Trump will speak to a Christian group that calls for abortion to be ‘eradicated entirely’
https://apnews.com/article/trump-2024-election-abortion-christians-13318983232798e44e9638a33811f844
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Donald Trump on Monday will address a Christian group that calls for abortion to be “eradicated entirely,” as the presumptive Republican nominee again takes on an issue that Democrats want to make a focus of this year’s presidential election.
The former president is scheduled to speak virtually at an event hosted by The Danbury Institute, which is meeting in Indianapolis in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Danbury Institute, an association of churches, Christians and organizations, says on its website that it believes “that the greatest atrocity facing our generation today is the practice of abortion” and it “must be ended.”
“We will not rest until it is eradicated entirely,” the group said.
Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the overturning of a federally guaranteed right to abortion — having nominated three of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade — but has resisted supporting a national abortion ban and says he wants to leave the issue to the states.
Both the Southern Baptists whom Trump will address Monday and Republicans at large are split on abortion politics, with some calling for immediate, complete abortion bans and others more open to incremental tactics. Polls over the last several years have found a majority of Americans support some access to abortion, and abortion-rights groups have won several statewide votes since Roe was overturned, including in conservative-led states like Kansas and Ohio.
Like the GOP, the Southern Baptist Convention has moved steadily to the right since the 1980s, and its members were in the vanguard of the wider religious movement that strongly supported Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Trump. The Conservative Baptist Network, one of the event’s sponsors, wants to move the conservative denomination even further to the right.
Although they criticized President Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the 1990s, Southern Baptists and other evangelicals have supported Trump. That has continued despite allegations of sexual misconduct, multiple divorces and now his conviction on 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump will give his address on the same day he appears virtually for a required pre-sentencing interview with New York probation officers.
Many Southern Baptists say they see him as the only alternative to a Democratic agenda they abhor.
H. Sharayah Colter, spokesperson for The Danbury Institute, said in a statement that the presidential race was a “binary choice” and said Trump has “demonstrated a willingness to protect the value of life even when politically unpopular.” And Albert Mohler, longtime president of the denomination’s flagship seminary and once an outspoken Clinton critic, wrote a column after Trump’s conviction attacking Democrats for supporting transgender rights.
“Say what you will about Donald Trump and his sex scandals, he doesn’t confuse male and female,” wrote Mohler, who is a listed speaker for Monday’s event, along with others from the denomination’s right flank.