Posts Tagged with “liberalism”

The Dichotomy of Gun Control and Abortion Rights

I’m not a protector of gun rights. As I’ve previously argued, I’m not sure Christians should be. In fact, I’d give up the 2nd Amendment in heartbeat if it guaranteed an end to abortions. But it seems that some people want to have it both ways.

Access to abortion services is not in the Constitution. Yet liberal powers claim that it is so important that is should not be restricted by any safety measures that hinder access. Their arguments in Whole Woman’s Health et al. v. Hellerstedt claim that Texas’ attempt to increase the safety standards of abortion clinics in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell atrocities must be stricken because it increases the barrier to access.

President Obama celebrated the decision, saying, “[The Texas laws] harm women’s health and place an unconstitutional obstacle in the path of a woman’s reproductive freedom.”1

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued in her own opinion paper, “When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners.” Ginsburg continued, “…targeted regulation of abortion provider laws that do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion, cannot survive judicial inspection.”2

Note Ginsburg’s “desperate circumstances” straw man, as if no pregnancy is ever terminated in order to preserve a current lifestyle. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, most abortions occur because “having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents, or she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems.”3

In Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s majority opinion, “Gosnell’s behavior was terribly wrong, but there is no reason to believe that an extra layer of regulation would have affected that behavior.”4

I’ll summarize these arguments: First, regulations should not overly restrict rights. Secondly, there is no evidence that these regulations reduce abuse of the right in question.

These are both arguments that advocates for 2nd Amendment rights make on a regular basis in resisting increasingly restrictive gun control laws. The liberal community argues that, when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, safety should trump open access to an actual Constitutional right. But when it comes to abortion, even though it is not a constitutional right, liberals will not tolerate the same arguments they themselves use in attacking the 2nd Amendment.

Why is this so?

Laws restricting both abortion access and gun access may seem to be common sense, but restrictions on abortion violate the core beliefs of the current moral revolution and its idolatry of human autonomy.

“Abortion in this case becomes the sacrament of this new idolatry,” Albert Mohler writes. “It is the sacrament of a modern humanistic religion to which the society is increasingly committed. Abortion is absolutely central to the sexual revolutionaries and to the moral revolution around us.”5


  1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/27/statement-president-whole-womans-health-v-hellerstedt []
  2. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf p. 47 []
  3. https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/psrh/full/3711005.pdf []
  4. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf p. 32 []
  5. http://www.albertmohler.com/2016/06/28/briefing-06-28-16/ []

If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.