Leaps and Bounds

George was having some problems with his wife. One afternoon, he expressed his frustrations to his administrative assistant, a lovely woman who had worked in his office for several years. She had been through a divorce herself, and was quite sympathetic to his comments. She advised him to try to talk to his wife.
As the months wore on, George became more and more attached to her. They began to have drinks after work so he could unwind before going home to the stressful situation there. Drinks stretched into dinner, several times a week. And finally, they wound up at her place.

He felt awful, and vowed not to let it happen again. But it did. And 18 months later, George was spending three evenings every week with her, and lying to his wife about how he had to work late.

Finally, overcome with the guilt, he went to see a marriage counselor to try to figure out how to address the mess.

Does any sane person think that the counselor told him that since it took him over a year to incrementally create the situation, he would need the same amount of time to incrementally correct it, and that the thing he should do is to stop paying for her drinks and dinners when they met?

Of course not. No reputable counselor would advise anything other than "stop seeing her completely and immediately." Cheating on one’s wife is just plain wrong, and the only way to fix it is to stop cheating – cheating less often or more cheaply is not an option.

That is because while movement toward evil usually occurs in small steps, a return to goodness does not. An action is either a moral good or it is not. And we all understand that reality when we are dealing with adultery or alcoholism or drug addiction or theft.

So why are we blind to it when it comes to politics?

In their new Pledge to America, the GOP says it will work to ban federal funding of abortion. It does not say one single word about ending, or even limiting, abortion in America. So the new pro-life standard for dealing with killing unborn children is to stop paying their killers from government coffers.

The GOP is exactly like the counselor who tells our friend George to keep seeing his mistress, but make sure she buys her own drinks and dinners. There is no reason for George and his mistress to end their adultery as long as the wife being cheated on doesn’t have to fund the affair.

It’s ridiculous, but the GOP is not joking. Which brings us back to the original question – why are we so blind to moral truth when it comes to politics?

Because the moral voice in America, the voice that comes from our pulpits, lives under a government-imposed gag order. The voice that remains, the political voice of the government, is more concerned with getting and keeping power than it is with restoring true liberty to our land. They have reduced good and evil to poll numbers and convinced us that we cannot move faster than the polls.

But polls don’t change the truth. Abortion, like adultery, is wrong. If we are to truly restore our heritage of freedom, we need to begin by recognizing that the very basis of freedom is truth. Government is not now, and has never been, the Voice of the Truth. That voice comes from our churches.

It’s a voice that we desperately need.