And both state anti-life initiatives passed: the Michigan Stem Cell Initiative (allowing human embryo experimentation) and the Washington Death with Dignity Initiative (allowing physician assisted suicide).

Altogether, this means we are fooling ourselves if we think the United States is still a Christian nation. Its people just elected a barbarian as president, authorized the killing of both its youngest and sickest, rejected scientific fact that human life begins at conception, blocked parental intervention of abortions of young girls, and voted down the wording of an abortion ban they said only two years ago they would support.

America can be called a culture with Christian roots, but its Christian ethos has been significantly eroded.

One other thing. Obama's election means Roe v. Wade has been taken off the table for the next 20 or 30 years. Throughout his four- to eight-year tenure, Obama will nominate at least two or three young Supreme Court justices to ensure the majority continues to agree with that decision, forcing the continued legality of abortion on all 50 states for decades.

So the holy grail for many pro-lifers is now gone. Just get used to thinking of pro-life strategy without it.

For 35 years, the pro-life movement has been doing its best. We educate. We help mothers in crisis pregnancies. We stand along streets with our signs. We try to elect solid pro-life public officials and defeat dastardly pro-aborts. We introduce pro-life legislation and thwart anti-life bills. We go so far as to stand on sidewalks by abortion mill doors begging mothers to reconsider in a last-ditch effort.

But the pro-life movement is hobbled. We can get up after being knocked down as we were Tuesday, and we can walk, but we do so with a limp. We have been able to accomplish some things but never as they should be. On our own we'll never be vigorous, muscular, vibrant.

The collective Christian church in America must wake up and finally take responsibility for abortion. That's what Election Day 2008 showed.

The pro-life movement was actually born of necessity by a void in church teaching, and now the church is almost completely reliant on our para- church organizations and the government to handle the gravest human atrocity in all of history.

Find another genocide or catastrophe or war or famine or plague to match 1 billion people systematically killed in just a 20 year span, the number who have been murdered by abortion worldwide just in the past two decades according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, research arm of Planned Parenthood.

The church must stop abdicating responsibility to stop abortion to the pro-life movement and politicians. God's people are commissioned.

But since we are uneducated and compromised on the issue of sexual relations and abortion ourselves, it's no wonder our culture is uneducated and compromised.

It is your responsibility, pastor and church leaders, to teach your people that abortion is abominable, and before that to teach chaste living. And before that, at the risk of making my Protestant friends flip, to teach that the contraceptive/sterilization mentality, which considers children bad, not blessings, is also a component of the sexual demise of our country.

This election may have prompted a turning point on the Catholic front. We had in Obama a pro-abortion presidential candidate set apart from Clinton or Kerry, who both expressed reticence about their abortion support - "safe, legal and rare," and all that.

Obama was confident, categorically supporting unfettered abortion for all nine months of pregnancy and beyond.

Catholic theologian Dr. Monica Miller thinks Obama's boldness shook U.S. bishops up.

"I've been waiting 35 years to see vigorous, uncompromising statements from the bishops on abortion," Monica told me. "With this election, we had a concerted, bold speaking out of almost 100 of 300 U.S. bishops. There have been several bishops' documents going back 20 years or more. These are decent documents, but they can be interpreted in such a way by Catholics who want to justify a vote for a pro-abortion candidate. These bishops' statements sought to close those loopholes. They were saying nothing outweighs the killing of innocent human life by abortion."

Yet almost half of all Catholics still voted for Obama, indicating edicts alone won't work. Only consistent church teaching that breaks through deadened consciences on the horror of abortion in conjunction with education on the godly confines of sexual behavior will do.

Face it. It is the Christian church's fault that legalized abortion in America - and now infanticide - exists and persists.

That was what Election Day 2008 showed.

END