Trying to separate social issues out from other issues is folly.
Morality and Government are separate issues. They are intertwined and interact , to be sure, but if you fight the social/moral battles now, you will loose the war. We are fighting a battle for the culture: That means we must eventually take back the Media, the Schools, the Churches and the Government. However, if your plan involves seizing the government, and then using it as a weapon against your fellow man to take back the other institutions, you will defeat the entire purpose. Every revolution that ever used the government for a purge ended up more totalitarian and worse off than when they started. The French Revolution and the terror, Stalin and his purges, and so on. If you want America back as the Founders gave it to us, how we win is just as, if not more, important, than winning.
Unfortunately for us, that is just what the Left is trying to do, repeatedly, legislate their social issues. And when they can't get what they want legislatively, they go to the courts....Working just through the culture is not a viable option right now with the Left seeking to enshrine their desires into law.
This is like the One Ring. We dare not use it. We must restore the government to its rightful purpose: to protect the natural rights of its citizens. To use it to impose our social vision only justifies the left's use of it in that same way. If we can push the government back out of the social arena, we can then work culturally to enact the needed changes- through persuasion. And yes, that persuasion should include the right to hire who you want, the right to rent to who you want, and the right to publically censure people who act in ways you feel are undesirable. Freedom can sometimes mean some pretty unpleasant things - it means that a Racist restaurant owner can run an all-white lunch counter, or make blacks stand while they eat. You cannot force him to stop. It also means the rest of us are free to not eat at his establishment, and socially shun those that do. All of the lefts "equality" and "equal opportunity" crap was to shut down the main tools of social censure. Why did the Irish change their ways at the turn of the Century? Because they couldn't get a job and they couldn't sue over it. Instead they had to police their own- via Social stigma and censure.
If I truly believe that an unborn child has a right to live, it behooves me to do everything I can to protect that child including fight for its protection legislatively. I don't believe trying to convince everyone that a baby is a person will work to save many babies....Many people look to laws as a way to decide what's right.
And declaring in law that Gay people married will convince you that they are, and make you treat them as such? At one time Slavery was the law of the land, in the constitution and ratified by every State of the Union.. did that make it right? People do not look to the law to decide right from wrong, they look to it to see what they can get away with- to see what the potential consequences are. Liberals, having no internal moral compass, often feel the Law is Morality and vice-versa, because the government has become their Church and their God. We should know better.
YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE MORALITY. Morality and a moral compass are developed internally, spiritually, and no HUMAN law can bring them into being within , or dispel them from an individual. "Salvation is not a Group Activity" - Passing a law will not make an individual moral.. it only imposes consequences on the individual. Gun Laws don't get guns out of the hands of Criminals. Drug Laws don't prevent people from doing drugs, and abortion laws will not stop people from getting abortions, and laws forbidding Gays to marry will not prevent them from sinful acts.
The government's mandate is to protect the rights of others- to prevent and punish individuals that cause harm to others. Is abortion such harm? I think so, but then I think a baby is a person, and sadly that determination is the one that is in dispute. No one has the authority to say when life begins, when a fetus is given a soul, self awareness, or even which qualities must be present for "personhood." Our natural right of conscience is one that allows EACH AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL to determine right from wrong on their own. Madison's original 1st Amendment read:
"The Civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any National Religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext be infringed"
We chafe when the Left denies us that right- denies us the right to give to our own charities, to withhold money from abortion clinics, to follow our own moral compass in our dealings with the world. God's Laws belong to God, and let him enforce them. John 8:3. This isn't to say that you do not speak out, that you do not minster and testify to others your belief that a Baby is a person, and that abortion is a transgression against God and God's laws. But,as I said, freedom means allowing some pretty ugly things, and this is the worst. However, can you imagine standing before God and having to admit that you killed your own child? Judgement Day will come. But not here and not now, and not by your hand. Trying to use the government as a tool to bludgeon the wicked into righteousness, never has and never will work.
George Washington at first believed he could conduct the war solely on the strength of belief in the cause. That fizzled out after about 6 months. He had to rely on stiff penalties and promises of money to keep the troops from deserting when the going got tough.
Washington had to bend to practical reality and the limits of human nature. The practical reality is that people who would or could abort their own children are unfit parents and would raise those children to be foot soldiers for the enemy. You cannot make them better parents, and we could not find other homes for 1 million babies a year, many of whom would be disabled and maimed by drug use.
Are we to hope that if we explain to the man that the woman is a person worthy of life he'll change his ways? Why must we butt out of a woman's decision to kill her baby? We don't have an obligation to protect a woman from a beating and a baby from death?
Because no one is disagreeing that an adult woman is a "person" and therefore under the protection of the government, where-as they do dispute the person-ness of a fetus. You do have a moral obligation to make the argument for the baby , loudly and often, but that obligation does not go so far as to deprive another person of their natural rights, even though you believe the natural rights of the fetus are being violated. And don't get me wrong, I would support a person-hood amendment in a heartbeat - but to win this battle you need a personhood amendment to pass - meaning it has garnered support of a super majority of the people. Trying to impose it by any lesser means will be counter productive and seen as oppression. Convincing a super-majoirty that you are right in determining a baby is a person, means winning the culture war first.
Do do that the government must be pushed back into its rightful place - out of the moral sphere, leaving us then free to heal the culture without the burden of supporting their warped views. Until the people are made righteous by pursuasion and argument ( and just flat smaking against the wall of reality) , you cannot get laws that are righteous.
Fighting to implement righteous laws over an unrighteous people will end in disaster. Engaging in these social battles now, and using government force to win them, will cost us the war, to the ultimate ruin of all we are trying to accomplish. Morality must come first, and cannot be forced. A law would not force you to accept homosexuality as normal, and a Law will not make a homosexual refrain from deviant acts. Likewise, a law legalizing abortion does not make you accept the practice, nor will a law forbidding it change the minds of those who feel the procedure is moral.
"Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government." - George Washington
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Benjamin Franklin
"The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence." - Alexander Hamilton
"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." - James Madison
"No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government." -Thomas Jefferson
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." - Patrick Henry
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams
"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen onto any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man." - Samuel Adams
"It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist." -Edmund Burke
"We must follow the example of Solon who gave the Athenians not the best government he could devise, but the best they would receive" -Butler
"Righteousness exalteth a nation." Proverbs 14:34
