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

Supreme Court Clear Cuts State Health and Safety Protections for Women

You were in the workshop, using your router on wood that you intended to incorporate in a lovely accent table in your formal living room. As so many of us have done, you failed to wear safety glasses or goggles. You bent low to follow the line that your router bit cut into the wood. Then, suddenly, you are clawing at the painful wooden bits that spewed onto your face. Unfortunately, some of the wood chaff got in your eyes.

Rinsing with water did not resolve your problem. You and your spouse hope into the car and head to the local freestanding urgent care center. After registering and waiting, you wait for about 30 minutes. When a staffer at the clinic calls you back, you confront an ugly scene in your treatment room.

Filth: Gosnell's way of practice

Ceiling tiles and insulation have fallen.

A leaking ceiling drips into a plastic bin.

In the corner near that counter a bucket of water sits, with an electric water heater suspended in the bucket. You look inside the bucket and notice a small collection of medical surgical instruments.

The tiny, tawdry, filthy treatment room seems spacious by comparison with the hallway leading from the waiting room to it. In that hallway, you could

Water heating in a bucket to "sterilize"
Gosnell's Surgical Instruments

not walk side by side with your spouse.

When the doctor finally enters the treatment room, he looks a great deal like a cross between Mel, the short order cook from the old TV series “Alice,” and a Bugs Bunny caricature of a witch doctor. You find it odd that he is smoking while he examines you. Because he has not donned gloves, you observe the dark crust under his fingernails. He coughs spasmodically, and you remember hoping that the cough evidences a longtime habit of smoking, rather than some communicable illness.

Who in their right mind would allow the doctor to take a pair of tweezers from the counter, after digging them out from under the ceiling tiles and insulation, and begin removing wood flecks from their eye?

Cramped Procedure Room at Gosnell House of Horrors

Maybe cautious living, up until the woodworking accident, contributed to your longevity? Perhaps you are the sort to research a doctor on the internet, and to look for evidences of medical licensing, and health and safety inspections, before even considering allowing something important, like your self, to undergo such an intimate kind of touch by a complete stranger?

Got Germs? Gosnell apparently set a low bar
for environmental concern in the office

The fact is that, in Texas, if you sought a surgical procedure of the kind that can be done on an outpatient basis at a freestanding clinic, you would not have confronted the conditions I described above. Instead, because of a regime of health and safety laws and regulations, the center described above would be closed. 

Texas requires a clean environment for the provision of such care. Here's the basic regulatory framework for ambulatory surgical centers in Texas:

(a) The ambulatory surgical center (ASC) shall have the necessary personnel, equipment, and procedures to handle medical emergencies that may arise in connection with services sought or provided. At a minimum, the ASC shall provide:

  (1) periodic instruction of all personnel in the proper use of safety, emergency, and fire-extinguishing equipment;

  (2) procedures, including adequate surveillance techniques, that minimize sources and transmission of infections;

  (3) a comprehensive emergency plan to address internal and external emergencies, including:

    (A) a provision for the safe evacuation of patients during an internal emergency, especially patients who have difficulty walking;

    (B) a provision for the most efficient use of available facilities and services during an external emergency; and

    (C) a requirement for at least four drills a year of the internal emergency plan.

(b) Hazards that might lead to slipping, falling, electrical shock, burns, poisoning, or other trauma shall be eliminated.

(c) Facilities shall be clean and properly maintained.

(d) An emergency call system shall be provided and readily accessible to staff and patients in all areas of the facility.

(e) All equipment, including emergency equipment, shall be properly maintained and periodically tested.

(f) There shall be a system for the proper identification, management, handling, transport, treatment, and disposition of hazardous materials and wastes whether solid, liquid, or gas.

  (1) This system shall include, but is not limited to, infectious, radioactive, chemical, and physical hazards.

  (2) The system shall provide for the protection of patients, staff, and the environment.

(g) An ambulatory surgical center shall meet the requirements set forth by the department in §§1.131 et seq. of this title (relating to Definition, Treatment, and Disposition of Special Waste from Health Care-Related Facilities).

(h) Sufficient space, equipment, and supplies shall be provided to perform the volume of work with optimal accuracy, precision, efficiency, and safety in the laboratory and x-ray. The ASC shall furnish equipment for basic diagnostic purposes, depending on the extent of services provided. Dressing area(s) shall be required, depending on services provided, with convenient access to toilets, and may be shared with patient changing/preoperative rooms

Yes, it is stunning, isn't it? 

All these outpatient clinic categories are subject to
health and safety regulations ... but not abortion businesses

As you read these requirements, knowing that a plastic surgeon enhancing your nose must meet these requirements but an abortionist terminating a pregnancy need not do so, you realize just how far afield the justices of the Supreme Court have wandered.

