A leading Christian pastor has called out Sen. Tim Kaine’s “hypocrisy” for summoning Christians to care for the most vulnerable among us while publicly supporting abortion on demand.
“Senator Kaine is simply not the right person to explain how our faith and scripture inform our actions for the ‘least of these,’ writes Pastor Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today. “We know of his actions, and his faith has not led him to protect the unborn.”
Rev. Stetzer was responding to a September 15 article by Tim Kaine (D-VA) in the same journal in which the senator and running mate Hillary Clinton appealed to Christians across the nation to come together to fix health care in America.
“I think all Christians—Democrats, Republicans, Independents—can agree that these are the people Christ told us to care for. Our disagreements do not lie in whether to care for them, but how,” Kaine wrote.
In his critique of Kaine’s essay, Rev. Stetzer writes that his greatest concern is the senator’s silence regarding the elephant in the room—namely, the Democratic Party’s absolute insistence on abortion on demand.
“Senator Kaine sent this to convince a readership that is pro-life while he tip-toes past a whole segment of the ‘least,’” Stetzer writes, referring to the unborn victims of abortion.
Stetzer states:
While serving on the ticket of a party that wants no restrictions on abortion, Kaine has famously obfuscated around the issue of abortion, claiming that his Catholic faith informs his personal opposition to abortion while advocating for legal protections for abortion (up to the moment of birth) along the Democratic party line.
According to the leading reproductive rights organization, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Kaine holds a 100 percent pro-choice voting record in the U.S. Senate, meaning that whatever his personal opinions may be, as a senator he has been consistently and reliably pro-abortion.
The executive director of the Billy Graham Center, Rev. Stetzer writes that “it is more than a little disturbing to me that a candidate who just ran on the most radical pro-abortion ticket in American history would come to Christianity Today, an evangelical Christian magazine, to speak of the least of these.”
Although Tim Kaine has claimed to be personally pro-life, his constant public stance has been pro-abortion, defending a woman’s right to terminate the life of her child up to the point of birth.
“That’s what makes this entire article so bizarre,” Stetzer writes. “He basically says we should listen to the teachings of our faith on healthcare, yet he is a Catholic who just ran on a ticket that couldn’t even oppose partial birth abortion.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a number of bishops stepped forward to criticize Sen. Kaine on that same issue, noting the hypocrisy of a candidate running on his Catholic credentials while supporting legal abortion.
One leading American prelate, Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann, urged voters to “be wary” of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, calling him a “cafeteria Catholic” who picks and chooses from church teachings according to political expediency.
Archbishop Naumann said that it was “painful” to listen to Sen. Kaine repeat “the same tired and contorted reasoning to profess his personal opposition to abortion while justifying his commitment to keep it legal” in the last vice presidential debate.
While boasting of his Catholic Jesuit education, Kaine fell back on “all the usual made-for-modern-media sound bites,” the archbishop noted, such as it is “not proper to impose his religious beliefs upon all Americans” and he “trusts women to make good reproductive choices.”
The archbishop called on voters to “be wary of candidates who assume to take upon themselves the role of defining what Catholics believe or should believe.”
“Unfortunately,” he continued, “the vice-presidential debate revealed that the Catholic running for the second highest office in our land is an orthodox member of his party, fulling embracing his party’s platform, but a cafeteria Catholic, picking and choosing the teachings of the Catholic Church that are politically convenient.”
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