Aborting Churches
National Review Online ^ | February 10, 2006 | Mark Tooley

Posted on 02/10/2006 10:55:19 AM PST by NCSteve

Early in January, just in time for the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Episcopal Church reaffirmed its membership in an abortion-rights coalition.

During its January 9-12 meeting in Des Moines, the executive council of the Episcopal Church voted to clarify and affirm its membership in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

RCRC, formerly known as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, was founded in 1973 with funding from the Playboy Foundation (Playboy Magazine) (and later from the Ford Foundation) (Ford Motors), to organize religious supporters of legalized abortion. RCRC is absolutist in its rejection of any restriction on abortion, defending the legality of partial-birth abortion, and opposing parental-notification laws, as well as other sensible restrictions.

Agencies of the Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, Reform Judaism, and Conservative Judaism all belong to RCRC. So too does "Catholics for a Free Choice." RCRC was founded in the wake of Roe v. Wade to counteract Roman Catholic opposition to the Supreme Court ruling.
I remember well that these are the same people who marched in the early 1970’s against the Vietnam war. I can remember their speeches. And these are the same guys that preached in the early 1970’s liberation theology, and later supported communism in Eastern Europe and in South America. And have for the last decades been a part of the backbone for the Green Party and its environmental activism. These people and all the corruption that they stand for can not, and simply will not go away. Their efforts are not just in the US but also worldwide.

The author of the Episcopal motion, representing the Diocese of Washington, D.C., noted that the executive council's vote simply reiterated the denomination's stance on abortion, which he said has been an "unequivocal opposition to any federal or state legislation that would interfere with a woman's right to make a decision on terminating a pregnancy." This was reported in the Living Church magazine .

RCRC boasts that its ecclesial alliance for abortion rights is both wide and "mainstream." It describes abortion rights as integral to "religious liberty." RCRC head Carlton Veazey notes on its website that RCRC founders thought their struggle would last only a decade. "In fact the struggle is far from over," he regrets. "It has changed and intensified, and the stakes are growing."

Veazey refers to a "sense of doom" as the U.S. Senate moved toward confirmation of Samuel Alito. RCRC had already called the Senate Judiciary Committee's approval of Alito a "dangerous setback for individual privacy and women's reproductive health." According to Veazey, in a column for Beliefnet.com, Alito has "shown an appalling lack of understanding for life's complexities and the circumstances that some women must endure."
Belief Net is apparently some arm of the RCRC.

Feelings of angst at RCRC are quite deep. Veazey, who is ordained in the National Baptist Convention, writes:

After four years of unprecedented access, far-right Christian fundamentalists are deeply embedded in government structures. The nation is not yet a theocracy, if mullah-run Iran or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is the standard. But we are on the brink of a de facto Christian state, and we should be very frightened for the future of religious freedom and diversity.
As I have written elsewhere these people HATE God, HATE the bible, and HATE any semblance of Christianity that would follow after Christ. And thus they Hate with a passion the Christian ideals elaborated in the US Constitution and our Religious Freedom. This may sound like a diatribe but it is not for this same religious coalition has its fingers in the ACLU, which has been conducting it unrelenting war against Christianity God and Christ in the US for the last few decades.

This article is in the face of their notable string of defeats since the 1980’s. First the wall came down in Berlin and then the Soviet Union collapsed – to their great horror. And Russia’s subversive activities around the world halted. Understand that these people had been riding in on the Pale Rider of communism expecting it to take over the world and cleanse the earth of God the Bible etc. but when that suddenly fell these people went into full panic. They eventually re-amassed themselves in the Green Party and the environmental movement to in particular hold back the US which has been the most explosive force in the earth for Christ (I am speaking more or less their POV here, and not contradicting what is written on this site) and the US’s ideals about freedom and the right to vote – hence their opposition to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and their utter joy at the Palestinians voting in Hamas.

In the US they set backs have been great since the 1980’s Electorally – they first lost the US House of representatives, in the 1990’s the Senate, 2000 the presidency and now most notably their power to dictate law without vote or representation through the supreme court – and these coalition is livid.

Internationally they communist hero went down, their green party clout has disappeared as a vapor, and their center piece of the Kyoto treaty has fallen.

