Pro-lifers and Obamacare opponents suffer from the same moral myopia.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the attacks on Obamacare from the right, and I’ve discovered a disturbing affinity between abortion supporters and Obamacare opponents:

Money is more important than life.

I have yet to hear one cohesive argument that does not support abortion because unwanted children cost too much, or doesn't oppose Obamacare because it costs too much.

 

(Except from the Catholics and some like-minded Protestants who defend life at all stages regardless of cost. And if anyone’s wondering, I am on that side, which isn’t a side at all, but a principle.)

 

Any consideration of money before the sanctity of life has immediately, irrevocably attached a cost, and not to that life, as you might expect, but to the inconvenience the rest of us endure preserving it.

But I want to talk to the evangelical right for the moment, the side that often denies evolution because it denies God, that refrains from casting the first stone, that draws moral direction from the widow’s mite, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and Jesus’ ministry to the infirm and impoverished, the marginalized and despised.

Shame on us.

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I’m thinking of no one in particular. Instead, all the clamor and hand-wringing have coalesced in my head around an unhappy selfish personality that is very un-Christlike.

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Final thought: If we had real leadership in Washington, there’d have been no government shutdown, because real leadership uses consensus rather than coercion and from the outside more often looks like teamwork than leadership.

[2103-10-08]

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