While visiting Yale with my son 15 years ago, our tour guide said something that has challenged me since. Near the end of the tour, I inquired about on-campus church services. Our tour guide half-jokingly replied, “Oh yea, if you’re one of those hate-mongering Christians, we have several church services here on campus”. While our tour guide tried to take back his words, churning inside my brain was the question: “How could such an extraordinarily intelligent, perceptive and otherwise gracious young man, call Christians “hate-mongering”? “Hate-mongering!” It didn’t take more than a moment to recall news a few days earlier of Christians protesting outside the funeral of a fallen soldier returned from the war in Iraq. Against the backdrop of a grieving family was a small group of protesters, oblivious not only to their own callousness, but the far-reaching consequences of their hypocrisy. Hypocrisy and its consequences have always been with us, but far more troubling lately is the scope of disinformation and duplicity spewing from the mouths of political “leaders”. Few things are more dangerous and destructive than lies masquerading as truth, and the wholesaling of incongruent beliefs by shrewd and powerful people.
Perhaps the most serious areas of our lives in which duplicity is being sown involves the meaning of being ProLife and how we should contain the pandemic. I submit that many of my fellow Republicans, who like to boast that they’re ProLife, are really just Pro-birth, and not ProLife. Applying the old adage “actions speak louder than words” ought to lead us no other conclusion than politicians who claim to be ProLife while advocating or voting against affordable healthcare for all, increased funding for public schools and preschools, expanding the child tax credit, and protecting the environment our children and grandchildren will inherit are intentionally distorting their beliefs and intentions to advance their own political ambitions.
While some may be inclined to brush-off a ProLife vs Pro-birth distinction as some minor mix-up in terminology, I submit it reflects an intentional political tactic. Not only is this duplicity leaving the genuine needs of our nation unmet, it’s deceiving many, exacerbating divisions among us and spilling over into the health of our nation. Nowhere is this more significant than the wake of destruction being left by ProLife Republicans stoking anti-masking and anti-vaccine notions and conduct.
Since the pandemic began, 45 million Americans have contracted Covid, 722,000 lives have been lost to it, millions of people have lost their jobs, businesses or some aspect of their well-being and all of us have experienced damaged relationships. In March 2021, Dr. Birx, who specializes in immunology and was the Trump Administration’s Covid Coordinator said, “There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.” A wealth of medical experts begged us daily to mask-up, yet Trump repeatedly refused to model masking and waited until March 2021 to give a qualified endorsement of vaccinations.
Tragically, throughout this year, several Republican governors and mayors have followed in Trump’s footsteps, sowing duplicity, and trying to animate their political base by pushing back against mask and vaccine mandates under a guise of freedom and liberty. While they claim to be ProLife they actively push back against the very practices that save lives. Tragically, their duplicity, like a cancer, has now spread into our communities, where parents rail against school administrators trying to protect children.
As disinformation, divisions and duplicity continue to be sown across America, perhaps it would be good to recall the fragility of our democracy. Hopefully, the pain we’ve endured, the damage we’ve witnessed, and the potential for even worse will compel each of us to give meaningful weight to the inconsistencies between how politicians label themselves and the policies they espouse, and vote accordingly.