lobbying for righteousness

I think we should just outlaw crime and sin, and then we'll be in an earthly paradise.

But seriously: The Civil Rights Movement represented a major paradigm shift in our society's way of thinking about segregation and race relations. That shift bore fruit in people's unwillingness to tolerate racism any longer, and their willingness to be beaten (and worse) for crossing the segregation line in the South. Those actions had political significance but what I'm saying is that they are where the real breakthrough happened, not in legislation that Congress signed.

The lobbying effort to change the law must follow the change in society, or it is doomed to failure. During the GOP primary, Bush said he would not support a constitutional amendment to ban abortion on the grounds that a nation that could pass one wouldn't need it. Though his performance during much of the rest of the primary branded him a yogurt-head, I do have to agree with the wisdom of that remark.

If we want abortion to end -- and I'm sure many of us on this forum do -- we need to bring a paradigm shift to society at large, not send high-power lobbyists to Washington.

Politics has its place in church-world relations, but I think it's a much smaller place than we've allowed it to be in the United States. It's also unclear exactly how directly we can apply the example of Israel to the United States since Israel was, in no particular order, a monarchy, a theocracy, called to be a peculiar people different from the surrounding pagan peoples as the church is called to be today.

The United States is a democracy -- a concept not even found in Scripture -- pluralistic, and very much like its neighbors. How the church interacts with it must necessarily be different from how Israel interacted with itself.

The government has chosen (wrongly, I would say) to recognize neither the humanity of the unborn, nor the sanctity of their life. This does not alter the sanctity of unborn life, nor does it release us from our obligation to save those lives.

What I am saying is that our efforts at saving those lives are best oriented at a personal level to the women most likely to get abortions and to the doctors most likely to perform them.

As we effect a social change, we will see our leaders begin to follow.