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

Complete the Following: Here I Sit All Broken Hearted ...

If you're rhyme sense led you to complete that sentence with "tried to poop and only farted," then you might live in North Carolina.

On the other hand, if you finished that rhyme with, "a pretty girl walked in just as I farted," then you probably live in a more sophisticated State, perhaps one where urinating in public is now lawful, or in which an end is being brought to the provision of gender-separated toileting facilities.

Something to think about in this whole bathroom imbroglio:

The fellow that was waiting, surreptitiously, and then peeping at the little girl.

He was a guy. He didn't think he was a girl trapped in a guy's body (thus, he didn't think he was "transgendered" or, as the DSM might call it suffering from "gender dysphoria"). He was, no doubt, perverted (no offense to my radical Islamic friends who take no issue with 7-, 8-, and 9-yo girls being married off), but his sexual orientation appears to be straight or heterosexual.

Given the wide stance of a certain Alaskan Senator, I don't doubt that there is a certain amount of isogender peeping too. It's just that the early stories of apparently criminal activity following North Carolina's bathroom law involve "straight" men peeping and videotaping in women's bathrooms.

Why am I mentioning this fact?

Because, TBH, there is justifiable anger about Cities like Charlotte threatening businesses that address the risks of such crimes by providing gender specific facilities and unsurprising angst from the "transgendered" community over being targeted by the corrective law. As with all these kinds of disputes, at a certain level, they are a distraction. They generate mucho fuego. They divide in ways that i don't think most people would be proud to admit.

If we applied certain fairly sensible and enduring principles, there would be little anger or angst, and what there would be, I think most folks would recognize would be the product of folks that enjoy the triumph of their demands over the desires of others.

For example, what if Target had only one person facilities. Admittedly, when the kidneys are bursting, you hate seeing a line and to do its best job of serving its customers, Target might need to have multiple one person facilities. But that approach would guarantee everyone a modicum of privacy.

As an alternative, Target could have two kinds of multi-person restrooms, but not identified by the gender of use. One set of restrooms could just have urinals and sinks. Anyone that could relieve nature's call with a urinal would have the option of using such a facility, whether they identify as male or female, or whether someone else would identify them as male or female. The other set of restrooms could be equipped with commodes in stalls and sinks. If your "business" required the assumption of a more restful pose, then this would be the restroom for you. Now, I would not go with the stall-less commodes, but if Target chose to do so, it would be its privilege so to do (and a great way of reducing restroom use too!). I might agree with the idea of floor to ceiling stall walls.

It seems to me that, in virtually every circumstance, either of these approaches turns down the heat (turns down for what?), and facilitate movement (including of bowels and minds). There is, however, one small group that might object:

Some part of the transgendered community and their supporters are not just looking for a place to drop a deuce. They are looking to assert their right to poop amongst those who share the gender with which they identify. Seriously. If one-person facilities were to be the order of the day, that would not be the accommodation sought by the potty partisans. Rather, what they seek is that all objection cease to the presence of a person whose body screams out to others "man" but whose mind mews "woman" in a toileting facility designated for female users (and vice versa).

We have seen this ideological tyranny before.

The struggle over slavery produced such a clash: slave-holders, in Lincoln's view, would have never been satisfied until all objection was silenced to slavery and until those who had objected to the inhuman practice acknowledged slavery as "morally right and socially elevating."

The abortion issue has produced an identical ideological clash. It offends the ardent defenders of a woman's right to choose to show photographs of aborted babies, sometimes even tasteful Lennart Nilsson-style photographs of children in utero. Such photographs bear witness to barbarism and to humanity in indisputable ways, and so supporters of the right to homicidal eviction of babies will always demand two things: an admission that abortion is a moral good, and a denial that children before birth are human persons.

So, returning to the porcelain perturbations, we really just have to decide one key question:

Are we for, or against, liberty?

