Michael Bray

Author of A Time To Kill

Abstaining from Terminating Abortionists: An Apology

Michael Bray
July, 2010

Abstaining from Terminating Abortionists: An Apology
(A defense for those who refrain from exercising the right to terminate an unwanted abortionist)

Prefatory Considerations

I have not opined recently at any length on the great subject at hand because just about all that need be said has already been articulated and inscribed and broadcast profusely. There is no lack of “education” as NRL was accustomed to proclaiming in the 70s. Child slaughter had followed in due time after the national abandonment of God and His Law. In a word, Lawlessness rules. The whims of the moment – the evanescent fashions swinging now left, now right – drive the people onward in the name of “freedom” as an evolutionary nightmare into self-destruction. It is the inevitable consequence along the course which idolatry sets.

When a state or nation abandons God and enthrones false gods (philosophies, constitutions, governments, dictators) in His place, the Law (true morality and justice) is cast away along with the abandoned God. And when, as in the case of the United States since the 20th century, mankind itself – as in the case of pure democracy – generates its own ever-changing “law,” a people, in the name of freedom, and fancying themselves free, place themselves instead into bondage by promoting Lawlessness and reaping for themselves the unpleasant consequences which God, in accordance with His Law, is bound to execute.

For example: Sexual liberation yields adultery which yields broken families which yield state sponsored remedies which yield high taxation which yields poverty which yields child slaughter as the hailed remedy for poverty. The pursuit of “freedom” (Lawlessness) without Law thus produces slavery and death. How remarkable is the popular euphemism with which child slaughterers identify themselves. They want to be known as “abortion providers.” Indeed, along with abortion maladies of all sorts abound. Slavery, death, disease, and theft are provided by Lawlessness.

Formerly, from the mid 1980s until the turn of the century, I answered questions in hundreds of interviews in all fora: print, radio, and T.V. I was pleased following a cornucopia of abortuary demolitions or disablements by sundry methods such as the application of glue to door locks, butyric acid treatments, fake anthrax threats, and occasional abortionist terminations, to answer ethical questions; to wit: “How can you, as a Christian pastor/theologian, justify such actions?”

In 1990, at the annual meeting of evangelical theologians, I presented a case for blocking doors at abortion facilities [1].  While acknowledging that both racism and abortion were injustices and offenses against the dignity of man as a creature made in the image of God, I distinguished the actions of the Civil Rights activists from those of the highly publicized Operation Rescue. I averred that abortion, as the killing of an innocent human being, was nothing less than murder. Segregation and deprivation of opportunity on the basis of race was an offense less egregious than murder. If non-violent civil disobedience was justified to make a political protest against racist segregation, then a fortiori blocking the doors of abortion facilities to prevent the deaths of innocent children was certainly justified. Indeed, I argued that much more drastic action was ethically permissible including forceful action such as the destruction of property which had already taken place on multiple occasions within the United States. I iterate here the first of three points: 1) forceful action taken in defense of womb children is not to be confused with political protest (whether it be civil rights for black people in the U.S. in the 60s or G-8/G-20 protests against “government” and “capitalism” in 2010). The next is 2) the child in the womb may be defended on the basis of his humanity just as any other person may be defended when his life is threatened by an aggressor. And finally, an argument which we have not advanced publicly and in polemical form before is this: 3) the neighbor of the child in the womb of a mother who delivers her child unto death is not under obligation to rescue the child.

When I stated that the same defensive action which would be permitted for the sake of a person outside the womb ought to be permitted for the person inside the womb, one from the ETS audience raised the question as to whether or not the justification for breaking bricks would not also allow for the shedding of blood. To which I affirmed that such bodily harm could not be condemned. Three years later when an abortionist was shot dead in Pensacola, a thorough treatise on the subject was produced. It fleshed out the Defensive Action statement published by Paul Hill in 1993 following the shooting death of abortionist David Gunn by Michael Griffin [2] : “Whatever action is justified to defend the born may be used to defend the preborn.”

This systematic reply (point 2) was accomplished by the foresight of Andrew Burnett, publisher, and Paul deParrie, and Cathy Ramey, editors of Life Advocate, the flagship magazine of the anti-abortion activist movement of the same period. Following the deed performed by Griffin, Burnett devoted his staff to the production and publication of A Time to Kill, employing me to write and had his staff edit it.

