Pro-Life Baptist Leader Richard Land Endorses Mitt Romney

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Oct 30, 2012   |   4:43PM   |   Washington, DC

Richard Land, a Baptist leader who has been one of the leading pro-life evangelicals for many years has written an opinion piece in which he lays out the case for social conservatives as to why they should vote for Mitt Romney.

Land is executive editor of The Christian Post and president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, but wrote the endorsement piece as a private citizen. The endorsement represents a break from his 24-year-old tradition of not endorsing presidential candidates.

“Every four years we have pundits and political gurus tell America, “This is the most important presidential election in a generation.” They are most often wrong. However, once a generation they are right. The 2012 presidential election on Nov. 6 is at least the most important election in a generation,” Land writes. “It is perhaps the most important election since one that occurred on Nov. 6, 1860, when in the providence of God Abraham Lincoln was elected president, preserved the Union, and expunged the evil of slavery from our land.”

“America is at a fork in the road and must choose between a President Barack Obama who wants to remake America in the model of a European welfare state and a Governor Mitt Romney who wants to restore a more economically vibrant and traditionally moral America,” Land continues. “The stakes could not be higher morally, socially, or economically. When one turns to the platforms of the two parties, one finds radical differences on issues that deeply divide American society.”

Land’s column goes on to say:

On the sanctity of human life, the Republican Party’s platform proclaims, “We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.” Further, the Republican platform endorses both “a human life amendment to the constitution” and “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”

The party platform also addresses the assaults on life at its various stages, declaring opposition to “the non-consensual withholding or withdrawal of care or treatment, including food and water, from people with disabilities, including newborns, as well as the elderly and infirm, just as we oppose active and passive euthanasia and assisted suicide.”

Conversely, the Democratic Party’s Platform declares that it “strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion.” And they “oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.”

For Christians of traditional religious faith there cannot be more fundamental issues than the protection of the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death and the defense of marriage as a divinely-ordained institution between one man and one woman.

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On Thursday, October 18, the great American and evangelist Billy Graham took out a full page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal in which he declared “it is vitally important that we cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles…I urge you to vote for those who protect the sanctity of life and support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman.”

It is for all these reasons and more that I endorse Gov. Mitt Romney for president of the United States. In doing so, I am personally breaking a 24-year tradition of not exercising my right as a private citizen to endorse a candidate. I am endorsing Gov. Romney because he endorses my values and convictions on the issues discussed in this column.