Texas Democrat Senate hopeful James Talarico’s claim that Scripture is “silent on abortion” is the latest attempt to launder progressive policy through selective theology, and the 2A community should take note. When a candidate dismisses millennia of Judeo-Christian teaching on the sanctity of life, he is signaling that his view of rights is purely political rather than grounded in any fixed moral order. That same fluid standard is what allows anti-gun lawmakers to treat the Second Amendment as an annoying relic rather than an enumerated protection of a pre-existing natural right; once you decide the unborn have no claim on the law, it becomes easier to decide law-abiding citizens have no claim on their firearms.

The timing is no accident. Talarico is running against Attorney General Ken Paxton, the man who has aggressively defended Texas’s heartbeat law and constitutional-carry reforms in federal court. By framing abortion as a purely private medical matter, Talarico hopes to neutralize the moral argument that has powered the post-Dobbs resurgence of state-level protections for both life and self-defense. Gun owners who have watched Democrats pivot from “common-sense safety” to “abolish the police and confiscate AR-15s” recognize the pattern: redefine the right out of existence, then regulate it into irrelevance.

For the 2A community the lesson is straightforward. Candidates who treat the Bible—or the Bill of Rights—as infinitely malleable on one issue will not suddenly discover textualism when the subject turns to magazines, braces, or suppressors. Texas voters heading into the primary should remember that the same worldview driving Talarico’s abortion stance is already on record opposing constitutional carry and campus carry; trusting it with the Second Amendment would be an exercise in willful blindness.