Confessions of a one issue voter

WARNING!  If political debates or “hot topic” issues cause your blood pressure to rise, get you depressed or incite you to start cursing at your computer screen – you may want to skip reading this post today. Read on at your own risk. 

Ok….so I am a one issue voter.  Whether you agree with me and are saying “Amen, Sister!”, think I am crazy, foolish or vehemently disagree and want to scream at me – I hope you can respect me for my passion and commitment to my beliefs or at the very least “tolerate” me (as it seems would be the “politically correct” thing to do – although I find very little tolerance for many of my Christian tenets from those who scream tolerance the loudest…but I digress….). 

Here are my core beliefs:

• I believe that life begins at conception(ie: the minute a sperm & egg meet a human being is created – this is an area where both religion & science agree with me – so that should make us all in agreement on at least one point!)
• I believe all life deserves a chance to be lived to it’s fullest – whether that “full life” is hours, days, years or decades or whether that full life has it’s challenges, hardships, handicaps or disabilities (what life does not include some of these?).
• I believe that deliberately taking that life is murder. (dictionary definition – “to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously”  I consider scraping a baby from a mother’s womb piece by piece as in 1st trimester abortions as inhumane.  I consider 2nd & 3rd trimester and partial birth abortions as barbaric. I consider leaving a baby alone to die after a botched abortion as infanticide – the act of killing an infant)
• I believe that murder is breaking one of the 10 Commandments, is a sin and is morally wrong (I must add here that like all sin,  it is forgivable – thank God for His amazing love, mercy & grace for us all)
• I believe that murder/abortion should be illegal in our country
• I believe that abortion is not a “right” nor should be a “choice” (we should not have a right to murder or again we should not have a choice to end the life of a innocent baby)
• I believe that I will stand before God one day and give an account for my actions or in-actions when it comes to what I did to help stop the aborting of 3,000 innocent babies each day in the USA.

Because of that belief I have:

• volunteered for and supported with my time, talent and money many Crisis Pregnancy Centers.
• taught against abortion to thousands of teenagers whom I have worked with for the past 28 years.
• encouraged those teens as well as the many others in my sphere of influence to do something to help end abortions.
• was privileged to have intervened with one of those students who was just moments from having an abortion (truly she was inside the abortion clinic, as was I – it is quite a story!). She now has a beautiful 20 year old daughter and thanks the Lord daily that she did not end her child’s life. (she came by my home several years ago and with tears in her eyes expressed her tremendous gratitude for my “guts” that day)
• participated in a peaceful demonstration in front of an abortion clinic in 1988 which resulted in closing the clinic for a day and in my arrest. (and I promise it was peaceful….singing worship songs and praying – no yelling, screaming, no signs or posters).
• helped many single mothers – physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially – who have chosen to have and raise their children rather than have an abortion.
• am in the process of trying to adopt a baby from a crisis pregnancy center whose mother was in crisis and has chosen adoption over abortion.
• always voted for elected officials who do not support abortion as well as always voted for propositions that are pro-life or that will limit/restrict abortions and/or abortion funding.
• taught my children that abortion is wrong and encouraged them to be involved in all of the above. I want them to be passionate about this issue! (which means in the next decade + a few years there will be, at the very least, seven more pro-life/anti-abortion activists out there.  Hmmmmm….and if they each are blessed with seven children (which is highly likely as they all want lots of sweet babies!), then there will hopefully be 49 more joining the cause.  By the time I am a great gramama….there could be well over 300 one issue voters just from the Lambdin clan alone – perhaps there is hope we can turn things around. Wait that could mean 2,000 – 2,500 of us in just three more generations…wow!  Opps, I got carried away and caused the over population crowd to hyper ventilate!)

I am posting this article from a professor at Princeton University that sums up why I can not/will not vote for Senator Obama. (On a side note….please do not even begin to think/say that I am racist – it could not be farther from the truth – I have voted for Alan Keyes several times and…just wait to see the race of our soon to be adopted child/children!  Also, are you aware that the highest number of abortions in the USA are performed on black women? – I want to save those precious black babies as well as help those women in crisis pregnancies. I hate that during this election process I have often felt like I needed to “prove” that I am not racist…but once again I digress….) No matter which side of this abortion issue you fall, I hope you will read this article to the end and give it some serious consideration. (I have only included a part of it here on my blog…please click on the link at the end to get the entire article)

Obama’s Abortion Extremism

by Robert George

Oct 14, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama’s views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

 

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-lifeCatholics and Evangelicals – who aggressively promote Obama’s candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama’s self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak. It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly believe what they are saying. But before proving my claims about Obama’s abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as “pro-abortion” rather than “pro-choice.”

According to the standard argument for the distinction between these labels, nobody is pro-abortion. Everybody would prefer a world without abortions. After all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an abortion? But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby would present significant problems for them. So even if abortion is not medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers’ money.

The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people – Thomas Jefferson was one – reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn’t think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.

Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as “pro-choice”? Of course we would not. It wouldn’t matter to us that they were “personally opposed” to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were “unnecessary,” or that they wouldn’t dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said “Against slavery? Don’t own one.” We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being “pro-abortion” and being “pro-choice.” Who would qualify for the latter description? Barack Obama certainly would not. For, unlike his running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely private choice that public authority should refrain from getting involved in. Now, Senator Biden is hardly pro-life. He believes that the killing of the unborn should be legally permitted and relatively unencumbered. But unlike Obama, at least Bidenhassometimes opposed using taxpayer dollars to fund abortion, thereby leaving Americans free to choose not to implicate themselves in it. If we stretch things to create a meaningful category called “pro-choice,” then Biden might be a plausible candidate for the label; at least on occasions when he respects your choice or mine not to facilitate deliberate feticide.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. For starters, he supportsThe same cannot be said for Barack Obama. For starters, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest. The abortion industry laments that this longstanding federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, “forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead.” In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in uterowere it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

But this barely scratches the surface of Obama’s extremism. He has promised that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed “fundamental right” to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed Act, “a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined ‘health’ reasons.” In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would “sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.”

It gets worse.  …. Read whole article here

Further evidence for me – here is a short video clip of Senator Obama speaking at a Planned Parenthood event –

Because many elections and especially this election has proven to be very volatile and because we seem to live in a society that has ceased having polite discourse on the issues (especially the issue of abortion), I am sure that this post will cause more than a few to unsubscribe to my blog or vow to never read my writings again – which is yet another price I am willing to pay to live out my core beliefs. If I have influenced just one more person to be more actively involved in ending abortions and saving the lives of those babies, then I will have accomplished my purpose here.

For those that choose to leave….I am sad to say goodbye.  For the rest of you who stay…I will continue to strive to inspire, motivate, challenge and bless you along the way.

Lastly, I have to add – perhaps someone reading this blog is currently contemplating having an abortion – I beg you from the depths of my soul, not to go through with it.  I am willing to do whatever it takes to help you choose life for your unborn child. Email me at beth@bethlambdin.net and I promise to be there for you.