An Open Letter to Rob Schenck

Rob,

I had thought a point by point examination of your editorial would be the approach to take in answering your justification of the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade. Indeed, I have spent days pouring over your editorial piece to that end. There are so many manifestly wrong assertions – of the law of love, of reason, of judgment – that a full answer becomes, was it not on a matter so manifestly at the heart of God, nearly picayune.

Tell me I am wrong if I have misinterpreted your editorial. This is its sum and substance:

It is wrong to overrule Roe vs. Wade because there is an insufficient social safety net to support women whose impoverished existence prevents them from being the kinds of mothers that can give to their children the love, care, and sustenance necessary to their formation.

Thus, you will hoist children on petards you charge the church and the larger society either (a) with having created, or (b) with having at least maintained, or (c) at a very minimum, with having failed to deconstruct. In essence, you make the church and the larger society bearers of the bloodguilt of children killed by abortion because, as you seem now to see matters, a child’s mother cannot be directed by law to reject the death of another as an answer to fear or difficulty.

You don’t seem to be able to bring yourself to the stage where you propagate your newfound support for Roe by circulating photos of yourself licking a cake festooned with the message, “Abortion is Healthcare” as did Miley Cyrus recently. Indeed, you claim that every abortion is “a tragedy,” and every live birth is “ideal.” But you do not explain why these assertions are so. And you certainly do not explain why, if the reasons that these assertions are so are, as I suspect they are, why you would oppose restoring the once clear standard of legal protection for uterine children.

I think this is what you are not saying aloud but must be thinking:

Every abortion is a tragedy because it ends the life of a child in being. Every live birth of a child is ideal because such births continue in each being a life cycle of hope and the promise of entry into a life-giving relationship with the Creator God.

Is this why every abortion is a tragedy? Is this why every birth is ideal?

There are, of course, many ways to come to the question of whether an action should or should not be the subject of a positive prohibition in law.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King experienced frustration in confronting a society of self-styled Christians that exhibited the most ungodly despite and abuse of their fellows based simply on the color of their skin. He yearned for all men to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And many folks of fairer skin joined him in that yearning. But he wanted more than that. 

He wanted changes in the law that would afford equal status under law to colored people, so that they could enjoy, with the white man, the accommodations, businesses, and affairs of civil society unburdened by rank prejudice.

To that yearning, however, many fairer skinned folk balked. It asked, they argued, too much to enact positive prohibitions into federal law before hearts and minds were converted by the law of love. Let hearts and minds be won, then let laws be changed.

For this, though, Dr. King would not wait. He argued, as one might on a mound of God’s Word, that the civil rights laws should be enacted with dispatch, and not after hearts and minds were trained. Rather, as Paul to the Romans, Dr. King to his Christian interlocutors posed that it was right that the law should be changed so that it could teach the hearts and so that it could ameliorate the wrongs.

Dr. King explained:

“It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so there is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems we face.”

You know that when the Apostles forbade abortion as a moral act, in the Didache, it was simply a restatement of the law of love, that we should not do to another, the nascent child, what we would not have done to ourselves.

And when the English common law, at least as long ago as the 13th Century, as confirmed by Henry de Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England, had concluded that abortion is a homicide of a living human, it did so for precisely the same reason. De Bracton wrote, "If there is anyone who strikes a pregnant woman or gives her a poison which produces an abortion, if the foetus be already formed or animated, and especially if it be animated, he commits homicide." 

William Blackstone explained the basis for the law this way: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother's womb.”

Dr. King knew that the law should teach rightly, and thus should make a positive legal wrong of the morally wrong act of race hatred. 

So too the Apostles, the common law, and the positive statute laws of this Nation prior to Roe vs. Wade taught rightly that the human child in the uterus was a living being, a human one, and fully possessed of the natural rights endowed on each of us, at the moment we came into being, at conception, and not by passage through the magical gateway of the cervix.

You are at a crossroads, Rob. 

You must choose. It will be insufficient for those who have welcomed your editorial for you to merely assert, as you have, that Roe should maintain its legal status while begrudging that every abortion is a tragedy.

Lincoln understood how corrupting of the heart and mind the gospel of death could be. So, in addressing another evil, contumacious of the Imago Dei in every African slave, he put the slavers’ case as the slavers saw things:

“Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.”

And that certainty of moral right in the decision to snuff the life of a child out in the womb is what allows Miley Cyrus to lick the abortion cake, and allows thousands of adoring fans of child murder to applaud her depiction of doing so. But it is not just that she must be allowed to celebrate the moral rightness of abortion while you bemoan – in 90-pound weakling fashion – its tragic proportions. As Lincoln put the case for the slaver, so you must see the case for the abortionistas: full national recognition as a legal right and a social blessing.

