Abortion, the Spirit Given Truth

My small group went through 1 Corinthians last year. It was eye opening. I was especially struck by Paul's pronouncement that if you do not have the spirit, you, in truth, do not know about the "things from God" (1 Cor. 1:14-15):

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment.

Based on this, I started thinking about voting. Why do we hold politicians accountable for things that are obvious to us only because we have the Spirit? Specifically, why do I vote against Barack Obama because of his stance on abortion when he doesn't know any better? I know the answer to that, but I saw that someone answered it well at another blog, so I thought I'd post it (my friend Bryan alerted me to this). Below is a conversation a blogger (Zach Nielsen) had in his comments section with a woman named Alli Rogers:

Alli:

I have a friend who is very pro-Obama who explained the abortion issue to me in a way that made sense. For the record Zach, I am with you 100% but what he said made sense to me. I think of it like this:

A person who does not understand that they are a sinner will never understand that Christ died for their sins. So telling them that TRUTH will not mean anything to them because they do not know the truth.

Until those who are pro-choice understand the truth about abortion, many of the churches arguments are nonsense to them. Although it is black and white to me, it is absolutely not to many people. They do not understand the TRUTH.

Zach:

Alli,

Right. Theologically I totally agree. But here is the HUGE problem with your friend's line of reasoning: That logic does not work with other moral issues that we all certainly want the gov. involved in. Things such as, rape, murder, child porn, and stealing.

We don't say as a church, "since unbelievers don't have the mind of Christ we shouldn't legislate against these things." That would be total anarchy. None of us want that and all of us are thankful that we have gov. to retrain evil (Romans 13).

Just because a crazy guy might kill people because he doesn't have a conscience that lines up with the word of God, doesn't mean he is off the hook and we should bag our laws against murder. Same goes with abortion.

Yes, we should appeal for conversion and know that laws can't change people's hearts, but we both know that we are glad we have laws that protect people regardless of how people feel about those laws.

Again, just because say 51% of people think its perfectly ok for them to steal and have no remorse about stealing doesn't mean we should legalize stealing. We should seek to restrain evil by appealing to the heart AND through laws even though we know that law making can only go so far. Yet, I sure am glad we have them.

I am just advocating for those laws to be extended to the most weak and defenseless in our society.