Hugh Hewitt has once again asked for comments. Johnathan Rauch has written a piece for the New Atlantic confusing the religious right with violent 60’s activists.
On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics.
Sadly, Rauch believes that anyone who supports life is equivalent to the few wackos who bombed clinics. That’s right, the bombers that were widely criticized by the religious right are just the same as the religious right.
He continues:
The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out of their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard.
Rauch makes a false comparison. Pro-life people have been against legalized abortion for 32 years. Yet as a group, they have not rioted in the streets like the leftists of the 60’s. The religious right are not the terrorists, “insurgents and provocateurs”, that Rauch believes they are.
It’s amazing that someone can grow up in America thinking Christians (which is what they mean by religious right) are terrorists and it is only by the left’s reluctant allowance of Christian participation in the political process that abortion clinics are safe from bombing.