Today is the first day I’ve woken up remotely close to on time since we changed the clocks for that obnoxious Daylight Savings Time, despite the fact that I got about five hours of sleep last night. I wasn’t up late being irresponsible, and I didn’t wake up earlier to be responsible either. It’s because of the Gosnell Murders. If you haven’t heard of this, it may sound like a new crime book, an episode of Law and Order, or perhaps even a strangely named Doctor Who made for TV movie. I wish. I’ve written about the 336 Million abortions in China. Never did I think I would write about this here.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for infanticide. Yes, you read that right. He was the “doctor” at an abortion clinic at 3801 Lancaster in Philadelphia, and according to his own staff performed late term and post-birth abortions. There’s another word for that: murder. This “doctor” allowed over 100 children to be born and then basically executed them. He had his assistants cut the spinal cords, effectively severing the baby’s head from the body. If you get your news from the major news networks, you probably haven’t heard about this since the murder trial began on March 18th. Almost a month and no news coverage!? In a USA Today article, Kirsten Powers says that we’ve forgotten what belongs on page one. This isn’t just something that has slipped through the cracks. It’s a media blackout.
They’ve blacked it out because there’s just no way they can spin this story and keep abortion clinics away from negative connotations, as Trevin Wax points out on his blog at The Gospel Coalition. It’s long been known that the media now serves the purposes of political agenda, when it used to be a force for truth and justice. Apparently now the American Way is protecting equality no matter what the cost. God help us.
It’s more than that, though. It isn’t just that we’re trying to protect rights, it’s that we’ve forgotten what gives us those rights. In doing so, we’ve even walked away from our own constitution. We have forgotten that “all men are created equal.” We’ve forgotten, or maybe ran from, the fact that we are created. We’re not an accidental result of evolution. Babies aren’t an unfortunate result of a one night stand! They are created. It is that fact that gives them, that gives you and me, intrinsic value and worth. Have we forgotten our history in the name of pursuing freedom? Wasn’t it this very creed to which Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed when pursuing equal rights and trying to end racism?
We’re fighting for equality but denying its very basis. The original title of Darwin’s book was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” (emphasis mine). Favored races? Isn’t that exactly what we’ve worked so hard to end over the past fifty years? Yet, by denying creation, we have no basis for racial or gender equality. The title of Darwin’s book alone tells us that.
We’re fighting for equality and rights and then denying all the responsibilities that come with exercising those freedoms.
In the Children of the Earth series of Torchwood, aliens come back to Earth and demand that the world surrender 10% of its children to them. They had come before, and only wanted maybe 30 kids. They came back because they met with no resistance the first time. Out of options, the British government and other government officials began speaking of collecting “units.” These units are the children. They relabeled them to make this gross tragedy more palatable. That’s exactly what we’ve done in America. You can call an unborn baby a “fetus” or “zygotes” or a “unit” if you want, but it doesn’t change the objective reality that it’s still a human being, known by God in the womb (Ps. 139:13-15).
I feel that this post has probably been the most disjointed post I’ve ever written. That’s partly because this issue is so massive that it would take a book to cover all of the issues related to it. It’s also because I know that words aren’t enough. Writing a blog isn’t enough. Reading this blog, and hundreds more like it, isn’t enough. The only hope we have of restoring true equality and of really fighting injustice is the gospel. The only hope we have is declaring that we were created imago dei and that Christ loves the very least of us as much as He does the best of us. That He loves us enough to step out of Heaven, put on flesh, die for us to absorb the wrath of God against us for our sins. Christ alone is our hope, and I pray He hears our cries before this gets any worse.
We have built a culture of death, as Brandon Smith puts it. We desperately need to get back to having a Theology of life.
Christ save us.
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