If we are for liberty, then we leave Target free to make itself inhospitable to families concerned about the safety of their children and to the survivors of rape and other sexual traumas. If we are for liberty, then we leave ourselves free to conduct business with persons of like thinking.

Liberty, then, is the guiding principle that resolves this dispute.

Charlotte struck hard against the liberty of private places of business when it stripped away a previous ordinance provision that allowed private businesses to provide sex-separated toileting and bathing facilities. The State of North Carolina swatted the Queen City on the hind side with the bathroom privacy law.

But if Charlotte had respected liberty to start with, this kerfuffle would never have gotten going.

Missteps or Next Steps: Is this Federal Statute the Answer

I won't defer to others on the following point:

I am unapologetically anti-abortion and unashamedly pro-life. Given the ability to do so, if, like Obama, I could play emperor, I would make abortion always a prohibited criminal act. By the way, just as in history, I could do so without the prospect of women being tried for participating in the abortions of their own children.

Now, of course, criminalizing abortion can be justified from a religious, particularly Christian, perspective. "Suffer the little ones to come unto me, and forbid them not," after all, is one of the more memorable and kindly counsels that event ardent atheists recognize as a teaching of the Savior. When Mary, recently having become pregnant, visited her cousin, Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist, Elizabeth reported to Mary that when Mary spoke, the child leapt in her womb. In Aramaic, she used the word, "blephos." That word means "child" or "little one." Still, while it suffices for people of the Christian faith that Jesus took a most solicitous view of the value of children, that perspective would not suffice to justify such a restriction in an irreligious, or religiously pluralistic society. While it constitutes a valid reason to criminalize abortion, it is not, by itself a sufficient one.

Criminalizing abortion can be justified from concern for the life and health of women that resort to abortion. Abortion is a violent physical assault on a woman. There is, after all, an atmospheric about the decision by the Republican Leadership to have held this vote on the day it chose. Kermit Gosnell, a licensed medical doctor, is in prison because he killed a woman as part of providing her with a safe legal abortion; a jury also convicted Gosnell of three separate counts of first degree murder because, after three infants were born alive during abortions, he cut their spinal cords, killing them. Abortion disrupts a natural process. Often, particularly later abortions, involve even more dangerous assaults on the woman's body to accomplish the killing of her child. There is little doubt that abortion never helps women. But in a society where genuine concern for women is portrayed as shameless chauvinism, that concern would not suffice.

The better ground on which abortion should be criminalized pertains to the civil and human rights of the fetal child. That ground is, in its essence, indistinguishable from the ground on which this Nation ultimately rejected the legality of enslaving others. Remember, the American experience with the Peculiar Institution of Slavery depended in large part on a view that blacks were not persons in the same sense that whites were. That view is the one expressed by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia. There he wrote, “I advance it as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."

In the same fashion, though by different terminology, abortion advocates have denigrated the separate and equal status of fetal humans as persons. They denigrate the personhood of fetal children in both biological and constitutional senses. As to the former, arguments for abortion that dispute the biological evidence for the fetal child's separate existence and identity have hung on long after the medical and biological evidence resolved those questions in favor of the humanness and separate existence of the fetal child.

Frankly, the persistence of that view as a matter of biology is decided in conflict with science, as testimony going back to the Senate's Hearings on S. 158, "The Human Life Bill," established. What remains then, is an argument derived from Roe v. Wade's judicial usurpations, that fetal children are not persons, at least not persons in a constitutional sense. That the Court necessarily rejected the personhood of the fetal child as part of deciding Roe v. Wade is no more dispositive there than was the Supreme Court's determination in Roe that blacks are not persons, but chattel goods.

Ultimately, as our national history showed, the one sure way to end slavery, the sure means of tattooing equality regardless of race or national origin on the skin of our governmental framework was to amend the Constitution. I have no remaining doubt that amending the Constitution is the only adequate and complete remedy to the current injustice of legalized abortion.