Whose religion counts in this country?

Created
Thu, 22/06/2023 - 08:00
Updated
Thu, 22/06/2023 - 08:00
Following up on the post below here’s a pro-choice tactic that should tie the other side up in knots: Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back. The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis. “I thought: ‘Whoa, these people really are not messing around.’ But then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not messing around either.’” So when Missouri’s abortion ban took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Barnes and Taves decided to fight back. Along with rabbis and ministers across several denominations, they joined a first-of-its-kind lawsuit arguing Missouri blurred the line between church and state, imposed a particular Christian idea of when life begins over the beliefs of other denominations, and threatened their ability to practice their religions. As the nation nears the one year anniversary of the fall of Roe, the Missouri case is one of nearly a dozen challenges to abortion restrictions filed by clergy members and practitioners of everything from…