many little hot tongues
Many voices, many little tongues are being fueled by the stress of lockdown. Having lived through several wars, and seen people respond to trauma, I note a certain element at work.
In panic people apparently reach for the toilet paper, a full gas tank, and self preservation. Earlier conversations comparing espresso makers, vacation destinations and wardrobes fade and may even be forgotten. Ask yourself how many days you just spent in sweatpants. Yup.
Nothing’s wrong with that. In fact, it’s a normal adrenaline response, as we probably all know. But what’s more crucial is that in the stress and tension that has built up by being on lockdown, the media is fueling a dueling mentality. Of course. This makes them more money. But none of us are immune to the adrenaline we are running on. And our psyche has not forgotten everything that was going on before Covid-19.
The temptation is to think that we are being generous, or kind, or thoughtful to move from Truth, and settle for less.
Examples? Heres a loud one:
The voice which says you can’t be pro-life and support the defunding of organizations, aKa Planned Parenthood, which help people with their reproductive health, so they can avoid having children they can’t take care of or who will over populate the planet.
To the contrary, one must respond:
To be pro-life means to defend life from conception. Period. Anyone who needs condoms can afford them. They cost a dollar at Dollar Tree.
Secondly, over-population is a math problem gone wrong: https://www.crossculturalconnection.org/pilgrims-blog/qualified
Anyone who is having sex outside of marriage and getting pregnant is creating a human being. If they feel that they can not care for this child, there are thousands of adoptive parents who are waiting to adopt that child. Even a married couple who get pregnant and feel that they can’t afford one more child can give their child up for adoption. There are many, many organizations who stand ready to provide the resources needed to help that mother or couple do this.
But we as a society need to stop saying that I should have the “right” to have “free” sex and then make the government pay for me to abort the baby. If the immediate response to this is to jump on the rape bandwagon, rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0 percent, according to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. That means about 32,101 annual cases in the USA.
Yes, in a society where the focus of freedom has come to mean the freedom to push boundaries and do what I want no matter whom it hurts, these 32,101 babies came into the world in trauma. They should not have. But to kill them because someone else sinned is tantamount to killing you because someone else is on death row for a crime they committed. And, yes, the woman carrying that child should have the right to every form of justice available to her. The man who raped her should be convicted and punished. He should have to work to pay for all the expenses of her and that child, including their college education. And that child should be given the right to live. A society which punishes the weakest for the sins of the most violent is in the process of sickening to the core.
So, the hot-tongued quip that to be pro-life means you should fund Planned Parenthood carries no weight.
If the argument is that a girl shouldn’t have to carry that baby to full term, I would agree that we should not have laws to force her to do that, any more than we should have laws that force us to fund her getting an abortion. It is not something that should be easy to deal with. We should all have to grapple with it.
I understand that what I am suggesting is a shift in society. It’s a change which may need to be triggered by repentance. And, writing as a Christian, who repents daily of things that I sense I should have done better or things I left undone, which I should have done, I understand that repentance can’t be legislated. It’s a choice.
But any time any government gets involved in legislating the provision to take our tax money to legislate that someone CAN do something that they should not do, anyone who has any morals at all must stand up and say no. It is not popular. And for people who are running around trying to even just find toilet paper and food, it seems like a waste of time and energy. But it’s a foundational life principle.
There are those who proceed to wax loquacious in their hot-tongued dart throwing. ‘You can’t be pro-life but leave the poor to fend for themselves having to work three jobs just to make ends meet. You can’t be pro-life and let someone’s employment and employer decide whether they have access to life-saving healthcare.’
This is rhetoric.
Every pro-life person I know lives from their convictions. This means that they live sacrificially, seeking ways to help the poor around them, give to those who ask, volunteer with local organizations that help the homeless, sit on committees which shape ways that things are improved for the poor around us. That is how poverty is addressed. To quip that the poor shouldn’t have to work three jobs to make ends meet implies that there should be some system created which ends that.
To the contrary, I worked three jobs as a single mom and helped my daughter through college. I did so without any expectation that anyone owed me anything except for what I had worked for. The recent mantra which seems to think that the government owes this to people is twisted. When we create a system where top down dictates what happens in local communities we create a police state. That’s stupid on steroids. And to tell someone that’s pro-life that they can’t be pro-life without solving the needs of the hard working poor is like telling a diver he can’t buy an oxygen tank until he provides one for anyone who feels like diving.
The same sort of stupid applies to dictating healthcare. Not that healthcares shouldn’t be evaluated, changed, improved, studied, and made stellar … but that the concept of pro-life should be limited until a person with convictions has personally solved that issue.
Truth remains Truth. Life is life. From conception to last breath of natural causes, from down syndrome to high IQ, from cripple to sports hero, from family with none to family with twelve children. The fact that anyone would even dream of legislating and controlling this factor of life is indication that someone with means is feeding a media machine and education system with lies that no one is stopping to think through to their logical conclusion.
Fact is, it goes beyond. Logic says a strong society protects family, marriage, children. Anything less is pure stupid, no matter how much money is behind the rhetoric and excuses.
Friends, we can’t be true to ourselves, to our faith, to who we are as humans and believe and follow lies. Stop and think. Stop and choose this day who you will be and who you will follow.
Image: Kreated Media on Unsplash