracy and its replacement by elite communist rule. A President Kamala will continue foreign waters and start new ones, endangering all our lives. She…
— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) August 26, 2024
Let’s get this clear: Over the last 50 years, a cozy cottage industry has been created for pro-life organizations. Some rake in $10 to 15 million annually, focusing solely on glitzy galas and omnipresent fundraising requests. This shields their ineptitude at grassroots precinct organizing, which is the essential component for sustainable freedom.
Timidity is not the pro-life movement’s problem; it’s know-how—expertise and knowledge.
A.W. Pink noted last century the decline in England’s Christian seminaries and gospel work: “One of the principal Bible training schools in England closed down some years ago, and the fact that one of the leading Institutes in this country is constantly sending out urgent appeals for financial help is conclusive evidence that it is now being run in the energy of the flesh.”
Conservatives and pro-life organizations inside the Beltway might take note.
American Founder Samuel Adams (1722-1803) advises these pusillanimous, lily-livered souls, fearful of the rough and tumble of the public square, to do the following:
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands that feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Sitting out this election is tantamount to empowering pro-abortion radicals and those who hate God to elect their representatives, who then draft and pass profane legislation, and, by that, codify into law their godless values; hence it amounts to out-and-out foolhardiness.
Nevertheless, Gideons and Rahabs are entering the public square of America.
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David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.
