{"id":2066,"date":"2023-07-28T15:51:10","date_gmt":"2023-07-28T20:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelight.com\/?p=2066"},"modified":"2023-07-28T15:51:12","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T20:51:12","slug":"male-anti-abortion-religious-leaders-mull-murder-charges-for-pregnant-people-at-national-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/28\/male-anti-abortion-religious-leaders-mull-murder-charges-for-pregnant-people-at-national-event\/","title":{"rendered":"Male anti-abortion religious leaders mull murder charges for pregnant people at national event"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Make no mistake – we stand for life! \u00a0However, there is a huge difference between banning abortion and eliminating abortion. \u00a0This is something we should have learned from history – from the Crusades to the Pilgrims to the Prohibition. \u00a0Legislating morality <\/strong>does not work (although we must legislate to restrain harm).<\/p>\n

Influencing culture through our witness is how you move the morality needle. \u00a0That is, after all, how Jesus went about it. \u00a0He never created one single piece of earthly legislation. \u00a0Yet, he shared Himself and His love with large numbers of people. \u00a0The result? \u00a0He changed the world!<\/p>\n

We should do the same.<\/p>\n

\n

\"MaleAn all-male panel of anti-abortion religious leaders from around the country met Friday night to discuss the strategies that should be used to end abortion in every state at any stage of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape and incest, and with criminal punishment for the pregnant person in line with existing criminal penalties for murder, which includes the death penalty.<\/p>\n

The panel was part of a week-long series of events hosted by Operation Save America, an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim religious group that wants all Americans to follow \u201cGod\u2019s law\u201d and their interpretation of the Christian gospel. Many of the events were held<\/a> in Douglasville, Georgia, at Pray\u2019s Mill Baptist Church, which broke away<\/a> from the Southern Baptist Convention for supposed acceptance of liberal social justice views regarding race and gender. Tuesday through Friday, the group started its mornings by protesting outside<\/a> of A Preferred Women\u2019s Health Center, an abortion clinic near Atlanta.<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s speakers included Wisconsin-based Operation Save America Director Jason Storms and former OSA director Rusty Thomas, along with Arizona-based End Abortion Now<\/a> communications director Zachary Conover, Georgia Right to Life President Ricardo Davis, and Gabriel Rench, a member of the extremist Christ Church<\/a> in Moscow, Idaho.<\/p>\n

Speakers focused on equal protection bills in state legislatures<\/h4>\n

The theme of OSA\u2019s national event was unity, and highlighted divisions within anti-abortion circles over what they described as the proper approach and response to legislation that seeks to limit or entirely restrict abortion procedures. The moderator of the panel, Derin Stidd, opened by asking, \u201cWhy do you all hate women?\u201d to which the men laughed.<\/p>\n

Rench then joked about not giving the microphone to Conover and said, \u201cWe don\u2019t give him a voice like women,\u201d then added, \u201cBad joke.\u201d<\/p>\n

The comments were in jest, but in line with remarks from OSA speakers throughout the week, including another comment from Rench, who said the church was wrong to allow women to be preachers.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, anti-Islam speaker Raymond Ibrahim said, \u201cIf you look at a country, and the best they can come up with for a president is a woman, there\u2019s something wrong about that. That doesn\u2019t mean women aren\u2019t smart or capable, I believe that, but if the very best \u2014 the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me \u2014 is a woman, that tells me something about the men when it comes to positions of authority and leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

The panel focused on legislation they call \u201cequal protection\u201d bills, such as Georgia\u2019s House Bill 496, also called the Georgia Prenatal Equal Protection Act<\/a>, which was introduced in February but did not advance in the state\u2019s House of Representatives. An \u201cequal protection\u201d bill, by their definition, is one that adds criminal penalties to a pregnant person for the intentional termination of a pregnancy at any stage, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The law would make an exception if the abortion was performed to prevent the pregnant person\u2019s \u201cimminent death or great bodily injury.<\/p>\n

Storms said OSA has advocated for similar bills in more than a dozen states<\/a>, including Alabama, Arizona, Missouri, Kentucky and Oklahoma. So far, no states have passed an \u201cequal protection\u201d bill, but several, including Georgia, did pass what anti-abortion advocates call \u201cheartbeat bills\u201d that ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant. Those who advocate for \u201cequal protection\u201d bills call themselves \u201cabolitionists,\u201d co-opting language from the movement to abolish slavery, while the \u201cpro-life\u201d community has advocated for more politically expedient bills like six-week bans. Storms and other panelists called the six-week bans weak, even though they expressed understanding of political environments that make \u201cequal protection\u201d bills unlikely to become reality.<\/p>\n