Just as with basic health and safety, Texas requires basic, frankly commonsense, minimum standards for construction. For example, the architectural review conducted by the State’s Health and Human Services Commission would insure that internal hallways leading to treatment rooms would be wide enough to accommodate a stretcher so that, if an emergency arose, a patient could be retrieved by emergency personnel and quickly transported to a hospital for possibly life-saving care.

In case you were not aware of the facts, most of the nightmare of filth and danger described in the opening paragraphs above are not the fruit of a vivid imagination.

Instead, those “hypotheticals” are drawn from the very real conditions of a Pennsylvania abortion business run by Doctor Kermit Gosnell. Dr. Gosnell, you may recall, is spending the last of his days in prison. His role in murdering children born alive and causing women to die and/or suffer permanent scarring is the story of the filth, disorder, and dangers in the paragraphs above. In fact, the pictures accompanying the paragraphs above were taken from the evidence in his trial.

Today, five black-robed magicians testified in unison that the States have no legitimate interest – not in the lives, safety, and health of women that may seek or obtain abortions – in preventing other Kermit Gosnells from maintaining medical houses of horrors across Texas. Ass. Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined Ass. Justice Breyer in a decision striking down two provisions of Texas law enacted by the Texas Legislature in 2013. The case was Whole Women's Health vs. Hellerstadt.

In 2013, Texas passed new statutory requirements for abortion services in Texas. Two requirements became the subject of a lawsuit that led to today’s Supreme Court decision. Texas amended its health laws to require that physicians performing surgical abortions have “admitting privileges” at hospital within the vicinity of their practice. Texas also extended public health and safety regulations that already applied to all other outpatient surgical businesses.

No! The temerity of Texas!

Ambulatory surgical centers that participate in Medicare, for example, are required by federal law and regulations to meet a similar admissions standard. “To further protect patient safety, ASCs are also required to have an effective means of transferring patients to a hospital for additional care in the event an emergency occurs.Written guidelines outlining arrangements for ambulance services and transfer of medical information are mandatory. An ASC must have a written transfer agreement with a local hospital, or all physicians performing surgery in the ASC must have admitting privileges at the designated hospital.”

The answer is obvious:

None. 

Each of the justices is the product of remarkably similar LEGAL training. None of the current justices holds joint degrees in law and medicine. None of them possesses any relevant training or specialized experience that suggests that their collective judgment about patient health and safety and standards of medical care is trustworthy at all, let alone more trustworthy than a legislative body to which the determination of such questions is reserved by the federalism embodied in our Constitution.

In the same way that requiring admitting privileges is eminently reasonable and well within the public health and safety regulatory power of States, requiring abortion businesses that provide abortion services in the office to meet basic requirements of sanitation, environment, safety, and health is also eminently reasonable. In fact, virtually every State (outside the context of abortion businesses) requires ambulatory surgical centers to meet such basic requirements.

So what about the idea of requiring that doctors that perform so-called “ambulatory surgery” to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital? Was that some outsized and burdensome hurdle invented by rabidly “anti-choice” representatives in the Texas Legislature?

In fact, the American College of Surgeons adopted a set of ten “core principles” for office based surgery. The fourth of the core principles states: “Core Principle #4 – Physicians performing office-based surgery must have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, a transfer agreement with another physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, or maintain an emergency transfer agreement with a nearby hospital.” You can find that Core Principle on the American College of Surgeons in its “Statement on Patient Safety Principles for Office-Based Surgery Utilizing Moderate Sedation/Analgesia, Deep Sedation/Analgesia, or General Anesthesia.”

California was one of the first State’s to liberalize abortion restrictions before the decision in Roe v. Wade. The State government and bureaucracy are hardly bastions of pro-life sentiment. California thinks that surgeons that perform outpatient surgery should have hospital admitting privileges. In fact, accreditation depends on ambulatory surgical centers “a written transfer agreement with a local accredited or licensed acute care hospital” and on only permitting “surgery only by a licensee who has admitting privileges at a local accredited or licensed acute care hospital, with the exception that licensees who may be precluded from having admitting privileges by their professional classification”

Even Consumer Reports considers hospital admitting privileges an important consideration in selecting a doctor. In their online report, “How to Find a Good Doctor,” Consumer Reports offers a collection of nine factors to consider in selecting a doctor. The second criteria (only after insurance coverage), Consumer Reports advises, “Your choice of doctor can determine which hospital you go to, if needed, so find out where the doctor has admitting privileges.”

Now, with respect to admitting privileges, the question must be asked: With what specialized training and experience in medical care, and in patient health and safety, are the justices of the Supreme Court invested? How is that judicial body better situated than a State’s legislature to make the necessary kinds of judgments that are, necessarily, legislative in character, as with crafting statutes setting standards for medical care?

