Here’s the bad news from The Beckett Fund website: Today, a federal court denied a request to halt enforcement of the abortion pill mandate which forces the Christian-owned-and-operated Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., to providethe “morning after pill” and “week after pill” in their health insurance plan, or face crippling fines up to $1.3 million dollars per day… Hobby Lobby is the largest and first non-Catholic-owned business to file a lawsuit against the HHS mandate. The Green family has no moral objection to the use of preventive contraceptives and will continue covering preventive contraceptives for its employees. However, the Green family’s religious convictions prohibit them from providing or paying for the…
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Gay Marriage and the Future
Two articles on gay marriage have appeared recently that you need to take note of if you haven’t already. Both of them are written by men who believe in traditional marriage in the same way that I do. Yet both of them are suggesting that social conservatives can no longer stand against gay marriage as a matter of public policy. They are not saying that social conservatives shouldn’t stand their ground. The are saying that social conservatives can’t stand their ground. There simply isn’t a viable political coalition to make it happen. Legal gay marriage in all 50 states is inevitable at this point, and so social conservatives need to…
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Kicking Abortion and Marriage to the Curb
The conservative editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal feature two articles arguing that the GOP needs to get over its hang-ups about abortion and marriage. These voices are shrill and uncivil, but we knew this was coming. The first one is from Sarah Westwood, a college Republican who says that the GOP is irrelevant to younger voters because of their positions on social issues. She writes:
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Was the election a disaster?
My friend Matt Anderson thinks that social conservatives have given in to “handwringing” and “freak out panic end of the world despair” after last Tuesday’s election. I think he is commenting on what he sees as a general trend among social conservatives, but he singles out me and Al Mohler in particular. Yes, Mohler and I did refer to the election as a disaster, but as far as I know there hasn’t been any handwringing on the part of either of us. Anderson has not only misread us, but I think he also risks missing the lessons of this last election.
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What does the election reveal about us?
This piece by George Weigel is perhaps the most insightful commentary that I have read yet about the meaning of Tuesday’s election. Here are some highlights, but pay particular attention to the conclusion. The American culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the “dictatorship of relativism.”
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Does the Grand Old Party Have a Future?
In my earlier prediction of what would happen in the Electoral College, I missed two states—Virginia and Florida. I picked both of them to go to Romney, but that turned out to be wrong. I wasn’t surprised by Virginia going blue again, but I have to say that I was stunned by Florida. I saw how close the polls were beforehand, but I thought surely Florida would be red this year. This loss is a big deal for the Grand Old Party. The GOP will not win another presidential election if it can’t win Florida (and other states like it). The party will be dead in the water.
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Personal Testimony on Abortion and the Election
Garrett Kell reminds us that abortion is not merely a political abstraction. It deals with real live human beings making real life or death choices. Sometimes these are the wrong choices, as he confesses to know all too well. He writes:
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The Loyal Opposition
President Obama won the election yesterday, and it turns out that he did so pretty handily. In both the popular vote and in the electoral vote, he is the clear winner. He is the president—duly elected now two times—and we owe honor to whom honor is due (Romans 13:7). But that is not the end of the story. We also owe him our loyal opposition. There’s no getting around the fact that last night was a disaster for social conservative causes. The scope of this setback is due in no small part to the way in which President Obama campaigned and won reelection. In the course of the campaign, the…
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Predicting the Electoral Map
As I said last week, I think my original prediction of an Obama victory still stands. Certainly the race has tightened in the last month, but the polls still give an edge to the President in the crucial battleground states. That being said, it’s difficult to be dogmatic because many of those very same polls are still within the margin of error. Nevertheless, the trends seem to indicate that President Obama will end up with more than the required 270 electoral votes. In my view, the most likely result from tomorrow’s election will give the President 290 electoral votes to Romney’s 248 (see map above).
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Can Evangelicals Vote for a Mormon?
The New York Times has an article this morning declaring Glenn Beck to be a bridge between Romney and evangelicals. The article notes “the long-frayed relationship between evangelical Christians and Mormons” and speculates on whether or not evangelicals will put aside religious differences to vote for Romney on Tuesday. The article includes quotes from me and Russell Moore criticizing Glenn Beck’s mix of politics and religion. I stand by those remarks, especially as it regards Beck’s 2010 Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C. It was a mash-up of civic religion and syncretism that had some evangelicals looking to Glenn Beck as some kind of a spiritual leader. It exposed the…