Sadly, you are along the path to granting all that they ask because, while you claim to see every abortion as tragic, you reject the gracefully direct and instructive act of restoring the legal status of the uterine child as it was before the aberration of Roe and its progeny.

Indeed, as Lincoln continued regarding slavery, you must decide regarding abortion: 

“Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement.”

Only fools lay in the center of the road, Rob. 

There is no chance for life there. There is no chance for having God take delight in your soul there. Either choose life or choose death. But put an end to the mincing about the question. 

Frankly acknowledge that the lives of every black baby taken by an abortionist and given by its mother represents a grievous moral wrong that society can only correctly mark as a homicide. Or, celebrate the power of the poor to liberate themselves from the quaint notions of a curious desert religion.

Jim Henderson

UPDATED: The British Foreign Office Warns About Dangers From American Bathroom Privacy Laws

but not about the dangers of being shot or killed in lead- and red-riddled streets of America's bloody, Democrat-controlled cities, including Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.

In England, a soldier returning to his base is murdered in a cold-blooded attack by a radical Islamic terrorist.

In England, for the first time, sex crimes reported in a single year have surpassed 100,000. The murder rate is skyrocketing.

In England, cybercrime is up.

In England, the problem of how to kill someone, complicated by the difficulty in obtaining a handgun, has been resolved by resort to the cutlery drawer, and you can actually research the areas of London bearing the highest risk of knifing attacks.

Yet, in England, dear old friend and long-time ally England, the Foreign Office has another danger on its mind. Not radical Islamic terrorist attacks at home, not rape or other sexual violence, not cybercrime, and not cutlery attacks. Rather, the Foreign Office wants English subjects traveling to the United States, particularly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered travelers to be aware of the dangers of traveling in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Here’s the travel advisory update on the Foreign Office’s USA travel advisory page:

 

“LGBT travellers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi.”

“May be affected by legislation.” There’s a helpful bit of guidance. I wonder just how LGBT travelers may be affected?

Here in North Carolina, for example, we have not had a spate of attacks on visitors from the UK, or at least, if we have had such, it has been ignored in the news media. We certainly haven’t had a spate of attacks targeting gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered Brits, and I’m fairly confident that if we did, that too would be headline news.

So, I am, again, left wondering what dangerous condition might threaten British LGBT travelers in North Carolina?

Inexplicably absent from the travel warnings for the USA-bound Briton are some rather dangerous places, including Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. Just whom must the powers that be in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, DC know in Britain's Foreign Office to keep a justifiable and sensible travel advisory from being issued for UK residents headed to those dark and bloody grounds? Crimes, particularly murders, in those three cities alone, drove a spike in violent crime in the USA in 2015, and the murderous jungle of Chicago is on pace for another banner year of bloodletting. Here's a link on the role those three cities played in America's violent crime spike last year. As that article mentions:

About half of the increase in murders is attributed to Baltimore (up 63 percent), Chicago (13 percent), and Washington, DC (51 percent). Violent crime reports in general ticked up 3.1 percent in 2015, largely due to substantial increases in Los Angeles (up 25 percent), Baltimore (19 percent), and Charlotte (16 percent).

Far be it from me to suggest that Britain's Foreign Office does a disservice to Britons traveling to the USA by their warning ... a warning that is oblique and unhelpful in any event for its lack of specificity about the dangers presented to LGBT travelers ... yet, it does seem strange that the kind of "steering" of travel destinations that may result from such a warning just might land unsuspecting Britons in such shooting galleries as Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.

_______________________________________________________________

As of at least June 23, 2016, the British Foreign Office Travel Abroad Warnings no long advise Britons traveling to America of the dangers inherent in traveling to a nation that maintains sex segregated toileting and showering facilities in public places.

Apparently a cooler head prevailed.

In place of that warning, others that seem to make more sense, are now being fronted. Included are hurricane season warnings, the Pulse shooting advisory, and Zika virus exposure risks.

Oddly absent yet is any specific warnings about the dangers attendant to visiting cities with Democratic Party mayors and city councils. Nothing about the fact that Chicago is on track to hit 300 gun murders this year and perhaps 4000 nonfatal casualties. Oh, there is this caution:  "You should be alert to the dangers of car and street crime." That guidance would be greatly enhanced in its helpfulness if it distinguished between the risks of street crime in Mayberry versus street crime in Chicago, Baltimore, and, for example, Washington, DC.