Yet the same dusky solons that know better than the medical community on the topic of hospital admitting privileges concluded that it knows better than Texas about the need for health and safety regulations of abortion businesses.

We live in a time when laws being made at the Supreme Court is so commonplace that few outside the pro-life community are likely to be perturbed at today’s decision. 

Still, when you go to get the wood scraps scraped from your eye, you will expect a reasonable standard of care, a modicum of cleanliness above men’s gas station restrooms, and available specialized care if your treatment results in an emerging medical crisis. And because all you are doing is having wood scraps removed, you’ll find your legitimate expectation is usually satisfied. If, on the other hand, you were going to have your offspring scraped from within you and disposed of as medical waste, you will be at the hazard of the next Kermit Gosnell, and for that, be sure to thank the Ass. Justices of the Supreme Court.

How the Church Built the Argument for Marriage Equality ... Pill by Pill and Condom by Condom

One of the arguments made by the LGBQT community over the question of marriage definition risks resembling a jeremiad from a Church father against the Church contemporary. Supporters of traditionally defined marriage invoke the important aspect of marriage to the stability of how children are reared, to the interest in creating a legal framework within which couples conceive and bear children. From that view, marriage is about as related to same sex relationships as are fish to bicycles. Because simply by saying that I may offend, I mean that in our current biological state, a physical act of union might occur in three separate kinds of two-person couplings: between two men, between two women, between a man and a woman. Despite popular headlines about a transgendered man giving birth, which involved a biologically female person that identified as a male, only the male-female couple is independently capable of fecundity. Men only in a physical act of coupling never become pregnant. Women only in a physical act of coupling never become pregnant. So, essentially, this particular argument against redefining marriage reflected the erection and maintenance of social and legal structures to assist the fecund in procreating, bearing, and raising children. The LGBQT community offered several answering arguments. For example, they argued that, with sperm donation, artificial insemination, and adoption, gay couples and lesbian couples too could become the parents of children needing the supporting social and legal structures of marriage. Of course, much offense -- whether intended or not, well-founded or not -- was created when traditional marriage advocates contended that recognizing and normalizing same sex marriage would institutionalize a harm for children, namely that they would be denied thereby the best possible outcome by being denied a stable, opposite sex couple as parents. Another argument made by the LGBQT community for recasting the institution of marriage was that, de facto, society had already has recast marriage. By that, they did not imply that society redefined marriage to include same sex couples. Rather, they meant that society had opened marriage to include opposite sex couples that were not physically capable of producing, or even possibly likely to see, offspring result from a physical act of union. Think of it: we have elderly couples -- who meet in Senior Living communities -- falling in love and marrying. But the wife will have long since passed menopause and be infertile and for the husband, unless the little blue pill or its variants are available, the ability to successfully conduct the unitive act is likely to be substantially degraded. We have scarlet fever victims who marry -- just as George Washington -- whose illness was, effectively, a biological vasectomy. And we have survivors of uterine and ovarian and testicular cancer that marry, even though they can never produce offspring. Yet society was not asking Fred if he had been mechanically castrated by a farm accident or Wilma if she had survived ovarian cancer but had lost her ovaries. In these circumstances, society was testifying that procreation was no more than "a part" of the reason for marriage, and, indeed, not so significant a part as to insure that there was at least a biological possibility of producing offspring.

One argument that I never saw in the long battle over same sex marriage was that society had also testified loudly and proudly against this very interest by helping to develop, to widely distribute, and to make moral the use of artificial contraception to control fertility. Yet, and I realize again that I may be stepping on toes, by the widespread teaching and availability of artificial birth control, by its acceptance in churches, by its use in marriage, they do exactly that. They testify to a certain perspective, namely that marriage isn't always, or even principally about, fecundity and the bearing and rearing of children. Some who've read this far will suspect that I am foisting a falsity on them, the falsity being that there was ever a time when churches generally agreed that artificial contraception and abortion violated God's design for marriage. It's a funny thing, that. A thing becomes so commonplace that one disputes that another condition -- the absence of that thing -- ever existed. For example, I recently saw a Tweet from a knucklehead who queried in a Twitter post why old push button home phones had a hashtag ("#") key, when Twitter wasn't even invented until 2006? Well, in much the same way, Christian folk who are not versed in the history of our society nor in the teachings of the church over time may suspect that, setting aside the rather bizarre Roman Catholics, all other Christian denominations had always recognized that artificial contraception was an important tool for married couples. The fact is that, until very modern times there was little dispute amongst the denominations about the nature and purposes of marriage, and that, as such methods became available, the use of artificial contraception struck a defiant note against God's design. Let me take an aside here. Do you enjoy C.S. Lewis? Perhaps his Chronicles of Narnia, or some of his nonfiction? I'll start with an honest confession. I have read **some** C.S. Lewis, specifically Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and Mere Christianity. I also read his Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Here's the confession, I tried and tried to read The Chronicles of Narnia, but I just never was captivated by them as I was with his Space Trilogy or with J.R.R. Tolkien's Ring Saga. But I loved Lewis' Space Trilogy, loved it and read and re-read it.

