October 2023

October 24th, 2023

Tucker Carlson recently claimed that Zelensky has “banned the Christian faith in his country and arrested nuns and priests.” Though purporting to speak on behalf of religious liberty, in reality Carlson is playing fast and loose with the truth and endangering the lives of Ukrainian believers.

The Moscow-backed clergy being arrested in Ukraine are not neutral, but actively working for the Kremlin, some contributing directly to the deaths of hundreds of Ukrainian women and children. These arrests are not merely a whim of President Zelensky either: Eighty-five percent of Ukrainians polled favor the government taking action against these representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church who are causing mayhem in Ukraine—66 percent of Ukrainians want the Russian Orthodox Church banned completely in Ukraine.

Seventy percent of Ukrainians identify as Christians, primarily in one of two denominations of the Orthodox faith – the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP). The latter, as the name implies, answers to Patriarch Kirill, the church leader of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.

The Russian Orthodox Church is not a church in the sense that most American Christians think about churches. It directly serves the Russian government’s purposes, including Russia’s imperialist ambitions. For one example, Russian tank manufacturer Uralvagonzavod recently released a promotional video of priests splashing holy water on Russian T-90 tanks coming off the assembly line headed for Ukraine.

This isn’t just a blip in the Russian Orthodox Church’s record. Whether under imperial, soviet, or federated Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church has worked hand in glove with the Russian state for centuries. In 2000, Russia’s official state church put out a document, The Basis of the Social Concept, which defended “the medieval conception of symphonia to describe the church’s ideal relationship with the Russian state in terms of ‘body’ (state) and ‘soul’ (church). The document argues that “it is in their linkage and harmony that the well-being of a state lies.”

It is no surprise, then, that Patriarch Kirill, who led the committee that wrote The Basis of the Social Concept, calls Putin’s presidency “a miracle from God.” Soviet archives show that both Kirill and his predecessor Patriarch Alexy were KGB agents during Soviet times.

In 2015, the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate was the second largest denomination in Ukraine, behind the homegrown Orthodox Church of Ukraine. 24 percent of Ukrainians identified as parishioners in the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate, versus 33 percent for the OCU.

After the 2014 invasion of Donbas, where Ukrainians saw reports of UOC-Moscow Patriarchate priests sheltering Russian officers in their monastery and blessing the leaders of the breakaway Luhansk Republic, membership in the Moscow-backed church dropped. In 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople—who holds a unique, historic role within global Eastern Orthodoxy—dealt a further blow to public support for the Moscow Patriarchate when he formally recognized the Ukrainian church’s independence from Russia. As Matt Gobush has written, this pronouncement caused Putin to threaten possible bloodshed and purportedly order “a cyberattack on the patriarch’s palace.” An irate Russian Orthodox Church also broke its centuries-long fellowship with Constantinople over this.

As a result, a December 2021 survey, two months prior to the full-scale war, showed only 14 percent of Ukrainians with the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate. And as the Russian Orthodox Church continued to erode away its credibility with its barbaric military tactics, only 4 percent of Ukrainians identified with the Russia-backed church after the atrocities of the full-scale invasion.

For example: In Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russians executed 560 civilians ranging in age from 2 to 92 and raped girls as young as 14, a UOC-Moscow Patriarchate clergyman reportedly told invading Russian soldiers who there would be most likely to oppose them.

While Carlson would have you believe these agents of the Kremlin are being persecuted, the truth is that Russians target Christians in Ukraine, having murdered at least 26 religious leaders and tortured many more believers.

Viktor Cherniivaskyi, an evangelical Christian who works with Steven, was evacuating a refugee group from occupied Luhansk that included a pregnant woman and a newborn baby when pro-Russian forces took him captive. He was tortured with electricity and beaten with a baseball bat for 25 days until his wife miraculously found him and convinced a pro-Russian official to free him. Despite enduring these horrors, he has returned to the front as a part-time chaplain, alternating with his work as a software engineer.

Ukraine is not ‘cracking down on Christianity’. In fact, the opposite is true. Even with the backing of Putin’s government, only seven percent of Russians even bother to attend church regularly. Ukrainians, by contrast, are more than twice as likely to attend church, a number that has increased the longer Ukraine has been independent of Russia’s influence.

