As “pro-life” as a MIRVed ICBM

Appropos of yesterday’s post on the incredibly bad logic behind the radical right’s anti-vax rhetoric, Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark had a piece today on the “depraved indifference” of #TeamVirus’s campaign of disinformation and sociopathic posturing in opposition to the efforts of the Biden administration to get us to herd immunity and end this pandemic once and for all by getting enough people vaccinated.

This all started because Donald Trump a) popped off about another lunatic conspiracy theory that struck his fancy and, of course, refused to back down when it was shown to be nonsense, as usual; and b) recognized the economic impact of common-sense public health measures to control the pandemic, realized that it would destroy the healthy economy that was the only real argument for re-electing him, and placed a greater value on his own re-election than on human life.

The willingness of such a great percentage of American Christians to show themselves to be hypocrites by casting aside the very “pro-life” values they used as an excuse to support Trump if that was the cost of getting him re-elected is one of the great scandals of church history. This is not to say, of course, that every pro-Trump Christian is a conscious hypocrite about the sanctity of innocent human life. A great many just got carried away with the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates both sides of the political divide these days, and failed to think the matter through.

But there it is. This issue is a perfect illustration of why I cannot be a Republican any more, and why I have a difficult time understanding how anybody with a conscience and the ability to reason can go along with #TeamVirus, now that it doesn’t even have the excuse of saving Donald Trump’s political hide anymore.

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead who would otherwise be alive because of this depraved, performative pretense that enabling the spread of a deadly virus is somehow a protection of “individual liberty.” One wonders how many unneccessary deaths will be necessary before people with an iota of ethical sensitivity wake up and smell the decomp.

Look. It doesn’t matter that COVID seems only to have a fatality rate of one percent. This is one of the most contageous viruses we’ve even had to deal with. Even with that comparatively low a fatality rate, it’s killed 600,000 Americans in a little over a year.

This isn’t rocket science. And it isn’t just a tragedy. It’s an ethical stain on a large percentage of the American people, and a cause of scandal for American Christianity,

One wonders how many more have to die.