The last book in the trilogy is, essentially, apocalyptic literature. It speaks of a great confluence between forces of good and forces of evil. I recommend the trilogy for a good summer read, and I heartily recommend That Hideous Strength. In That Hideous Strength, there is a scene that relates to my musings here. Allow me to relay it to you: As the forces of evil and of good are separately drawing together and organizing, both look to the rediscovery and reintroduction into Britain of the legendary Merlin, of the Arthurian legends. In Lewis' version, Merlin, not dead, lies buried and awaiting a re-awakening. Evil believed that Merlin would join forces with it, but that reflected Evil's failed misinterpretation of history. Merlin seeks out and finds Good. It is in the finding of the fellowship of Good that the scene I have in mind occurs. Merlin is in the company of the man that leads the Good and that, like he, is part of an ancient order. As they are speaking in an ancient language, one of the book's protagonists, Jane, comes into Merlin's presence. Merlin discerns a truth about Jane, a youngish, and fairly recently married woman. That truth is that she and her husband have deliberately avoided conception of young in their physical couplings. Lewis leaves no doubt that Jane and her husband unite sexually. An earlier passage in the book pokes fun at how little time it takes for that shared activity to be completed and her husband to be soundly asleep. So, this wasn't a couple on the outs, withholding from one another in physical relations. Rather, as Merlin discerned the matter, this was a deliberate defiance of the Creator's plan. Lewis wrote the passage thus:

"Up to the first landing they were in darkness; on the second and last the light from the first floor fell.

"Looking down on them from the balustrade were two men, one clothed in sweepy garments of red and the other in blue. It was the Director who wore blue, and for one instant a thought that was pure nightmare crossed Jane's mind. The two robed figures looked to be two of the same sort. . . and what, after all, did she know of this Director? And there they were, the pair of them, talking their secrets, the man who had been dug up out of the earth and the man who had been in outer space. . . . All this time she had hardly looked at the Stranger. Next moment she noticed his size. The man was monstrous. And the two men were allies. And the Stranger was speaking and pointing at her as he spoke.

"She did not understand the words: but Dimble did, and heard Merlin saying in what seemed to him a rather strange kind of Latin:

"Sir, you have in your house the falsest lady of any at this time alive."

And Dimble heard the Director answer, "Sir, you are mistaken. She is doubtless like all of us a sinner: but the woman is chaste."

"Sir," said Merlin, "know well that she has done in Logres a thing of which no less sorrow shall come than came of the stroke that Balinus struck. For, sir, it was the purpose of God that she and her lord should between them have begotten a child by whom the enemies should have been put out of Logres for a thousand years."

"She is but lately married," said Ransom. " The child may yet be born."

"Sir," said Merlin, "be assured that the child will never be born, for the hour of its begetting is passed. Of their own will they are barren: I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you. For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again."

"Enough said," answered Ransom. "The woman perceives that we are speaking of her."

"It would be great charity," said Merlin, "if you gave order that her head should be cut from her shoulders; for it is a weariness to look at her.""

So there you have it, Jane and her husband, though fecund in the strict sense of capacity, had made themselves barren.

Nor was theirs a conscienceless coupling like rabbits. The backstory reveals both a church wedding, and an intimate recall on Jane's part, at least, of the vows she spoke.
I mention C.S. Lewis for my Christian friends who may think what I am saying about artificial contraception is solely a matter of concern for Catholics, and doesn't reflect a teaching common to Christian churches in any era of church history. While C.S. Lewis enjoyed a great friendship with the Catholic author Tolkien, Lewis was no Catholic. He was, however, both a Christian, and a learned man. My surmise is this: the controversial Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops of 1930 admitted for the first time that certain circumstances might warrant artificial contraception and avoidance of pregnancy in a Christian marriage. The Lambeth Conference was highly controversial and both the product of and instigator of conversation about human sexuality and marriage. When Lewis published the Space Trilogy the 1930 Conference was just fifteen years past, certainly it was even more recent while he was in the process of writing the series. Lewis followed the Lambeth Conferences. We know that he did. He wrote a letter to the 1948 Conference on the topic of admitting women to Anglican priesthood. I think Lewis perceived the moral error of Lambeth, of teaching that salting the womb could be a moral right. And so, when the unleashed terror of holy judgments -- Merlin -- is restored to life and perceives the self-inflicted infertility, he simply states what is, to him, obvious. Here there is a gross moral imbalance.

