During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence shined a spotlight directly on former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine’s extreme abortion position. Pence said he could not understand “with Hillary Clinton and now Senator Kaine at her side is to support a practice like partial-birth abortion…the very idea that a child that is almost born into the world could still have their life taken from them is just anathema to me.”
Kaine maintained that “we really feel like you should live fully and with enthusiasm the commands of your faith. But it is not the role of the public servant to mandate that for everybody else.” First off, that isn’t even accurate – Kaine stands with a candidate who has said that millions of Americans must change their religious persuasions in order to encompass her views of LGBT rights. But beyond that, pro-life doesn’t require religious belief, it requires scientific belief: unborn children are still children.
Kaine didn’t acknowledge that. Instead, he said that he supported Roe v. Wade, which he mischaracterized as allowing “American women to consult their own conscience.” That’s not what Roe does. It allows American women to define someone else’s life – their baby’s life – as non-life for whatever purpose they choose.
Of course, he also now says he wants to reject the so-called Hyde Amendment, which means that it isn’t just women making decisions for their babies, it’s us subsidizing them. So the whole “let’s agree to disagree thing” doesn’t even apply.
Then, most disgustingly, the Catholic Kaine quoted the “gospel of Matthew” to tear into Donald Trump’s nutty declaration months ago that women should be prosecuted for abortion. Now, Trump was wrong on that. But Kaine quoting the New Testament in order to defend the killing of the unborn is not merely disgusting, it’s blasphemous – it’s taking the name of God in vain, if you’re a religious Christian.
Kaine continued along those lines: “That’s what we ought to be doing in public life. Living our lives of faith or motivation with enthusiasm and excitement, convincing over, dialoguing with each other about important moral issues of the day but on fundamental issues of morality, we should let women make their own decisions.”
Except that as a society, we don’t. Women don’t get to commit murder because they decide to do so. Women can’t hold slaves. Women can’t redefine away inconvenient humans simply because they have “different moral judgments.” By relegating the status of fellow human beings to the “do what you feel” category of government, Kaine undermines any concept of a government worth defending; no government that refuses to defend human life is worthy of existence.