Marvin,
What you say is true when you state that morality (at least in our system) plays a role in making the laws, but I think you miss the point. In our system a law which allows for the murder of innocent, helpless human beings is still a law and is enforced as such. There are other ways of thinking about “law” which would hold that such a law violates “natural law” and therefore is not a law at all and should not be enforced. I don’t want to go too far into this. I just wanted to point out how philosophy affects us and some incongruity in the prevailing ways Evangelical’s think about “law”. It is nothing more then an interest of mine being an Evangelical and a lawyer. Yet to fully discuss the issue we would have to go into all sorts of things like the relationship between natural law and the Catholic Church, the extent of human reasoning capacities, will versus reason, Calvinism vs. Arminianism etc. etc. etc. Suffice to say it is extremely complex.

“Rather rape and murder are illegal simply because the government has decided that they are illegal and can exercise coercion to enforce it’s decision. ”

Michael,

I think that this addresses the how, but it doesn’t address the why. The government didn’t simply decide to outlaw rape/murder et.al. just because they felt like it. There were beliefs held by those in government that led to the decision to outlaw those acts. It is those motivations of the government to outlaw certain acts where morality comes into play.

Marvin,
I know I’m going down my rabbit trail, but I think pointing it out is important. You mentioned that rape and murder are illegal in your post as examples of legislating morality. Yet as pointed out earlier, the prevailing legal philosophy in this country and among Evangelicals (whether the realize it or not) does not allow for such a moral determination. Rather rape and murder are illegal simply because the government has decided that they are illegal and can exercise coercion to enforce it’s decision. There is no morality to it. It is all about power. In the same way government has decided that abortion should be legal and it’s decision is supported by the majority of the electorate, thus abortion is legal.

on #14 – There are a lot of factors here, Josh. First, they didn’t separate orthodox Jews from others, who tend to be politically liberal, so that’s one issue. But I can tell you first-hand that abortions for babies with birth defects (downs synd., holes in the heart, missing limbs, et al) are routinely recommended in Israel — even to the orthodox. What percent follow through I don’t know, but there is a higher rate of defects in endogamous populations, so the issue comes up.

Further, there are some traditions, rabbinic, I believe, that don’t really consider the baby fully viable until a month’s survival after birth (on that, cf. Num 3:15).

Lastly, as was mentioned somewhere above, the issue isn’t clearly addressed in scripture, and most religious Jews (or their leaders) read it in Hebrew, which makes this even more clear than it is in our English translations.

I think if you polled only orthodox jews you’d get a split closer to the Catholics or Evangelicals.

Cnic,

Your assertion that making abortion illegal wouldn’t reduce it’s occurence was completey baseless and patently absurd on it’s face. I’m sorry if that offends.

A thirty second google search reveals that the frequency of abortion has increased roughly tenfold in the United States AFTER the Roe decision legalized it in 1973.

It is also a documented FACT that the much of the abortion rights movement was founded upon a stack of lies. To wit:

“The news that Norma McCorvey–”Jane Roe” in Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that liberalized abortion law–had switched from support of abortion to opposition to it is a welcome development and underscores a general trend in the American population, said Father Frank A. Pavone.

Ms. McCorvey’s involvement in the nation’s most important abortion case began in Dallas in 1970 when she was seeking an abortion and met two lawyers who were looking for a plaintiff to test Texas’ abortion laws. Under their guidance, Ms. McCorvey sued to contest the abortion prohibition and lost, but the Supreme Court reversed the decision Jan. 22, 1973, and ruled that abortion was legal in all 50 states. Ms. McCorvey remained an anonymous figure until the late 1980s when she announced her identity, revealed that she had never been raped, as she had testified in the original case, and that she had gone through with the pregnancy and given up the baby girl for adoption.”

Then there’s this:

“numbers were knowingly inflated by proponents of abortion rights. The star witness for this claim is Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion clinic doctor who in 1969 cofounded the group now called NARAL Pro-Choice America (the letters originally stood for National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws). Since Roe, though, he’s turned against his former comrades — he made the highly controversial 1984 antiabortion film The Silent Scream and has authored several books describing his conversion on this issue and critiquing the abortion-rights movement.

In Aborting America (1979) Nathanson writes: “In NARAL we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always ’5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?”

I am frankly sick and tired of this government sanctioned slaughter at the alter of “choice” or “reproductive rights” or whatever phrase liberals attempt to use to polish the ugliness of it. I am sick and tired of the people who attempt to justify it. Abortion is an unspeakable evil that has been tolerated for far too long.

Marvin the Martian -

I was going to respond to your comments, but clearly you’re not open to having a respectful dialogue. When you start using terms like “absurd” and “annoying” to describe my views, you’ve ended the conversation. You’ve also assumed my comment had no basis in fact, because you haven’t read material that doesn’t confirm your own beliefs. For the record, I’m not a “liberal”, I’m more of a “moderate” who leans to the right. Though I feel I can learn from all perspectives.

Peace.

Cheryl,

CNic, like most liberals, share the annoying propensity for making “it’s a fact” statements that have absolutely ZERO basis in fact.

Marvin,

When I said morality can’t be legislated, I meant at the heart level. But as I am thinking about this, I certainly agree with you, if we don’t have laws that put limits on conduct and penalties for breaking them, we would be in huge trouble.

As a matter of fact, Romans 13:4 makes it clear that is the purpose of governement. It says, speaking of rulers, “For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”

And I too would like to know where CNic got the information that making abortions illegal does not reduce the number of them.

“Morality cannot be legislated and a few “hot-button” issues don’t define Christianity. ”

Really?

Then why do we have laws that dictate conduct at all? Rape and murder are against the law. Why? Any answer you give will ultimately fall into moral ground.

“And the fact is, making abortion illegal does not reduce its occurrence, any more than having illegal drugs reduces their use.”

On what basis do you make this absurd “fact” (other than your “because I say so”)?

CNic,

Of course you are right, government can not legislate morality. But is it not an altogrether different matter to legislate immorality? The killing of our unborn chidren? To legislate that killing them is ok to do is, in my mind, monstrous.