Now, do I think you should draw your moral theology from, or solely from, the fiction of C.S. Lewis? Hardly. The point of the story's use here is Lewis' use of the commonplace recognition of God's role in the marital bed and procreation, and the offensiveness of asserting an essentially atheistic autonomy in the face of what had been designed by God. Returning to the topic on which I began writing, there are vials and vials of expended bile in the word wars between those that support and those that oppose expanding the definition of marriage to include same sex couples. I haven't seen, however, any acceptance of (im)moral responsibility on the part of churches and Christians for their own abandonment of God's marital designs and their own personally justified rebellions against God's purposes in their lives. I suppose that if Churches and Christians hope for a revival and reversal of fortunes in the land, they might begin with profound repentance to God for turning away from Life's door the living gifts they rejected in contraception and abortion. Until they do, they will always be weakened by their own insistence on defiant autonomy.

How Many Abortionists Does it Take to Play Catch with a Dead Child?

Among the slogans used by pro-life advocates, there is one that has particular relevance on this Mother’s Day:

“Having an abortion doesn’t make you not a mother it makes you the mother of a dead child.”

My goal isn’t to make you feel bad today, I just want to take a look back at how far we’ve come as a culture with respect to abortion.

Thirty-four years ago, my brother, Dave Henderson and I were sued by two abortionists and the business where they worked. The case was Crist versus Henderson. In the era before Operation Rescue clinic blockades, we were something of an anomaly, conducting prayer vigils and picketing on public sidewalks spaces outside of an abortion business.

We didn’t block doors.

We didn’t trespass.

We didn’t block driveways to keep cars from entering the business.

We just prayed. We just marched with signs.

Even then, the right to engage in First Amendment free-speech was subjected to restrictions such as requirements to obtain a permit for demonstrations. While such restrictions are, in the view of First Amendment absolutists like me, always unconstitutional, we complied with the requirement and filled out dozens of permit applications over a two-year period. 

Unbeknownst to us, a police officer with the city police department was a niece of one of the abortionists. She made copies of our permit applications and provided them to her uncle. Her uncle contacted local attorneys here in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and those attorneys instituted a defamation lawsuit against my brother and me on the ground that our referring to abortion as murder defamed them as murderers. The lawsuit sought $200,000 in damages and a permanent injunction against our picketing activity at the clinic.

While the outcome is not the point of the story, we were represented first by the North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and later by the Rutherford Institute. The Rutherford Institute won the case on our behalf.  Our victory resulted from the trial court’s conclusion that the First Amendment protected our right to communicate our message about abortion.

I’m thinking about that case today, however, because it is a sign of how things have changed over time.

Back then, in depositions of the abortionists, our attorneys from the Rutherford Institute found that these abortionists were familiar with the common, dehumanizing tactic of referring to a child within its mother by such to occlusions as “gobbets of meat,” “products of conception,” and “conceptuses.” Terms like these were common then as they are now because they disguise a reality which, when recognized, is too shocking for the normal mind to withstand. That reality is that what abortion does is kill a living human being.

That same abortionist once declined an invitation from Coastal Carolina Community College to participate in a discussion and debate on the issue of abortion in which I would represent the pro-life view unless I agreed not to use photographic images of aborted babies as part of my presentation. Again, the obvious reason for doing so is to disguise a reality that the conscientious mind has difficulty accepting.

Thirty-four years later, things are much different.

Abortion advocates do not feel that the sacred right of abortion is much at risk when the reality of what it does is understood. Enough time has passed, enough consciences seared, enough exaltation of the rights of one, the mother, over the rights of another, the uterine child, has been had so that the capacity for sorrow and shame and horror approach nil.

For nearly three thousand years in Western culture, the archetypes and mythology of ancient Greece have played against the conscience of the Western mind. Out of those archetypes and that mythology, two stories are particularly relevant.

Abortion isn’t new to this era.

Where abortion was unavailable, infanticide was common, particularly in cultures not influenced by Judeo-Christian values. A common practice in Greek city-states, known as exposure, involved parents of affected children babies being placed out of the cities on the sides of hills exposed to the weather and animals and allowed to die. Today, of course, we know about the search and destroy methodology of abortionists who target, for example, babies with Down’s syndrome while still in the womb. Then, such sophisticated diagnostics were unavailable and a malformed baby would likely find itself exposed on a distant hillside. The story of one child left exposed on a hillside is told in a trio of plays by Sophocles. I refer here to the place of Oedipus

As you will recall, a prophecy was given to the parents of Oedipus that the child, not yet born, would kill its father and marry its mother. Patricide and incest wrapped in flesh. Of course, his parents placed him on a hillside when he was born in hopes that he would die from exposure. As a side note, there is in the act of exposure at least a modicum of mercy, formally, because the act says to the gods, we leave this child exposed on the hillside, but you will decide whether he is killed by animals dies in the heat of the cold or is spared by some intervention at your hand. In the case of Oedipus, he was found and rescued and raised rather than dying. Of course, ultimately, Oedipus does exactly as the prophecy says, killing his father, marrying his mother, fathers daughters and sons, and blinds himself when he discovers that he is that most loathsome creature about whom the long-ago prophecy foretold.

