Austin, Texas, Nov 5, 2018 / 04:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After a pro-life leader said she is voting for a pro-choice Senate candidate because she believes he will best advance the cause of life, another pro-life advocate rejected this approach to fighting abortion.
Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists, said in an Oct. 31 column for the Dallas Morning News that she is voting this year for Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging incumbent Republican Ted Cruz for his seat in the Senate. O’Rourke has gained traction in the normally red state, and polls show a tight race ahead of the Nov. 6 election.
Currently a U.S. Representative, O’Rourke has said that he opposes efforts to limit abortion access. He is endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice America, which gave him a “100% pro-choice” rating last year, noting his opposition to more than a dozen pro-life measures during that time.
Herndon-De La Rosa said that despite his voting record, she believes O’Rourke’s cooperative approach in seeking common-ground solutions will do the most to advance the pro-life cause.
She described O’Rourke as a “different” kind of candidate who “talked about working with Republicans and independents alike.”
Dr. Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, said that he believes this line of thinking is “deeply flawed and very unfortunate.”
He told CNA that it is a “fallacy” to believe that voting for candidates who favor legal abortion will bring about an end to abortions.
In her Dallas Morning News column, Herndon-De La Rosa explained that she had long accepted the belief that being pro-life meant voting Republican.
“[F]or years I reluctantly supported candidates who talked about making the sand glow in other countries with bombs and who advocated taking children away from their mothers, simply because unlike us, they hadn’t won the geographic lottery,” she said.
These votes often felt difficult for her as an independent who does not completely agree with either major political party, and as a “consistent life ethicist,” who opposes “all forms of violence against other human beings, including war, torture, the death penalty and abortion.” But she believed that compromise was necessary, because the right to life was so foundational.
However, Herndon-De La Rosa said the 2016 presidential election was eye-opening for her, showing her “just how deep the GOP had its hooks in the pro-life movement.” She stressed that “while I am 100 percent pro-life, I’m also 100 percent feminist, and I saw the way Trump treated women as an absolute deal-breaker.”
“I saw the way these politicians used unborn children’s lives to get out the vote but then oftentimes forgot about those lives soon after,” she said. “I saw the way pro-lifers compromised so many of their own upstanding ethics and morals to elect a man thrice married, who bragged about his infidelities and predatory behavior. And why? So they could get their Supreme Court seats.”
She said the final straw was watching Republican Senator Susan Collins agree to vote in favor of confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh only when he said that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”
This convinced Herndon-De La Rosa that abortion must be eradicated on a cultural, rather than legal, level – “by creating a post-Roe culture while Roe still stands.”
O’Rourke’s proposed policies and willingness to work across party lines, she said, will help address the factors that lead women to feel that they must choose abortion.
“Abortion becomes unnecessary when women have so much support from within their community that the one violent choice never even becomes an option in their minds,” Herndon-De La Rosa said. “Abortion becomes unthinkable when women of color realize that having their children will not cost them their own lives because we have men like O’Rourke actually addressing the disproportionate number of minorities and children dying during childbirth.”
However, Pojman countered that Texas already “provides a tremendous amount of help for pregnant women” and does much to offer alternatives to abortion.
The state has more than 200 pregnancy resource centers that offer free to help to women in need, he said, and some half of these centers receive state funding. In addition, the state’s social service network provides health care for more than half of the minors in Texas, and the majority of childbirths in Texas are funded by Medicaid.
Rather than advancing the pro-life movement, Pojman argued, “O’Rourke would be a disaster.”
“He has shown himself to be entirely hostile to protecting unborn children from abortion. He has voted to allow late abortions, he has voted to support tax funding for abortions. If he became senator and had his way, he would eliminate the Hyde Amendment, which has been demonstrated to have saved some 2 million babies from abortion since it was first implemented in the ‘70s.”
Texas Alliance for Life has enthusiastically endorsed Ted Cruz for Senate. Pojman pointed to Cruz’s consistent record of voting for pro-life measures, including a ban on late-term abortions and an end to federal funding of Planned Parenthood.
The U.S. bishops’ guide to political engagement, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, stresses the importance of examining issues rather than voting automatically for any political party. The bishops emphasize the right to life as a foundational human right in evaluating candidates and issues.
“As Catholics we are not single-issue voters. A candidate’s position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support,” the document says. “Yet if a candidate’s position on a single issue promotes an intrinsically evil act, such as legal abortion, redefining marriage in a way that denies its essential meaning, or racist behavior, a voter may legitimately disqualify a candidate from receiving support.”
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Unfortunate optics!
Wondering whether the papal choreographers knew where the Anglican ecclesial communion was heading so recently in its own permanent synod, when the recent airline interview by Pope Francis was conducted? Will Pope Francis now be propped up falsely, in England, as synodally in step with the Anglican version of German synodality, and its Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/02/05/pope-francis-in-flight-press-conference-god-accompanies-people-with-same-sex-attraction/
In a comment only yesterday on CWR’s “what to do about politics?”, even non-entity/yours truly volunteered that friendship must not be morphed into being misconstrued as concurrence or complicity (the case of Jacques Maritain’s friendship with Saul Alinsky). https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/02/05/what-to-do-with-politics/
Will the serendipity papal photo-op with Welby now be exploited in the British “hate-speech” case against their own synodalist Sam Margrave, i.e., REAL “hate-speech” being the institutionalized criminalization of binary speech?
But, who are we to judge?
Now that Fr. Benedict has passed, is the appearance of stocks like Welby and Greenshields, going to become a feature to suit the topics? Will it be “inside synodality” or “only inside synodality”? Outside? Fr. Benedict is no longer there to attest to anything but their agreement with Pope Francis will authenticate the recognizing and imparting of Fr. Benedict’s discretions? Says Welby, “Our pilgrimage together is a sign for the world.”
What this is showing to Pope Francis and to us, is that the temptations that beset him as Fr. Bergoglio before the papal election, have decidedly overtaken him in the Papal office and now he himself is actively pursuing them and using the office to spread them.
There is also a breakdown in transparency that I will not elaborate here. Consequences flow for all these and from all these; and they should be kept distinct for the sake of a fidelity.
Lamentably, things have gotten unhinged. It may not be trenchant but that can’t make evil good, or untruth, truth Meantime each will continue to provoke the other ones and produce more deranging outcrops.
There is a third layer and it does not amelorioate the problems, rather makes it worse. There is a piling up of misrepresentations going on that can be very diverting that at same time multiply the gravity of the situation, increase the guilt they incur and deepen the complexes, tending to confirm it all.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2023-02/pope-francis-south-sudan-interview-justin-welby.html
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/01/the-church-of-england-takes-a-third-way-on-gay-marriage
Can anyone explain what the significant difference is between modernist/materialist/politically correct Anglicanism and the German brand of synodality? Both use the same worldly and false ad hominem, and strawman arguments to deny or to denigrate the infinite wisdom of the Word of God, divinely inspired dogma, and the unchanging, (read: unchangeable) teaching of the Church? To paraphrase the English poet, Wordsworth: It seems that
“The world is too much with us…
We lay waste our powers…
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
Or to quote the bard on such foolish “worldly” self-impressed, love affairs: “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”
When one compromises religion with politics, especially the lame and limping form of politics that we see today, you get lame and limping religion. Absurdum Infinitum