Evangelical Bloggers Endorse Huckabee

Evangelical bloggers Justin Taylor, Joe Carter, and Matthew Anderson have written an official endorsement of Gov. Mike Huckabee for the 2008 GOP Presidential Candidate.

Here's the endoresment:

When it comes to politics, we three are pragmatic idealists. We are dedicated to the pursuit of noble principles and goals while never forgetting that politics is the "art of the possible." Because we are idealists we are choosing to endorse a candidate who most aligns with our principles and values and is most worthy of our sacred trust. Because we are pragmatists we are choosing to endorse the one candidate who we believe is most capable of defeating Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Because we are pragmatic idealists we are endorsing Gov. Mike Huckabee.

For several months we have admired the scrappy campaign of Gov. Huckabee but believed it would be a wasted effort to support him with our time, energy, and finances. We bought into the notion that he could never get the GOP nomination since conservative voters would not support him. And the reason we were told conservative voters would never support him is because he could not get the nomination. To quote John Piper (from a different context), "It’s like the army being defeated because there aren’t enough troops, and the troops won’t sign up because the army’s being defeated."

We can no longer sit idly by and allow the campaign of a worthy candidate and an honorable man to flounder for lack of support.

Only after prayerfully considering the issues, the candidates, and the electoral calculus have we decided to settle on this joint endorsement. We hope that you will join us in careful deliberation of Gov. Huckabee's candidacy and that you will join us in pledging to cast a sacred vote for the office of President of the United States. Our army may go down in defeat, but it won't be because we refused to enlist in this worthy cause.

• Matthew Anderson (Mere Orthodoxy)
  


• Joe Carter (Evangelical Outpost)
  


• Justin Taylor (Between Two Worlds)

Read more.

Guiliani vs. Clinton?

Who will you vote for in the next Presidential election if it comes down to two pro-choice candidates - Guiliani vs. Clinton? Justin Taylor has written a very thoughtful post on this, with a list of ten thoughts that are helping him work through the issue. Here are his thoughts, but it would be worth reading the entire article.

1. I do not want Giuliani to be nominated for the Republican ticket. For those who are convictionally pro-life and want to see justice for the unborn prevail and Roe v. Wade overturned, it seems difficult to support Giuliani's candidacy at this stage when there are other viable pro-life candidates.
   


2. The ballgame changes if the race comes down to a pro-choice Republican vs. a pro-choice Democrat.
   


3. One has to ask whether or not it can be reasonably ascertained if one pro-choice candidate would be better than the other in terms of the cause of life. The key word, I think, is reasonable. We're not talking infallibility here.
   


4. The next president will undoubtedly get to nominate justices to the Supreme Court. No one doubts that Hillary Clinton will nominate judges with a judicial philosophy at odds with constructionalism and originalism.
   


5. I think there are good reasons to believe that Giuliani would appoint constructionalists and originalists, as he has promised to do--in part because I think he will want to placate the Republican base. (Even if he does this for only one term in order to win reelection, which I think is doubtful, then the next point still stands.)
   


6. One must recognize that if it comes down to Guiliani vs. Clinton, a vote for a third-party candidate will undoubtedly guarantee a Clinton presidency (likely for the next eight years). Read that sentence again. Now read it one more time. I think it's incontrovertible, and I'm not sure some pro-lifers have sufficiently recognized this.
   


7. The irony, then, is that being a single-issue voter on the cause of justice for the unborn can actually lead to increased injustice for the unborn.
   


8. At the end of the day, perhaps we can categorize the two positions as (1) principled pro-life purity and (2) principled pro-life pragmatism.
   


9. It seems that the Religious Right (by which I mean the James Dobson Republicans--the elite evangelical political influencers of soccer moms and the like) are in a pickle: Mitt Romney is a Mormon, Fred Thompson doesn't seem like a Christian, and Mike Huckabee doesn't seem electable. From my seat in the bleachers, it seems like they should pick one and stick with him.
   


10. It is a valid, legitimate point that if the Republicans nominate a pro-choice candidate, then this precedence opens the door for the nomination of pro-choice Republican candidates in the future.