After the fall of Oedipus, a rebellion arose in his house. A faction led by one son rose in rebellion against a faction led by another son. Both of Oedipus's sons were killed. Oedipus’s brother, Creon, was made the king. Creon ordered that the one son be buried with honors for his role in defending the city. At the same time, he ordered that the other brother be left, his carcass exposed to the sun and to carrion fowl. In the Greek mind, being left exposed to the sun and carrion fowl, being denied burial, was a denial of humanity, and an obstruction to the afterlife.

In Antigone, Sophocles tells the story of Antigone, rejecting the king’s command, granting even handfuls of dirt for burial to her brother. It is a story in which Antigone recognizes the humanity of her shamed brother and demands for him a decent burial.

(If you did not read Antigone in school, I think you can still connect to the basic notion if you are a fan of the Walking Dead. As you recall, virtually every member of the faithful band receives an honorable burial, while enemies and strangers are left exposed on the ground. Those dozens of individual burials of family and friends recognize the essential humanity of, and connection to, those lives.)

Another Greek myth tells the story of Tantalus.

Tantalus, like many of the chief figures of Greek mythology, was the son of Zeus. Granted a rare honor, Tantalus was allowed to dine at the table of the Olympian gods but stole ambrosia from their table. Later, to appease the gods, he invited them to dine at his table. Whether he thought it was an honor, as some suggest, to do so, or whether he was testing the gods, Tantalus offered the body of his son for the gods to dine upon.

One of the gods, Demeter, consumed a portion of Pelops’ shoulder. The other gods immediately recognized, however, the blasphemy committed against them by Tantalus in offering human flesh to the gods. Zeus ordered Pelops restored to life and the missing portion of his shoulder was replaced by one made of ivory by Hephaestus.

In his afterlife, for punishment, Tantalus was required to stand immobile in a lake of fresh water that reached about to his knees. Where he stood in the lake, he was just beneath the boughs of trees bearing fruit. To his eternal torment, however, each time he reached to scoop some of the cool water to slake his thirst, the water receded away from him. Compounding the torment, each time he reached to satisfy his hunger to take a piece of fruit from the boughs above them, the branches pulled upward and away, keeping the fruit tantalizingly out of reach. This was his eternal torment for blaspheming the gods and abusing a human corpse.

Tantalus abused a human corpse to tempt the gods.

Creon blasphemed the Gods by prohibiting the burial of Antigone’s brother.

In both cases, the transgression was to fail to recognize the humanity of another.

William Brennan, professor of social work at St. Louis University has researched and written extensively on the psychology of the Holocaust. In his work, he has demonstrated that Germans did not leap to the murderous rampage of Birkenau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and other work and death camps. Rather, those atrocities occurred at the long end of a trail of denial of humanity, degradation of the humanity of another, and then, ultimately, attacks on humans. If you have not read Brennan’s work, it is certainly worth reviewing.

The basic psychology makes sense if you think about it. Few people could live with themselves if they believed that they were murderers. So Jews become Untermenschen, blacks become niggers, Asians become slopes, whites become honkies. Dehumanize first, then kill.

I know these are dark thoughts on Mother’s Day.

But today’s the day that I read an article quoting Father FrankPavone of Priests for Life. Father Pavone recounts a story told by an abortion worker. According to Father Pavone, that abortion worker reported that from time to time at the facility where the worker was employed they actually played catch with the aborted remains of fetuses.

Imagine discovering that the staff at local veterinary clinic played catch with the dead puppy that you had brought in.

Imagine discovering that the staff at the local mortuary played catch with the dead relative that you brought in.

There is a deep disorder in the mind resulting from the denial of the humanity of the unborn child. To throw an aborted baby’s body back and forth in a game of catch tells us how far we have come from the days when abortionists used "weasel words" like conceptus, products of conception, or gobbet of meat to cover up the murder of children.

“You’ve come a long way, baby, to get where you’ve got to today.”

That was the Virginia Slims theme when the cigarette for women was introduced nearly 50 years ago. As a Nation, we have come a long way, a long way back toward the inhumanity that turns a blind eye on Holocausts, to slavery, to the Trails of Tears. And part of that long journey is marked by the change from abortionists that use weasel words to hide child murder to abortionists that play catch with dead children.

