Post-Roe Confusion and Grief

Then the man of God began to weep. (2Kings 8:11)

I grieve. I have never been able to comprehend the hard positions over abortion, the binary world of all this or all that. The human, political, spiritual and ethical issues are much too complex for the sign waving, name calling, rush-to-the-extremes mess we have now. Sides have hardened again, as if at war with one another at the expense of both women and babies and I grieve. We're plunging into chaotic positioning in every state. There is much I don't understand and I have questions—many, many questions—some have been with me for a long time.

•  How can someone call themselves pro-life and oppose universal health care especially for women and children?
• Why doesn't supporting health care get the same energy as criminalizing abortion?
• How can someone call themselves pro-life and support allowing eighteen year olds to obtain military grade weapons with few if any controls?
• How indeed can they call themselves pro-life and refuse to allow common sense gun laws of any kind?
• How can people call themselves pro-life and attack or vandalize people who disagree?
• Are the lives of the unborn somehow more valuable than the lives of children in a fourth grade classroom, or teenagers on the streets of Philadelphia?
• How can the pro-life political movement call measures to prevent abortion, especially for poor mothers, a "distraction" from criminalization?
• Isn't hunger a pro-life issue as well? Don't mothers need to feed their babies?
• Isn't a living wage for families a pro-life issue for that matter?
• Where are the pregnancy support services?
• How can a pro-life position include no exceptions, even for the life of a mother?
• Where the pro-life voices advocating for women's absolute control over their own bodies up to the point of conception?
• Do women really believe that legal abortion protects them from abuse and neglect of their bodies?
• When did abortion become the end all and be all of women's rights, pulling all the passion and energy from other things--equal pay, adequate medical services, domestic violence, rape prevention and care, living wage?
• Has that laser focus on one issue actually harmed progress on women's rights?
• When did abortion become become "reproductive health," as if it were simple birth control or a substitute for fully robust women's health care?
• How did the unborn begin to be defined away as non-human even though each has unique human DNA at conception and is viable by the sixth month? Why?
• How can people demand "choice" and vilify people who disagree with their positions, even to the point of violence?
• How did we get from 'safe, legal, and rare,' to 'anyone, for any reason, at any stage of pregnancy?'
• Is abortion the BEST we can offer desperate poor women? Seriously?
• if we give ourselves the right to define who is human and who is not what are the implications for the infirm, the disabled, the elderly? 

• When did the rights of one person include the right to take other rights from other people?
• How do legal protections for the unborn harm women who also need protection?
• How is late term abortion not infanticide when those little people are capable of their own unique lives?
• How did we get into this mess?

We seem to be at war. The first casualties in war are truth and common sense. Those who attempt to stand in the middle end up shot full of arrows. I expect no less with his post. I grieve and can only pray.

Black Lives Matter

 Black Lives Matter. 

God created man in His own image,

Genesis 1:27

Black Lives Matter

If it is on the tip of your tongue to respond “but all lives matter,” stop right there. 

Don’t say it. You’re missing the point. Life is God’s precious gift to be valued always. But for hundreds of years black lives specifically—precious and beloved of God—have been held cheaply in our culture. For 250 years, black lives were used, abused, bought, sold, and snuffed out with impunity in the United States. For the next hundred they were over-policed, underserved, and, yes, still snuffed out with impunity too often. It didn’t end with MLK making a speech as his death makes clear. 

The cry of the streets, what we must understand, is that precious lives continue to die as a result of hunger, the worst of the income gap, poor access to health care, and the actions of bad apples of law enforcement the structure can’t seem to control. Those things are only able to go on because our culture as a whole DOESN’T value all lives as it claims. Our young people are demanding that we stop looking the other way.

Black Lives Matter.

Say it to yourself. Say it over and over until it seeps into your marrow and becomes part of you. Say it out loud until it seeps into our culture and begins to transform it at last.

Black Lives Matter

Killing is Killing

Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.
                                        1 John 3:15

I live in a political desert that lies between warring armies in the battle between life and death. There are no innocent parties, me included. They whole of life is a precious gift from God and we are all obliged to protect it.

Killing is killing. Death is death. On one side are the gun lobbies. They run the extreme from responsible gun owners (I'm related to many) to the rabid gun promoters. That last group includes the masses genuinely persuaded that "liberals" plan to take their precious guns to which God entitles them to the cynical bloodsucking NRA and firearms industry people growing fat off the firearms that have flooded the U.S. To those who believe the second amendment is about (or only about) some individual freedom and that "the genie is already out of the bottle" regarding the numbers of firearms out there—and therefore nothing can change—I say (with the Parkland Kids) BS. The community has a right to defend itself from without and within. We can enact federally mandated universal background checks tomorrow to weed out the unstable, mentally ill and terrorists. We can make all bumpstockj illegal. Those two would be a good start while we sort out what else we want. We can behave in ways that prevent mass killings.

Here's the odd part. Folks in the pro-gun camp often—in the case of the most extreme, almost always—claim to be "pro-life." What they really mean is they are anti-abortion, often in a way that masks as anti-women's rights. The far right also attacks universal health care and assistance to poor mothers. The whole of life is a precious gift of God. You can't have it both ways.

Killing is killing. Death is death. On the other side is the pro-choice movement. They run the extreme from those who know there is a line, a point at which the taking of human life is bad, to rabid pro-choice people who believe any legislation to regulate the abortion industry is an affront to their God give right to do what they please with their bodies. Women do have an absolute right to control what happens to their bodies. I have no doubt about that. At least they do up to the point of conception. At that point the woman is not the only person whose right must be considered because the rights of another human being are at stake—at least half of them future women. The point at which a fetus becomes that other human being has been debated, but to argue for late term abortion when the unborn child is fully formed, viable and moving is to argue for legalized infanticide. I personally have never found a point in prenatal development in which a radical becoming human event occurs except conception. The pro-life political movement has taken a hard line all or nothing demand for making all abortion a crime as their platform. I would argue for laws that slow the rush to abort as a cheap, freely available method of birth control. We can enact laws the value women's health, and provide the resources they need to provide for themselves and their children. We can focus on income equality. We can support community health centers that support the whole gamut of women's health. We can behave in ways that prevent abortion.

Here's the odd part. Folks who are rabidly pro-choice and defend the need for ubiquitous easy, freely available abortion are often anti-gun rights. I don't get it. The far left defends universal health care and income equality, but rigidly defends the right to terminate life in the womb. The whole of life is a precious gift of God. you can't have it both ways.

The signs we live in a culture of death are all around us: teen suicide, violent movies and video, the sheer proliferation of guns in our homes/streets, the high price of needed medication, the acceptance of abortion as an option in all pregnancy, inequality in access to health care, execution of criminals, advocacy for assisted suicide an euthanasia. I think on some level almost all of us are culpable. However, I think there may be a special place in Hell for some:

• Those who grow rich on the manufacture, sale, and lobbying for the firearms that flood our streets. 
• Those who make abortion a for-profit business, or even use it to fund their so-call non-profit operation. 
• Pharmaceutical company executives who grow rich manipulating prices and patents to keep the prices of their drugs high at the expense of the ill, the elderly and the poor. 
• Those who mock young people traumatized by violence. 
• Politicians who care more about reelection and fundraising than the death of young people, who value their position more than their ethics. 

Killing is killing and death is death. God forgive us all.