The Patriot Post® · St. James Talarico the ... Baby Killer?
“Jesus never talks about abortion,” insisted James Talarico in a podcast interview this week. “The Bible is silent on abortion.”
Talarico is the latest in a long line of Democrats who think that this time — surely, THIS time — they’ll win one of Texas’s two U.S. Senate seats. In a race against Ken Paxton, we’ll see, but if I were a betting man, I’d say Texas is safely red. The last time a Democrat won a Senate seat in Texas was 1988 — the year before Talarico was born. The young stud thinks he can break the losing streak with his radical left-wing brand of “Christianity.”
But like virtually everything else Talarico says about spiritual matters, his abortion argument is nonsense. No, Jesus is not recorded as having used the word “abortion,” yet the Bible is anything but silent on the value of life. And just because Jesus doesn’t use a particular word doesn’t make that thing totally permissible.
Talarico was right when he added, “We Christians have to take Scripture as a whole and make some kind of ethical determination.” Too bad he doesn’t follow his own advice.
Instead, he offers his own version of morality. “Right now in Texas, we have the most extreme abortion ban in the country,” he explained. “No exception for rape. No exception for incest. We have girls as young as 10 years old who are assaulted, who are raped, who are victims of incest, and who can’t access basic reproductive care, who aren’t able to make the decision about whether or not they are going to create.”
Killing a baby doesn’t right the heinous wrong done to that hypothetical 10-year-old, or to a woman of any age, for that matter. Yes, she was a victim, but she needs compassion and real care, not a faceless pill in the mail and a lifelong regret stacked on top of her pain and trauma. A baby is still a living human regardless of the circumstances of his conception. Moreover, I’d like to hear Talarico argue against any abortion. He advocates abortion on demand with no restrictions whatsoever.
Since Talarico’s seminary degree evidently left him inadequately equipped to exposit Scripture, let me offer some assistance.
“You shall not murder,” God says in the sixth commandment (Exodus 20:13). One chapter later, Moses wrote about fighting men causing a miscarriage, in which case he says, “You shall pay life for life.”
Of life itself, in Psalm 139:13, King David wrote, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Similarly, God tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” (Jeremiah 1:5). Other stories describe children wrestling in the womb (Jacob and Esau, Perez and Zerah). Wrestling seems like an awfully human thing to do.
Nevertheless, the Democrats often hide behind individual choice on this issue. “I trust Texas women to make decisions about their own bodies,” Talarico argued. “I don’t think that’s a place for government.”
Like all leftists, however, he thinks everywhere else is a place for government. Also like other leftists, Talarico distorts the words of Jesus in Matthew 25 about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked as a mandate for every government social program they can think of.
As The Wall Street Journal editorial board notes, “The Democrat is no moderate. He favors higher taxes on income, capital gains and corporations; price controls on drugs; doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour; and letting every American regardless of age join Medicare. The latter is the road by another name to Medicare for all.”
It’s certainly strange that the only place Democrats seem to be able to find a limit to government’s reach is on the matter of upholding foundational guarantees of the Declaration of Independence — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
If you’re a regular reader of The Patriot Post, you’re no stranger to Talarico’s strange brand of “Christianity.” Our Emmy Griffin tackled it early in his rise to fame, calling him a “grifter” and a “false prophet.” And Thomas Gallatin rebutted the praise offered Talarico by New York Times Token Conservative Christian™ David French.
In short, no, the guy who thinks “God is queer” or “nonbinary,” that “our trans community needs abortion care too,” that Jesus was a “radical feminist,” and whose church pushes gender pathology on children is not a reliable source for interpreting Scripture.