A Sometime Fallacy: "If You Don't Like [Fill In The Blank], Don't [Fill In The Blank]"

"If you don't like ... don't ..." is a form of reasoning I see in social media outlets fairly often. 

I see where it has a certain appeal. After all, our preferences can often be respected simply by the common sense of skipping our dislikes and serving our likes. 

Here's an example: 

If you don't like grapefruit juice, don't drink it.

Okay, that works. 

I don't drink beverages that I do not like. Apple cider vinegar, for example, a legendary cure for many ills (according to Mother Earth News, at least), is something that tastes nasty to me, even when watered down substantially. So I don't drink apple cider vinegar. No harm to others, no foul.

Does this reasoning always work?

Let's try another one.

If you don't like pencils, don't use one. Okay, that works too, at least to the point that if what I don't like is using a pencil. But what if what I don't like is having to read things written in pencil? Then it would be more like this: If you don't like reading pencil writing, don't read pencil writing. 

Still, that seems okay. 

There is, however, a problem with that approach. My preference begins to impact interrelationships between me and others. 

For example, a child completes a homework assignment in pencil; the parent requires the child to redo the homework in pen, "I don't like reading pencil writing, so redo your homework." That works too. Except when the child states, "Dad, the teacher said we aren't allowed to turn our homework in written with pen." Now, for the simplistic "if you don't ... don't ..." to work, we have to concede that it is acceptable to impose our preferences on others.

Here's yet another example of how the reasoning breaks down.

We used to live near Bardstown, Kentucky. That town is the home of Maker's Mark. You know, the bourbon with the waxy red seal? If you don't like Maker's Mark, don't drink it! Okay, that works. But what if what is going on is that you don't like the smell of sour mash which is part of the distilling process? It hangs low on the community for weeks and weeks at a time. "If you don't like the smell of sour mash, don't smell it?" Excuse me? Do you mean don't breathe?

Ultimately, many of the "If you don't ... don't ..." formulations simply evanesce like a vapor when held up to thoughtful analysis.

Why?

Maybe John Dunne had the answer?

In one of his best known poems, he wrote, "no man is an island, Entire of itself." In that view of things, the choices we make, or do not make, the preferences we serve or ignore, all these things touch more than us each alone.

Now, in the light of the liberty I value, I recognize that each other must be allowed that same liberty that I prize for myself.

"If I don't like drinking beer, I won't drink beer" works well, but if I embody my dislike for the taste of beer in a rule that none may drink beer, none may brew beer, none may sell or serve it, then I have embodied the notion of my liberty in a mallet with which my own liberties may be savaged. So there is a limit to be discovered in the enjoyment of my liberty if my liberty is to be preserved.

Sometimes that limit is expressed in the none-too-blunt, "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose." So we constrain the "If you don't like getting punched in the nose, don't get punched in the nose" contention with this better rule, "Don't punch people in the nose."

Now, to the point of it all.

Mixed in with the "if you don't like ... don't ..." litany is this little ditty:

"If you don't like abortion, don't have one."

That reasoning works very well.

So long as an abortion consists on a non-Donne-ian act, one that is truly an island to itself, then simply foregoing the disliked abortion is a good way to allocate and preserve liberty.

But what if abortion is not an act that consists of one person, like an island, taking an act that affects only their interest? What if the abortion act is more like the great, dreaded, "Big one" in which the San Andreas fault rips California  from its moorings and sends millions into the Pacific?

In other words, what if abortion KILLS someone other than the woman having the abortion, or maims but doesn't kill them? What if, as much as abortion supporters hate this idea, what if abortion ends the life of a human person?

Then, if that is the case, saying "if you don't like ... don't ...." makes as much sense as saying "If you don't like rape, don't rape." The problem with the approach is that, apparently, rapists either like raping, or they rape despite their revulsion to the act.

So, thank you for reading this far. 

Thank you for thinking about what goes into maintaining liberty. Thank you for entertaining the possibility that some things that are dressed in the clothes of liberty are, in fact, kinds of tyranny that actually would prefer to eat liberty for breakfast and pass it through their bowels like a hot, steaming pile, than actually surrender preference to principle.

Here's Donne's complete poem. Your reward for sticking this one out to the end:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Lawsuit Attacks California Rule Requiring Churches to Fund Abortions

For years, the State of California has engaged in acts of aggression against Christianity and Christians.

My first experience with those acts of aggression came as an attorney assisting Jordan Lorence​ in his preparations and arguments that imposing a nondiscrimination clause on landlords that barred them from refusing to rent their properties to unmarried couples violated their religious freedom.

