Pastor Barnhart explains right-wing anti-abortion politics.

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This message was truly written by the pastor.  Barnhart, who is a pastor at Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, first posted this message to his Facebook page in 2018.  At the time, Alabama politicians were in the process of passing an amendment to the state's constitution that would "recognize the rights of the unborn" in order to ensure that "state funds [would] not go to funding abortion care", according to AL.com.

The full text of Barnhart’s Facebook post read:

Thanks for posting this.

Here's a Twitter thread "on countering arguments from anti-choicers."

It's just a bad faith argument, Fnord, a concealed ad hominem, dressed up as virtuous concern - because abortion fanatics can't win the real argument. It's been rebuffed by myself on this forum more than once and by others in other places:

https://winteryknight.com/2022/05/04/pr ... hinking-2/

Suppose you are walking down the street one day, minding your own business, when you hear screams coming from a nearby house. You run over to investigate, and a woman runs out to tell you her child isn’t breathing. You follow her into the backyard where you find a small child who was just pulled unconscious from a nearby pool. You call 9-11 and start performing CPR on the child, praying you will be able to save her. Paramedics arrive and take her to the hospital, and you find out that thankfully, she will live and make a full recovery. The local news happens to pick up the story, and you are hailed as a hero.

Then things take a strange twist. The neighbors who watched the whole incident take place but didn’t intervene inform you that the child is being raised by a single mom, and that if the child had a father around, she wouldn’t have stumbled into the pool in the first place, so why aren’t you doing anything to fix the problem of single parent homes?

The situation gets even more bizarre. A local advocacy group asks why you aren’t engaging in education efforts about pool safety. Other advocacy groups begin asking why you only focused on saving the lives of children who fall into pools and not children who die of gun violence, abusive homes, or from poverty. Then, when you attend church on Sunday, the pastor preaches a sermon about how Christ-followers must focus on the sanctity of all human life, not merely the lives of those drowning in pools. Finally, to top it all off, a few days later the child’s estranged father, who has been skipping out on child support payments all year long, gets interviewed on the evening news, where he accuses you of all manner of character failings, saying that if you had truly been concerned about the life of his child, you would also pay for her schooling, her basic needs, and would ensure all of her needs throughout life are met.

If this whole scenario seems absurd, that’s because it is. And yet, it matches real world events currently playing out for pro-life advocates.

...

As I’ve written about before, there are two types of people who raise the issue of consistency: Crusaders and Inquirers.

An Inquirer is someone who has genuine questions about what it means to be truly “pro-life”. She gets why abortion is wrong, but she is curious how her views about the value of human life in the womb should inform her when it comes to issues outside the womb. She also wonders why pro-life advocates focus more on abortion than other topics. Her questioning is honest, but often misinformed. Pro-life advocates will focus on abortion more than “outside the womb issues” because it is the only time in an innocent human being’s life we may enjoy the full protection of the law while we deliberately kill them. While an Inquirer may not still fully understand, she is on the right track.

The Crusader wants none of it. He’s just looking for a quick way to end the argument in his favor, and he will usually do it by making the pro-life advocate look stupid or wicked. He isn’t searching for an honest dialogue, he’s looking to win fights. John Pavlovitz is an example of a Crusader.

Here’s a simple way to defeat a Crusader: Call their bluff. When I’ve encountered Crusaders who charge me with being inconsistent in how I approach being “pro-life”, I usually ask a simple question:

“Tell me, if I became active on all the issues you brought up and agreed to support all your positions, will you join me in opposing abortion?”

They will almost always say no, to which I usually reply along the lines of “So why did you even bring up those other issues in the first place? If you think there is nothing wrong with abortion, then you need to defend that idea, instead of just attacking me personally.”

...

To Mikah:

I assume that what you consider to be "the real argument" is the question of when "human life" should be deemed to have begun?

For a refutation of common fundamentalist Christian religious arguments on this matter, see Christians in the Hand of an Angry God (part 4) by Brad Hicks.

Excerpt:

The really sad thing about the articles Mona and I referenced is not so much that right-wingers will attempt to deny and dismiss them, but that the articles are generally predictive of right-wing attitudes and behavior.

This is not to say that every right-winger will always behave as predicted, but that they seem to behave as the two articles predict, more often than not.

And by “Right-Winger”, I mean those who try to justify their oppressive privileges with a false sense of self-righteousness coupled with willful distortions and mis-interpretations of cherry-picked verses from whatever ancient writings they deem “holy”.

The Christian Gospels, for instance, are full of accounts and parables demonstrating God’s love and inclusive intent. The right-wingers I know try to use those same accounts to justify slavery, genocide, and the oppression of women and people of color.

Sad.

I think the key question with abortion is why we value some forms of life and not others.

If someone values human embryos ahead of bacteria, that suggests a kind of human chauvinism. This is a pretty useful heuristic, but I think most people will quickly reject it when some implications are highlighted.

Should we prioritise human skin cells on the same level as human embryos? There’s not really a significant difference between them in the moment, and they’re both human. At most, you could argue that an embryo has its own genetic code… but we don’t think murder is wrong because it kills a genetic code, do we? If you thought you were about to be murdered, would your primary concern be for your genes? No, we think murder is wrong because it kills a person, someone who values their continuing existence. Skin cells and embryos do not do so. We should therefore not prioritise them ahead of persons, and should hold them in similar regard to comparable organisms. In the case of an embryo, those should be microscopic or barely organisms that aren’t capable of what we would recognise as thought. As it develops, we should continue to treat it like other organisms which it is comparable to in that moment, such as chimpanzee foetuses.

I'm not unwilling to attribute human status to fetuses. In such case, we should consider all the ethical arguments used in discussions about disconecting from life-sustaining care - and an additional one that in this case, the life-sustaining "apparatus" is a human being.

So far, I haven't seen this perspective in the public debate where I live.
Pity. I'd really love a respectful debate instead of the dirty ideological fights we're having here.

I am ambivalent about the subject of abortion, but I do think it's interesting how many liberal pet causes seem to revolve around sterility, whether it's abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism, encouraging careers over families, or having vasectomies to tackle climate change.

Does the average liberal ever stop and think about why this is?

What gets me is the huge number of men who believe they have both the right and the privilege of dictating what women can and cannot do with their bodies while disregarding the simple fact that, until a woman gives birth, the fetus IS part of her body.

I just still don't understand why this is such a huge issue in the US, because in the US abortion is legal most everywhere it seems and people can get them, so aren't people just makin a big deal out of something that is legal?