Rench said that is the case in Idaho, where many members of the state legislature are part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The church has taken an official position<\/a> that rape and incest exceptions are acceptable, and bills that have not included those exceptions, such as one introduced<\/a> by OSA-endorsed<\/a> Sen. Scott Herndon of Sandpoint, have gone nowhere in the Idaho Legislature. Christ Church and its followers have taken an approach they dubbed \u201csmashmouth incrementalism,\u201d<\/a> which acknowledges that change can be achieved through gradual reformation and repentance in the country\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n

But Rench said he intends to keep working with Herndon and others to bring equal protection bills back in the next legislative session to keep pushing for it, even though he thinks there is still injustice with criminal penalties for the pregnant person.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happens when you pass an abolition bill, a woman goes to trial, and then she goes to life in prison? That\u2019s just as wicked,\u201d Rench said. \u201cLife in prison is just as wicked as everything else, so you\u2019re solving one side of the equation, acting like we did a good job, but we locked that woman up in prison for 99 years like a monkey, and we\u2019re still not treating her like a person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davis, president of Georgia Right to Life, said his organization will push for their bill again in the next session as well, and said he\u2019s confident they\u2019ll get it done the next time around.<\/p>\n

How is abortion going to end? Maybe with civil war, speaker says<\/h4>\n

Thomas, who was a longtime director of Operation Save America before Storms, said incremental steps like \u201cheartbeat\u201d bills were \u201ca lie from the pit of hell\u201d from the very beginning, but the organization didn\u2019t used to be politically involved because there was too much compromise and too much that needed to be changed.<\/p>\n

Thomas said it wasn\u2019t until pastor Matthew Trewhella, who co-founded the Milwaukee-based group Missionaries to the Preborn and is Storms\u2019 father-in-law<\/a>, wrote \u201cThe Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates\u201d that he felt like there could be progress. The book references history and biblical theology to argue that governments deemed \u201ctyrannical\u201d and ungodly can and should be defied. Trewhella has said he has spoken to at least 11 state legislatures across the country about the book.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the first time in my life I knew we had solid rock to stand on to fight this battle politically,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conover\u2019s organization, End Abortion Now, creates model legislation that grants legal personhood to fertilized eggs, which would limit in-vitro fertilization procedures, and assigns penalties to people who have abortions in addition to doctors who provide them. Some of his legislative efforts have been defeated by organizations that are against criminal penalties for pregnant people.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a dirty little secret of the pro-life industry: Their heretical teaching that has informed the types of laws they\u2019ve supported for five decades, the lie that women should be allowed to kill their own children with immunity and impunity because they themselves are victims of abortion,\u201d Conover said. \u201cIt is a lie that says that they are never legally culpable, however willfully or intentionally they carry out the act of taking the life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of the legislative strategy, the panelists agreed changing the culture of America to take on a Christian biblical worldview, which will require all pastors to take the same position on abortion as their own.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must see that the church plays that role culturally, to create that social tension. That\u2019s the standard, that\u2019s the ideology,\u201d Storms said. \u201cBut that\u2019s when we have to say, \u2018Well, how does that flesh out in the real world?\u2019 It doesn\u2019t always look so pretty when we actually see that applied. How is abortion going to end? I don\u2019t know, maybe it\u2019s going to be a civil war, maybe it\u2019s going to be a whole variety of other means.\u201d<\/p>\n

States Newsroom reproductive rights reporter Sofia Resnick contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n

Georgia Recorder<\/a> is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com<\/a>. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This content was originally published here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Make no mistake – we stand for life! \u00a0However, there is a huge difference between banning abortion and eliminating abortion. \u00a0This is something we should have learned from history – from the Crusades to the Pilgrims to the Prohibition. \u00a0Legislating morality does not work (although we must legislate to restrain harm). Influencing culture through our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kHU7-xk","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thelight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Male-anti-abortion-religious-leaders-mull-murder-charges-for-pregnant-people-at-national-event.jpg?fit=1200%2C600","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2066"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2069,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066\/revisions\/2069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}