Ohio Confirms: Politics Ain’t Gonna Rescue America … Something Much Bigger Required

A week ago Tuesday night I hit the sack with a heavy heart. For the seventh time in a row since 2022’s High Court squashed the egregious Roe v. Wade decision, American voters in one region marched to the polls to affirmatively endorse more government-authorized baby-killing. This go-round it was Ohio’s “Issue 1” under consideration. The majority officially entrenched the “right” to abortion in that state’s constitution.

As 19thnews.org unassuagingly summarized: “The passage of Issue 1 makes for a 7-and-0 ballot measure winning streak for reproductive rights advocates since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.”

Let’s be excruciatingly clear about this (ducking the ugly facts, after all, isn’t going to facilitate baby-saving): Repeatedly since June of 2022, citizens in various states have gone to the polls to explicitly buttress extinguishing helpless pre-born human lives. What are those babies trying to do? Simply survive in the womb. What did these voters cast a ballot to enshrine — not one time, not three, not five, but seven(!)? The murderous crushing of those little ones’ efforts.

Slicing through the chin-pulling political speak, the pro-abort smug talk, the “It’s-not-as-bad-as-all-that” Republican excuse-making … how else can we frame it? Tuesdays Ohio development shrieked: “Yay, abortion!” “Ya-hoo baby-snuffing!” “Go, Go, Go, infanticide!” “Kill, kill, kill, kill!” 

Again, no punches pulled: it gets worse. This enormity occurred in Ohio. That must be emphasized. O-Hi-O. It didn’t unfold in goofy California or ultra-blue Massachusetts or Gov. Kathy Hochul’s New York. We’re talking midwestern-nice Ohio, midwestern-decent Ohio; the national “bellwether … the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated state … ‘The Mother of Presidents'”. Buckeyes “twice voted for former President Donald Trump”. “In 2019, they “passed the Heartbeat Bill, which banned abortion after a fetal heartbeat could be detected … usually around the sixth week of a pregnancy.”

Last week? The same bunch slapped their seal of approval on “a new state Constitutional amendment that changes state law on abortion”, effectively scouring away any restrictions on targeting unborn children. Oh, yeah: they did it by a commanding thirteen-point advantage. The results weren’t even close.

In the wake of Issue 1’s victory, an image circulating online showed gleeful women cheering and fist pumping. A friend of mine, remarking on the same photo, expressed bewilderment that a group of ladies — the human race’s life-bearers, recall — would exuberantly celebrate such ghoulishness. I confess, as accustomed as I’ve become to the social media sight of members of the fairer sex giddy over child-killing, this fresh photo stopped me in my tracks for a moment.

Chilling.

“The future is bright, and tonight we can celebrate this win for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights,” Lauren Blauvelt, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates Ohio triumphalized at an election night party. “Today, Ohioans made it clear abortion is a winning issue.”

Of course, abortion’s tiny, silent but once alive victims won’t be celebrating. Ever. For them, Issue 1 is anything but a “winning issue”.

When I first spotted headlines announcing Ohio’s moral debacle, a conviction I’ve long nurtured slammed down on me all over again — with both feet. I heard someone else concede it just the other day: “There is no political solution to this problem.”

Stumping for this pro-life politician or that fresh anti-abortion initiative, sending emails to and texting our officials, phoning their offices to object to this legalized homicide? Important all — but none of these exertions by themselves will succeed in wiping abortion off the societal landscape.

Cal Thomas recently observed, “We live in an anti-life and increasingly lawless culture. … I see abortion increasingly as a reflection of our deepening decadence at many levels. It’s not the main cause of our moral decline. That means it must be dealt with at a deeper level than politics.”

America’s “anti-life” culture has been incrementally generated by the spirit of death which has been mountingly pervading Western Civilization for decades. This pernicious, lying influence shows up most conspicuously in the nation’s abortion-absorption — but it doesn’t stop there. The contemporary fixation on sterile LGBTQ behaviors, much of modern feminism’s child-allergic leanings, the anti-human snarling of climate change mania … each one is rooted in a spirit of death. Fewer births. Fewer people. Fewer families.

In three words: Homo Sapiens? Bleccchhh!

In case you hadn’t noticed, the so-called “Christian” community isn’t immune to this death-dealing afflatus either. In an article entitled “Christians Turn on Republicans Over Abortion”, Matthew Impelli writes, “United Methodist … Deaconess Katelin Hansen told Newsweek on Wednesday that she was ‘thrilled with the results of yesterday’s Issue 1 ballot initiative.'”

Impelli skeweringly cites Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody on X, formerly Twitter:

Here’s an ABSOLUTE DISGUSTING Exit Poll Statistic from last night: 24% of so-called “White Born-Again or Evangelical Christians” voted FOR Ohio’s pro-abortion constitutional amendment. It’s not JUST the left. JUST HORRIBLE. 

In Ohio — as in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont over the past fifteen months — a startling share of those who would proudly market themselves as “Bible believers” apparently threw in with blood-thirsty progressives to rah-rah in utero murder. Then, presumably, there were those “Christians” who simply shrugged their shoulders over the matter. They couldn’t be bothered to be involved with it at all. In short, “born-again” masses abandoned the not-yet-born.

Some of early America’s leading lights envisioned how such a convoluted state of affairs would bode ill for the nation:

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” – Benjamin Franklin

“It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” — Thomas Jefferson 

“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who … will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man.” – Samuel Adams

Washington, John Adams, Madison, et al among that founding generation, echoed these convictions.

Nothing less than a continent-wide spiritual transformation — an awakening, a divine irruption, a seismic outpouring of God’s Holy, Life-Giving Spirit — is equal to straightening out such a mess. Until Americans’ hearts are rigorously righted, you can forget about any enduring change for the better.

Citizens of such caliber can only be produced by the direct working of God’s grace — which rushes in when righteous people humble themselves, desperately own their need and that of their land, and cry out to Him to intervene.

“Revival or bust,” as commentator Steve Deace puts it.

“[S]ecular tools alone,” admonishes Muslim turned Atheist turned Christian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “can’t equip us for civilizational war.

Godless Leftism is evil. Republicans and Conservatives have failed to sufficiently rebuff it. Voting, activism, general political involvement, etc.? Sure, they play a role … but sans a heavenly invasion’s seizing the conscience of the American people, the Republic is cooked. A little more focus on God’s indispensable and pointed intervention and a little less on Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis, or Savior Candidate X, or this “Big Vote” of that “Most Important Election of Our Lifetime” is existentially in order.

Abandoning the rescue of the most vulnerable among us can never be an acceptable outcome. But a sizable contingent of U.S. citizenry is pledged to all-abortion-all-the-time. An unbreachable impasse? Probably … unless the Judge of the Universe does that which He alone can do, in response to the pleas of His people who acknowledge it from the core of their beings.