I just read an “explainer” article by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) published in the Christian Index, and to no one’s surprise, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Southern Baptist Convention’s well-funded public relations department. It’s a cautiously worded, carefully scripted, spiritually neutered position paper disguised as righteous outrage.

It’s a magnum opus, a virtuosic performance, in moral hedging. At a time when the nation’s house of ethics is burning down, ERLC president, Brent Leatherwood, and his merry band of religious bureaucrats are busy arguing over whether the paint color is pink or ambrosia.

The article’s main objective is to convince Southern Baptists, once again, that now, NOW, is the time to finally defund Planned Parenthood. A noble enough effort, if this were 1994.

They tout the current political landscape—Republican House, Senate, and White House—as an opportunity to “follow through on those commitments” and pull federal funding from the nation’s largest abortion provider. They cite the familiar horror—over 392,000 abortions performed in a single year, more than $699 million in government funding, international abortion evangelism, overbilling Medicaid, gender transitions for minors, and of course, the perennial defense of partial-birth abortion.

“Now is the time,” Leatherwood says, to ensure “taxpayer resources aren’t going to this sort of horrific behavior and activity.”

Horrific behavior and activity. That’s phrase the ERLC chooses to describe the industrial-scale slaughter of human children. That’s the big swing at the proverbial “Goliath.” A vague euphemism nestled in the safe confines of fiscal policy discussion. When you’re standing on top of a mountain of corpses, maybe the problem isn’t that your language is too strong.

The entire piece is built around the premise that defunding Planned Parenthood will somehow end its reign of terror as if it’s a rogue nonprofit sneaking funds out of Uncle Sam’s wallet, and not a state-sanctioned, culturally protected, blood-soaked institution embedded in the machinery of American bureaucracy. Defunding it is simply like trying to reform a death cult by revoking its bake sale permit.

No, the reality is far darker. Planned Parenthood is not simply misusing tax dollars—it is the modern-day high priest of Molech worship, complete with sterile altars, sacrificial instruments, and ceremonial language of “choice,” “healthcare,” and “liberation.” It exists for one purpose, to profit off dismembered children and call it compassion.

Planned Parenthood is not a reckless or injudicious organization that conservatives or Christians should be able to opt out of funding for reasons of conscience. It is a malignant terrorist organization that stands opposed to basic, objective human decency and flourishing. It’s a death cult designed to kill the most innocent among us and should be treated as such.

To argue for anything less than its complete and total dissolution, followed by the public prosecution of its architects and executioners, is to make peace with evil. And that is precisely what Leatherwood, the ERLC, and the larger pro-life movement has made a career of doing. Not explicitly, of course. He doesn’t light the fires himself. He simply makes sure the wood is stacked just right and the torches stay in the hands of others.

This is the same Brent Leatherwood who actively opposed state-level legislation that would criminalize abortion, including laws that would allow for the prosecution of abortive mothers. In Louisiana, for example, Leatherwood and the ERLC publicly condemned a bill that would have recognized unborn children as persons under the law and held mothers legally accountable for their deaths.

Why?

Because it lacked “pastoral sensitivity.” Because the ERLC wants to be prophetic without being unpopular. It wants to weep for the babies while writing love letters to the mothers who hired the hitmen.

He has also, on multiple occasions, pushed the idea that women are always victims in abortion, never perpetrators. That it is somehow un-Christlike to pursue justice for the unborn if it means holding anyone accountable beyond the father or the guy in the lab coat.

The problem with that approach is simple is that it’s not just cowardly. It’s dishonest. And it perpetuates the very culture of bloodshed he claims to oppose.

Leatherwood wields an immense amount of influence. He is the ethical mouthpiece of the largest Protestant denomination in America. And what does he do with that power? He soft-pedals genocide. He issues half-hearted rebukes from behind a velvet curtain, hoping to be seen as serious without ever being labeled controversial. He wants to be the respectable voice at the cocktail party, not the prophet at the city gates. And he sure isn’t lying on his side eating barley cakes baked on the flames of human excrement.

Imagine standing in Auschwitz and telling the guards, “We think the funding structure here is problematic. Perhaps we could explore more ethical channels for gas allocation.” That’s what this article feels like. A gentle memo to Hell asking if it could maybe tone things down a bit.

Planned Parenthood should not be defunded. It should be dismantled. It should be dragged into the light and shown for what it is—a federally subsidized abattoir. Its executives should be put on trial. Its accomplices exposed. Its name remembered only as a warning to future generations.

But Leatherwood isn’t interested in dismantling the beast. He just wants to change its diet. He doesn’t want to burn down the temple of death. He wants to negotiate with it. And in doing so, he has become a kind of Judas-by-bureaucracy, betraying the innocent not for silver, but for political solvency and denominational approval.

He is not neutral. He is not moderate. He is complicit.

And every soft-spoken statement, every carefully crafted article, every invocation of “prudence” and “process” in the face of mass slaughter only confirms it.

Because when it comes to genocide, silence is not safety. It is guilt. And polite half-measures are not virtue. They are surrender.

It’s not Planned Parenthood that should be defunded, it’s the ERLC.