Democrats finally found a Texan who can quote Scripture.
Trouble is, James Talarico keeps quoting the parts that don’t exist.
And one Catholic voter sat across from him on a CNN stage and answered his favorite line with four words he won’t soon forget.
A Seminarian Picked the Wrong Audience for His Favorite Line
State Representative James Talarico (D-TX), the Democrat nominee for US Senate in Texas, recently sat down for a town hall that CNN hosted alongside Jubilee, the online outfit that puts voters face to face with politicians.
The format let ordinary Texans walk up, take a chair across from the candidate, and argue with him directly. Over roughly 90 minutes, voters grilled Talarico on his faith, voter ID, the national debt, and transgender procedures for minors.
Then came Jody Hunt.
Hunt called herself a “one-issue voter,” and her issue was abortion. Talarico, a seminarian who rarely passes up a chance to mention it, set out to convince her that his pro-abortion position fits comfortably inside her faith.
His whole pitch hung on one sentence. Talarico told her “the Bible is silent on the issue of abortion.”
He kept rolling from there, insisting that “certain policy levers” short of a ban could bring abortion numbers down nationwide. Hunt let him finish. She didn’t interrupt once.
But when the microphone came back her way, she skipped right past the policy levers.
“I just want to add that the Bible is not silent on abortion. There is the 10 Commandments: ‘Thou shall not kill,’” Hunt told him.
She wasn’t finished. “And as Catholics, we take great insult, I guess sometimes, when it’s described that way.”
Hunt also took aim at his push for expanded contraception and what he billed as “age-appropriate sex education,” calling it a “very trying thing” for Catholic families.
“We believe the parents are the primary educators of our children, and so, one of the things that we really struggle with is having any government interference with how we educate our children,” she said.
Talarico Rewrote the Commandment on the Spot
Talarico didn’t give an inch. And his answer told viewers more than he probably intended.
“If I believed that abortion was murder, that it violated the 10 Commandments, then I wouldn’t support it,” he said.
Read that one twice. Talarico doesn’t dispute what the commandment says. He just drew his own line around who counts as a human being, then asked Scripture to rubber-stamp it.
From there he pivoted to Texas law, claiming the state’s abortion ban has left “women dying in emergency room parking lots.” He offered no names and no cases on stage. Texas law already lets doctors act in a medical emergency, and the Legislature passed the Life of the Mother Act in 2025 to spell those exceptions out for skittish hospital lawyers.
“And so, if we are authentically pro-life, I think we should be disturbed by the outcomes of this extreme abortion ban,” Talarico said.
So the candidate who claims the Bible says nothing about abortion now wants to lecture a Catholic woman on what it means to be pro-life. That takes a certain kind of nerve.
The Good Book Has Plenty to Say About the Womb
Talarico didn’t debut the silent Bible line at this town hall. He told podcaster Jamie Kern Lima that “Jesus never talks about abortion,” and he has repeated some version of it for months. On Joe Rogan’s show he went further, claiming Genesis teaches that life begins with a baby’s first breath. Pete Buttigieg floated that same theory back in 2019.
But anybody who has cracked open a King James Bible knows better. The psalmist thanks God, saying “thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.” The Lord told Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” Luke records John the Baptist leaping inside Elizabeth when Mary arrived, while Jesus Himself was still unborn.
The early church didn’t treat the question as open, either. The Didache, a teaching manual from the earliest generations of Christianity, condemned killing a child by abortion right alongside infanticide.
Robert Gagnon, a visiting scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Mississippi, dismissed Talarico’s argument from Jesus’ silence as “juvenile hermeneutics.” Franklin Graham went blunter: “The Bible is not silent on abortion as he claims.” Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins accused Talarico of hiding behind Jesus to defend abortion.
There’s a reason the argument from silence is the oldest dodge in the book. Jesus never mentioned plenty of things Christians rightly condemn. Nobody needs a red-letter verse to know poisoning the neighbor’s well is wrong.
And Talarico knows all this. He studied it. That’s what makes the twisting so ugly. He’s bending God’s Word to fit the Democrat Party platform and betting Texas churchgoers won’t check his work.
Democrats Want the Pulpit Without the Commandments
For years, Democrats sneered at Christians who brought their faith into the public square. Now the party has a candidate who drapes every left-wing priority in a Bible verse, and the national press can’t stop swooning over him.
The play isn’t complicated. Talarico tells believers their pastors have had it wrong all along, that the faith they grew up with doesn’t really require them to defend the unborn, and that backing a pro-abortion Democrat squares just fine with Sunday morning. Jody Hunt showed what happens when a believer refuses to swallow it.
Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General and Republican nominee, wasn’t there. CNN moderator Erin Burnett noted that he declined the invitation.
The race is tight. Talarico holds a 2.6-point edge in the RealClearPolitics polling average, in a state where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race since 1988.
But part of that story runs through Washington, DC. Senate Majority Leader John Thune endorsed John Cornyn in the primary and called him a “principled conservative,” even though Cornyn championed Joe Biden’s 2022 gun control bill. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Thune-aligned Senate Leadership Fund lined up behind Cornyn too. Paxton beat him anyway with President Trump’s endorsement.
After that, the establishment took its sweet time. Scripps News reported that Democrats outspent Republicans roughly 7 to 1 in Texas over the summer while national GOP groups waited on Trump’s MAGA Inc to carry the load. MAGA Inc has since sent Paxton millions, and the Thune-aligned super PAC network finally opened the spigot this fall. When CNN asked Cornyn whether he’d campaign for Paxton, he answered with a deadpan.
Michigan tells a different tale. Chuck Schumer recruited Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) for that state’s open Senate seat, and progressive Abdul El-Sayed beat her anyway. Schumer quickly said he’d work with El-Sayed. Democrat leaders close ranks around their insurgents. Republican leaders make theirs wait in the lobby.
But the bigger fight in Texas may not come down to money at all. Talarico built his brand on convincing Christians that the Bible blesses the Democrat agenda. If that pitch catches on, expect Democrats in every red state to start carrying a Bible to the debate stage by 2028, with the inconvenient pages folded down.
America’s founders built this country on Christian principles, and the command against taking innocent life sits near the heart of them. No campaign consultant can edit that out.
Jody Hunt didn’t need a seminary degree to see through the act. She needed four words from Exodus.
Sources: New York Post, “James Talarico ruthlessly fact-checked by voter after claiming Bible is ‘silent’ on abortion at CNN town hall”; The Christian Post, “James Talarico doubles down on pro-abortion stance: ‘The Bible is silent’”; The Christian Post, “Franklin Graham, others blast Talarico for claiming ‘Bible is silent’ on abortion”; Finish the Race, “TX Democrat James Talarico Rejects Biblical Ban on Abortion”; Scripps News, “Republicans fret as Talarico bombards airwaves and Paxton awaits Trump team’s cash”; The Texas Tribune, “Ken Paxton raises personal best $18 million in third quarter”; Newsweek, “Paxton gets another $5 million boost as Talarico remains ahead in Texas”; Washington Examiner, “Thune-aligned PAC stays on sidelines as Cornyn slips in Texas runoff”; CBS News, “Abdul El-Sayed projected to win Michigan Democratic Senate primary”; C-SPAN, “We are not a purple state.”