These have already embraced Radical Islam as their new communism and will support all their efforts to overthrow Europe and the rest of the world – mark these words I do not say these things lightly.

Despite the claims of the "mainstream" on the issue of abortion, RCRC's members are in fact an increasingly isolated minority among America's churches. The vast majority of America's over 160 million church members belong to Roman Catholic or evangelical churches that disapprove of abortion. Denominations totaling less than 20 million belong to RCRC. And the membership of those denominations is, in fact, deeply divided and ambivalent on the question of abortion.
It is not that they have 20 million foot soldiers but the tithes offerings and gifts of 20 million people plus all the buildings and lands all these churches and denominations collectively hold to fund their nefarious domestic and international programs. And they also have their hundreds if not thousands of activist lawyers and judges that are a part of their membership as well. This is not so much a conspiracy or secret council plotting the end of the world, as it is a group of corrupt utter apostates of Christianity and Judaism doing the biding of their father the devil. And this same thing has gone on for all time with only the name of their member nations and organizations changing since the fall of man in the Garden

These RCRC churches, in their official abortion statements squishily express discomfort with abortion while still defending its unrestricted legality. "We do not wish to see laws enacted that would attach criminal penalties to those who seek abortions or to appropriately qualified and licenses persons who perform abortions in medically approved facilities," the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declares. The abortion rant here is just the tip of the iceberg of what these guys support and believe. Feminism, Gay rights, Abortion, the war on all visible signs of God and Christ, Hate speech legislation that would make the bible hate literature and make preaching against and specific sin or immoral behavior hate speech and the ultimate goal of this is to legislatively make proselytizing or the preaching salvation altogether a crime. Why because Fundamentalist Christianity and Pentecostal Christianity are to two fasting growing denominations in the world over and if they continue unchecked (and this is again these people’s POV not this sites or what God has been revealing to me for the last 2 years) they will out number and over power this ungodly coalition’s clout and fiancés and may be able in these people minds to create a Christian theocracy that they and all their corrupt perverted ilk would fall under persecution. This is their delusion – What they really fear is another church or church coalition reaching the power to dictate law as the Catholic Church enjoyed for almost a thousand years.

The United Methodist Church unequivocally asserts, "We support the legal to abortion as established by the 1973 Supreme Court decisions."

Episcopalians warn that "legislation concerning abortions will not address the root of the problem" and insist that any legislation must "see that individual conscience is respected."

The United Church of Christ "upholds the right of men and women to have access to adequately funded family-planning services and to safe, legal abortions as one option among others."

The end result of all their statements is that the official lobby offices of these denominations, on their own and acting through RCRC, oppose all proposed restrictions on abortion. In April 2004, they all endorsed and participated in the "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, D.C., organized by the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood.

In all their unctuous demonstration-marching and statement-making, the pro-abortion-rights church community has not considered the effect of their advocacy on their own demographic health.

Conservatives have often chided the mainline (Liberal) Protestant denominations for their dramatic membership losses, faulting the controversial liberal political advocacy of their churches' officials. No doubt there is truth in this. Most mainline Protestants (The Church members themselves) are still conservative leaning, despite the chronic leftism of their church hierarchies. Many react in frustration by leaving.

But the demographic implosion may also have other, deeper contributing factors. One out of every six Americans belonged to a mainline denomination 40 years ago. Today it is one out of every 15. (Their base is evaporating as well so the clock is ticking on this entire coalition which further drives their desperation) Writing for The American Journal of Sociology several years ago, Catholic priest (and romance potboiler author) Andrew Greeley, with two other sociologists, asserted that mainline Protestant decline is actually created by decades of declining birthrates in comparison to those for conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Though Greeley et al. did not address it directly, mainline Protestant hierarchs long championed legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, culminating in their founding of RCRC in 1973. Undoubtedly this had some impact on abortion rates among their own flocks. The lower birth rate among mainline Protestants can probably be explained, at least partly, by some level of increased moral ease with and resort to abortion (the "Roe Effect").

So perhaps unrestricted abortion is fueling the decline of the very same churches who have most championed it. The irony is a sad one.

— Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee (UMAction) of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.