ERLC Endorses Pathetic Pro-Life Legislation While Snubbing Prominent Abolitionist Bill
Exemplifying the most watered down, misguided, and milquetoast elements of the pro-life movement, the ERLC continues to demonstrate why they are one of the worst organizations in the world. This lobbying arm of the Southern Baptist Convention continues to hamper and sabotage abortion abolitionists at every turn, throwing their resources and endorsements behind toothless or neutered legislation. At the same time, landmark abolitionist bills introduced by SBC senators and pastors are either ignored or actively opposed.
The ERLC has a long history of ideological opposition to abortion abolition. At the 2021 SBC conference, President Bart Barber and the ERLC purposefully tried to stop a resolution to abolish abortion from happening, being thwarted only when it was taken to a floor vote and the elites were overruled. Afterward, the ERLC started to cope and seethe, casting it aside in favor of incrementalist legislation.
Then, in Louisiana, when abolitionist lawmakers sought to pass a bill to abolish abortion prior to the overturning of Roe, the ERLC again spoke out against it. They released an open letter opposing the bill, disparaging it for going too far in its efforts to abolish abortion. They were ideologically joined with far-left women’s rights groups and Planned Parenthood, the apex predator of the baby-killing world, who also opposed the bill and unequivocally declared that they could not support it.
Planned Parenthood was pressuring its supporters to defeat the bill and The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission was doing the exact same thing, both pushing from different sides to attain the same goal.
No mere one-off, this same situation repeated itself in Missouri, where the ERLC likewise helped defeat the bill.
Much of the antagonism comes from ERLC president Brent Leatherwood, who, like the whole organization led by Russell Moore before him, has created a culture that despises everything about it.
Leatherwood opposes abortion being made illegal without exception, along with abolitionist staples like all persons receiving equal justice under the law, men and women who kill their babies being punished, and the suggestion that women who take their babies to an abortionist ghoul to receive the sanitized equivalent of three swift kicks to their soft skulls and then a curb stomp to squish the brains out, really are murderers.
Enter a trio of introduced or passed pro-life bills that were endorsed by the ERLC last week. The Baptist Press reports ERLC public policy director Hannah Daniel praising their passage:
At a time when lawmakers have been timid to voice pro-life convictions, I was encouraged to see legislative activity pushing forward the cause of life last week…At the ERLC, we are celebrating the passage of the Pregnant Students’ Rights Act along with the introduction of the Pregnancy Center Support Act and the Unborn Child Support Act. These bills recognize the dignity and personhood of the preborn and also tangibly assist new mothers and families to choose life.”
These bills continue a long tradition of regulation but not abolition. One example is the Pregnant Students’ Rights Act, which passed the House last week. According to the summary:
This bill requires a public institution of higher education that participates in federal student-aid programs to provide information to admitted and enrolled students on the rights and resources for students who are pregnant or may become pregnant. These rights and resources must exclude abortion services.
Additionally, the IHE must establish a protocol to meet with students who believe they were discriminated against based on pregnancy.
The IHE must also provide pregnancy-related questions to enrolled students and annually submit compiled responses to the Department of Education.
Similarly, the Pregnancy Center Support Act gives tax credits and incentives to people who donate to qualifying pregnancy centers, and the Unborn Child Support Act would allow women to collect child support on their unborn child. These are ERLC priorities because Lord knows the first places university students go to find pregnancy resources and information is on their schools’ website, and because for the ERLC it’s more important to get single or divorced pregnant women child support than it is to prevent them from murdering their babies in the first place.
While those bills get rolled out the red carpet, it’s worth pointing out the prominent piece of legislation that ERLC didn’t endorse. Senate Bill 1729, the Abolition of Abortion Act, which would immediately abolish abortion in Oklahoma, give full personhood rights to the unborn, and punish anyone who murders them.
In fact, the ERLC won’t only NOT endorse it, but you can fully expect them to raise a stink and openly oppose it, pressuring Republican legislators to disavow it or introduce less severe and more compromised legislation in it’s stead, as they did in Missouri and Louisiana.
Out of the heart, the mouth endorses.
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Equal protection under the law sounds suspiciously like equal measures ….
Pretty sure we know where God stands on that matter …