Tucker Carlson’s willingness to parrot Putin’s talking points is why he is a favorite on Kremlin propaganda TV shows. But make no mistake, what he is saying is perpetuating the persecution of both Orthodox and Protestant Christians in Ukraine.

Read more at Providencemag.com.

October 24th, 2023

Early voting is already underway in Ohio, the nation’s next abortion battleground. On November 7, as polls close, votes will be tallied to determine whether or not Ohioans decided to enshrine “an individual right to … abortion” within their state constitution.

If voters check “yes” on Issue 1, Ohio will become the fourth state in the country (joining California, Michigan, and Vermont) to elevate abortion as a constitutionally protected form of “reproductive freedom.” Already in August, the pro-life cause in Ohio met one serious setback when an initiative to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments — an effort to stave off exactly the kind of constitutional amendment it now faces — failed dramatically with a double-digit spread. As Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said then, “Attacks on state constitutions are now the national playbook of the extreme pro-abortion Left.”

The pro-life movement has been caught flat-footed ever since its stunning victory in 2022, when the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade. Since the historic Dobbs decision came down, the pro-life cause has lost every time that the issue has appeared directly on the ballot, including in conservative-leaning states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio.

Political scientist Jon A. Shields suggested in a recent article in The Atlantic that these losses aren’t a backlash against the pro-life movement as much as a fear of “the sudden disruption of the status quo.” In other words, in an ironic twist, it is a fundamentally conservative impulse that has driven the latest string of pro-life setbacks.

If Shields is right, however, that same conservative impulse that has cost pro-lifers so many losses elsewhere might be what ends up winning the day for the pro-life movement in Ohio. While Ohio is not as conservative as Kansas, Kentucky, or Montana, there are still at least two important differences between this and other votes that could help Ohio turn the tide with a pro-life victory.

For starters, this is the first time we will be seeing a major pro-abortion ballot initiative in a Republican-leaning state. Previous conservative losses were all instances where the pro-life movement was on the offensive, seeking to pare back abortion with various initiatives. In those states — as in Ohio’s previous constitutional amendment initiative — the status quo bias worked against the pro-life cause, but this time in Ohio, the same bias should work for pro-lifers defending the status quo against progressive overreach. Studies have shown that this is especially true in decisions about complex policies, like Issue 1, which invokes concepts like “fertility treatment,” “miscarriage care,” and “fetal viability,” rather than a straightforward yes-no decision on abortion.

Secondly, Americans have already rejected the most extreme form of the status quo that persisted for decades under Roe v. Wade and could be revived once again if Issue 1 succeeds: partial-birth abortion. Even to describe it is to recognize how repulsive the practice is, comparable to the kinds of barbaric actions that shocked the world with Hamas’s attack on Israel. The procedure involves the abortionist partially delivering the unborn child until the “entire baby’s head is outside the body of the mother” and then puncturing “the back of the child’s skull” to remove “the baby’s brains,” before delivering the rest of the now-dead infant.

This grisly practice was first put on the map by “Dr.” Martin Haskell and perfected by him in Ohio’s abortion facilities. But Ohioans ultimately rejected Haskell’s procedure, becoming the first state to ban it in 1995. Haskell, who continues to work as an abortionist, has donated at least $100,000 so far to reinvigorate Ohio’s status as the nation’s abortion laboratory. As Amy Natoce of Protect Women Ohio has said, Haskell “knows it is an investment in his late-term abortion practice,” as Haskell is on the record as performing partial-birth abortions from 20 weeks on “even into the ninth month.”

While Issue 1 has some provisions that its proponents falsely point to as “moderate,” including one that would allow the state to restrict abortion after fetal viability, except when “the abortion is necessary to protect the pregnant woman’s life or health,” pro-life organizations have repeatedly and definitively demonstrated that the viability standard does nothing to stop abortionists like Haskell from carrying out partial-birth abortions, when virtually all abortions are performed before viability comes into play. Even after viability, the Supreme Court demonstrated in Doe v. Bolton that “health” exceptions can include anything from emotional health to “well-being” to serve as a loophole for abortion on demand at any point during a pregnancy (and in the case of partial-birth abortion, even after the baby is on the outside).

If Ohioans’ conservative impulses — to uphold the status quo and reject the most barbaric forms of abortion — can’t be counted on to stop Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby in-state, the pro-life movement is in big trouble.

Paul Teller serves as executive director of Advancing American Freedom in Washington, D.C.

Read more at the WashingtonStand.com.