The Moral Choice for President in 2016
Enough has been said and written about the moral shortcomings of both presidential candidates during this insane election cycle. Based on character alone neither is qualified for the Christian vote. So should Christians stay home? Or accomplish the effectual equivalent by voting third party? Well, that’s definitely what Democrats would like to see. Imagine, after eight years of President Barack Hussein Obama, after twenty trillion dollars in fiscal operating debt, an all-out assault on religious liberty, the fundamental redefinition of marriage by judicial fiat, after being now at the point where we are one activist lawyer on the Supreme Court away from abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy in every state and the barbaric practice of partial birth abortion foisted on the entire union from the DC bench, that a second Saul Alinsky Democrat in a row could actually get elected to the highest office of America while a less than adequate percentage of the nation's 80 million Christians do anything in the ballot box to stop it.
Look, I get it. We didn’t get our guy (or gal) through the primary. But let’s be a hundred percent accurate, if even a quarter of the moral and spiritual heavyweights in the churches now constantly blasting social media with promises that they’re not tarnishing their witness to support Trump would have spent even a sliver of the effort to actually stick their neck out there in support of Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio during primary season, the current climate would be much different. If we had Ted or Marco, there would be no moral issue with voting for the Republican candidate to complain about, so the vast majority of the blame rests on the shoulders of the Christian who sat on their hands during the primary and now saddles up their high horse. It’s quite pathetic, actually. If America is forever fundamentally transformed by a Hillary presidency, we (the American churches) will have been hoisted on our own petard (see: the German churches during the Holocaust).
If you are one of the unfortunately proportionally few Christians that fought for the much less morally compromised, conservative stalwart Cruz during the primary, you probably know that while we did not get our man across the finish line, we did accomplish something undoubtedly amazing in the process: we influenced the 2016 Republican Party Platform to be the most conservative it has ever been in the modern era. The 112 members of the Convention Platform Committee in Cleveland were stacked with Cruz delegates, creating platform language and principles far more akin to Cruz than Trump. For those that understand the Christian history of the Constitution and consider Christian responsibility to the American civil society being to restore/preserve the constitutional republic responsible for over 90% of the funding for global evangelism during the course of its relatively brief existence, consider the following.
What has become known as the "Cruz Effect," on the Republican Platform, produced a morally rock solid document that doesn't compromise on the sanctity of life and traditional marriage, using personhood language for the unborn in its repudiation of Roe v Wade and strongly affirming traditional marriage, even as the best model for raising children. The Cruz Effect led to an iron-spined position on religious freedom, with freedom of conscience provisions woven throughout, and an unequivocal stance of support for Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and demanding a veto of an UN Security Council resolution seeking to impose terms on Israel. From life to limited government, one simply cannot read the 2016 Republican Platform and ignore the rejuvenated commitment of the authors to founding principles and biblical ethics. Enjoy it for yourself HERE. Next, contrast it with the dystopian 2016 Democrat Party Platform, which is more immoral and markedly un-American than ever before, calling for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment (ban on federal funding for abortions), legalization of partial-birth abortion throughout the union, religious liberty restrictions that would make reading from passages like Romans 1 a hate crime and a federal power expansion the likes of which would make the Obama Administration blush. See for yourself HERE.
Regardless of who the executive is, remember the power of those in their cabinet over the modern version of America. For example, it's not Obama persecuting North Carolina over their stand against the insane push to let grown men use the little girls room: it's Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her cohorts in the Department of (in)Justice. Now ask yourself, is it better for the next four years to have a cabinet of Republicans, bound at least in principle to stand on the Republican Platform, shaped by the Cruz Effect, or a cabinet of Democrats, standing on a platform that seems to be written by Satan himself? That's what's at stake in November. When framed this way, the moral choice is to vote for the 2016 Republican Party Platform, from the top of the ticket to the bottom, and then spend the next four years actually practicing civic discipleship in our churches so a candidate that we can be proud to stand behind can finally muscle through in 2020.
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