We've always seen an incredible amount of hypocrisy from the anti-abortion crowd,
but one story in particular really hammered this home recently.
A girl named Maddi Runkles just graduated from Heritage Academy,
a Christian school in Maryland.
She was a good student by any measure, but this was a Christian school.
So, it's not enough that you get good grades and do extracurricular activities,
you also have to abide by their honor code
which polices your personal life.
She didn't do that.
She had sex with a guy who goes to a different school and she got pregnant.
And because this is a Christian Academy, this is now everybody's business.
They punished her by saying she couldn't attend graduation with the rest of her classmates.
They'd mail the diploma to her house.
And think about what that means.
If Maddi had chosen to get an abortion,
there's a good chance
no one would have known about it except her, the guy, and
whoever else who needed to know.
And she would have walked across that stage just like everybody else.
But because she chose to keep the baby,
which is exactly what conservative Christians always want women to do,
she was punished.
What message does that send?
They're totally against abortion,
but if Maddi had one, everything would have been fine?
They would have forgiven her and moved on?
We know exactly why they punished her.
It's because she's literally pregnant right now and everybody can see that.
That's what the school is really afraid of:
their reputation, not abortion.
Their scare tactics didn't work on her.
And this is one of the biggest problems with Christian "morality".
Evangelicals are not more moral than everybody else,
but they sure as hell want to act like it.
So they only really get mad when people "sin" in obvious ways.
That's why being gay isn't necessarily a problem in many churches.
But being in an open same-sex relationship, which people notice, is.
That's why televangelist can scam people out of their money behind the scenes
while acting pious in front of the camera.
That's why pastors like Ted Haggard have to resign after their sex scandals get a lot of attention,
but megachurch pastors who inflict abuse out of the spotlight
stay in their positions for years.
That's why evangelicals talk out loud about treating women as equals,
but get furious when female Christian bloggers openly call them out on their bullshit.
And you know what's really crazy?
Next year, Maddi will be attending Bob Jones University,
the Christian school that banned interracial dating until the year 2000
in part, I assume, because they felt there was a slap in the face to God if the public saw a mixing of races.
This isn't a controversy about abortion.
This is a controversy over a student who's visibly pregnant.
And her school is shaming her for it.
It's appalling,
but this is routine for the anti-abortion crowd.
If they really cared about preventing abortions,
they would celebrate her decision to keep the baby
even if it meant admitting that what she did with her boyfriend,
what so many other high-schoolers do,
was wrong.
They would do everything they can to make sure that baby is cared for
and help Maddi make the transition into motherhood.
Listen: I have a baby.
I'm older than Maddi is. I'm done with school. I have all the resources in the world to take care of the baby,
but it's still really, really hard.
I promise you she's gonna need some help.
Not shame from her own community.
I mean, at the very least, maybe they can start
teaching real sex education at that school instead of abstinence-only nonsense.
And, by the way, just to add one more point to all this,
one study in 2014
found that 13% of women who have abortions
are evangelicals.
And because that's a self-reported number, I don't know how accurate it is,
but it is likely that some of the people
who fight to shut down places like Planned Parenthood
are among their patients.
If you took all the women who've had abortions
out of Christian schools and out of the churches,
those places would be a whole lot emptier.
I'm Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
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