Later came the imposition of nondiscrimination clauses by Cities like San Francisco, denying any business that engaged in contractual relations with the City the right to limit health insurance and other benefits to legally married spouses of employees.

Later still came the insistence that businesses provide contraceptives coverage with their health plans.

Blow by blow the State and its People savaged those who clung to faith as a justification for their actions.

Did the People of the State rise in revolt?

No.

Did they punish elected officials with removal at election time, or recall from office?

No.

The consistent refrain from the officials and their policy gadflies amongst the various related interest groups was the same:

• If you don't want to rent to everyone, get out of the property management business
• If you don't want to provide benefits to unmarried partners of employees, don't do business with us.
• If you don't like what's going on in California, the essence of the message was, then get out. 

Our former pastor gave that message once during a "family meeting" of the church. "If you don't like how things are changing," he challenged the "family," "I have a list of 500 other churches in the area you could attend."

It seems to me that neither States, nor churches, should be in the business of telling dissenters that they should shut up or leave (although I do support the right of private associations like churches to engage in such discrimination, I just think that the approach looks alot like the opposite of what Jesus taught).

So the People of California have let their giant melt pot come to a full boil. Now the State is telling churches that they must provide health insurance coverage for elective abortions.

I'm not talking about election abortions, like the campaigns of Rick Perry or Chaffee/O'Malley/Webb. I'm talking about elective abortions.

An elective abortion is one that is not therapeutic in character, from a medical perspective. It is one that is not necessary to the life or health of the mother. [Let's leave aside for now the very notion that killing one's child is necessary to one's health, a notion that would empty most homes during the years in which children make the difficult passage from pre-teen to adult.]

In August, 2014, the director of California's Department of Managed Health Care wrote to several health insurance companies regarding their policies in force in California. The director advised the insurance companies that California prohibits discrimination between pregnancy outcomes (in other words favoring birth over abortion). For that reason, the director instructed the companies to take steps to insure that policies they issued were correctly constructed to insure that abortion, which California considers a "basic health service" be covered in a manner consistent with California law.

Here is a relevant excerpt from the letter:

It has come to the attention of the Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) that some Blue Cross of California (Blue Cross) contracts contain language that may discriminate against women by limiting or excluding coverage for termination of pregnancies. The DMHC has reviewed the relevant legal authorities and has concluded that it erroneously approved or did not object to such discriminatory language in some evidence of coverage (EOC) filings. [] 

The purpose of this letter is to remind plans that the Knox-Keene Health Care Service Plan Act of 1975 (Knox Keene Act) requires the provision of basic health care services and the California Constitution prohibits health plans from discriminating against women who choose to terminate a pregnancy. Thus, all health plans must treat maternity services and legal abortion neutrally.  

Exclusions and limitations are also incompatible with both the California Reproductive Privacy Act and multiple California judicial decisions that have unambiguously established under the California Constitution that every pregnant woman has the fundamental right to choose to either bear a child or to have a legal abortion. A health plan is not required to cover abortions that would be unlawful under Health & Safety Code § 123468. 

Regardless of existing EOC language, effective as of the date of this letter, Blue Cross must comply with California law with respect to the coverage of legal abortions. 

Required Action 

[] Blue Cross must review all current health plan documents to ensure that they are compliant with the Knox-Keene Act with regard to legal abortion. This includes plan documents previously approved or not objected to by the DMHC.  

In regards to coverage for abortion services, the descriptors cited below are inconsistent with the Knox-Keene Act and the California Constitution. Blue Cross must amend current health plan documents to remove discriminatory coverage exclusions and limitations. These limitations or exclusions include, but are not limited to, any exclusion of coverage for “voluntary” or “elective” abortions and/or any limitation of coverage to only “therapeutic” or “medically necessary” abortions. Blue Cross may, consistent with the law, omit any mention of coverage for abortion services in health plan documents, as abortion is a basic health care service. 

[]

So California demands that elective abortions, the ones sought to avoid weight gain, the ones sought to insure that classes aren't missed, the ones sought to guarantee that a woman will not have her trip to the glass ceiling disrupted, THOSE ABORTIONS, be covered by health insurance plans. Even when those insurance plans are required to be purchased by employers that are churches. Even when the churches treat the topic of abortion as a moral question, and conclude and teach and believe that abortion is a grievous moral wrong, a sin.

Now, thankfully, Alliance Defending Freedom​ has sued to overturn the application of that state rule to churches. I have attached a link to the complaint filed in federal court last week. It's worth the read to understand the hateful goings on in that State. I suppose it is worth reminding the churches that some aspect of their present suffering reflects a failure of mission in their society, a failure to teach from the pulpit the essential nature of God's design, a proper respect for life, and the duty of those who walk after Jesus to bring their faith to bear on their government.