Pro-life Town Tells Abortion: No Trespassing!

by Tony Perkins: There isn't a more dangerous place to be these days than in the womb. With liberals making even born babies a target, it's no wonder communities like Waskom, Texas are taking matters into their own hands. If there are sanctuary cities for immigrants, the city decided, then they can certainly make a sanctuary for people just as important: the unborn.

Waskom, Texas wasn't exactly on most people's radar. This week changed all of that, when five leaders of the local community (population: 2,189) made national news with its unique perspective on the abortion debate. The Texas town, which is literally on the border of Louisiana had been talking with pro-lifers in the neighboring state. There was some concern, they said, that if the Pelican State's new abortion law took effect, there'd be pressure to put a clinic near Waskom. It would be the perfect place for a group like Planned Parenthood to lure women over the state line.

Pastor Ivy Shelton, who heads up the First Baptist Church in town, said no one in the city wanted to take that chance. "We're the last town in Texas on I-20 before you go into Louisiana," he told me on "Washington Watch." "And so with that in mind, we had the thought -- let's try to be, rather than be reactive towards this, let's try to be proactive towards this... And so, [we] began the process of putting a resolution and an ordinance in place." After all, he pointed out, the unborn need asylum too.

Things happened pretty quickly. "We had [a] rally on Sunday night, and then Tuesday they got the city council and the citizens of Waskom got to hear the resolution, the wording of the ordinance. And... the city council voted unanimously to adopt it, making this a sanctuary city for the unborn." At least two of the councilmembers go to Pastor Shelton's church, so I asked him if any of it was controversial. "Our main goal of course is not to get political," he explained, "but our main goal is to be scriptural. And so I just shared with our congregation the reasons that we are pro-life."

He took them through the passages of Jeremiah and Psalm 139 and shared how God has plans for every person before they're born and how God is active in the pregnancy -- as David said, "knitting me together in my mother's womb." "I wanted to show them all the reasons from scripture why we are pro-life. And of course that was not a hard sell for our congregation. Our congregation is pro-life across the spectrum. We have folks that are engaged in this issue. We have folks that are engaged in foster care. We've had young ladies that have decided to have their babies and their parents and grandparents have stepped in and helped them raise their children. So just across the spectrum we try to be pro-life as a church. And so the church was just awesome with all of this."

We're called, he pointed out, "to be salt and light in our culture." "I think far too often -- just in in general -- the church has been on the sidelines. And I think it's time that we get off the sidelines and we get into that public discourse." That's not always easy, he knows. In fact, there are already rumblings that the Left will come after Waskom to scare other cities away from doing something similar. But that doesn't bother Pastor Shelton."We come to this with the full knowledge that Satan is not going to be happy with this measure -- and he will be actively working within the systems that he influences to come against us. It will be a battle. I think our mayor said it will -- that we will no doubt be sued over this. And there'll be a court battle, and it's one that we are expecting. But that's okay. That's not the thing that we spend our time worrying about. Mainly we just want to keep our focus on Christ, and we believe that he'll take care of us and all of this."-------------------
Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is President of the Family Research Council . This article was on Tony Perkin's Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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