The proclamation of this defensive action doctrine along with Burnett’s involvement with the newly formed street activist organization, American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA), resulted in a lawsuit which named, among a dozen defendants, Burnett, Ramey, and Me (Planned Parenthood v. ACLA, 1995). The magazine was consequently shut down as the court required subscription lists to be turned over to Planned Parenthood. But the doctrine expounded in A Time to Kill remains philosophically, theologically, and ethically unrebutted. Its substance might be simply stated by theologians of the Reformation in their commentary on the Fifth Commandment: “Thou shalt not murder”:

So also, if you see any one innocently sentenced to death or in like distress and do not save him, although you know ways and means to do so, you have killed him.  And it will not avail you to make the pretext that you did not afford any help, counsel, or aid thereto, for you have withheld your love from him and deprived him of the benefit whereby his life would have been saved.[3]

Having frequently and abundantly in public fora answered the fundamental ethical questions concerning the use of force to defend the innocent, and failing to have our arguments answered, it now seems appropriate, following the fourth highly publicized termination of an abortionist over a span of 16 years (George Tiller on Pentecost in 2009) to offer some additional ethical clarifications. If it is permissible to defend the lives of womb children because they are truly human beings, why is it not mandatory? Why is it only an ethical option rather than an obligation?

The Argument

The following line of argument presents itself: “If abortion is murder, one must certainly have a very good reason NOT to rescue these innocents; some very important affairs to conduct! If true human children are being dispatched with every abortion “procedure,” how can one deny the legitimacy, yea, the duty, to take up arms to defend the helpless innocents?

We set forth here arguments for our third point, personal vocation (point 3). It stands upon inductive arguments from Biblical examples and is fashioned upon three principles: A) the sovereign judgments of God, B) conflicting obligations, C) personal discernment of divine calling.

First is a laissez faire (“let do” as in leave the economy alone!) argument. As we are not bidden to follow an ex-communicant and implore him return, but would let the due judgment fall upon him and his children whom he has by his own choice taken away from the fellowship of the Church, denying them the Life of the Church; and as we would simply pray for his repentance and return to the Life found at the Table of our Lord where he and his children are nourished, so we must similarly look at these children. They have been taken to the slaughter by their own parents who, living in a Godless and Lawless nation, have been equipped and protected by the state to carry out such a deed. This very condition is a judgment of God upon a wicked people. It is the same situation found among the nations among whom Israel dwelled. They sacrificed their children to Moloch bringing judgment upon themselves in their own wicked idolatry, destroying the most precious gift from God, thinking that they were serving Him. And God did not command His people to rescue those who so sacrificed their children nor did he pronounce the failure to rescue such children to be sin.

Our current legal/ethical status under our apostate government might well be viewed in terms of the biblical “ban,” by which a town or nation was “devoted” unto destruction. In that case, God sent judgment to that nation, slaughtering all – women, children, animals.

A similar laissez faire posture was taken by Christians regarding American slavery. Christian theologians argued that the enslavement of Africans was a particular divine judgment upon their idolatries [4].  They could overlook the condition which Providence had placed these fellow human beings and entrust them to His benevolence and mercy. They could, therefore, be good overseers and citizens of a society where slaves were undergoing their own process of conversion and sanctification. They could be taught the Gospel, converted to the Faith, and given the hope of salvation even as they lived un less desireable conditions than their otherwise blessed white countrymen and fellow Christians.

A second principle is a “conflict of obligation” principle in which a person declines to take on one duty because it disables him from performing another. A man with duties to his own children has less of an ethical demand to lose his life to imprisonment or death to save an orphan depriving his own children of a father. I say less of an ethical demand. The man who gives up his fathering responsibilities to save another does not do wrong, but he certainly is engaged in choosing one duty over another. The choice is left to him and we may remain “pro-choice” by this principle.

A third principle has to do with divine calling and is thus related to the second. The legitimacy of taking defensive action for the sake of the innocent at great personal and familial loss beckons one to discern the will of God among multiple options and it thus falls as well under the “pro-choice” banner. One may call to mind the divine calling upon Hosea to marry a harlot or upon Samson to marry a woman outside of the covenant nation or upon Ezekiel to preach to a people of whom God said that they would not repent. These callings are reserved for the particular servant of God to discern. He called these men out for a special task to which He did not call others. Such extraordinary and sacrificial deeds may be compared to the “prophetic call” by which the leading of God is sensed by the one who defends the innocent ones.

The first reply is the most applicable to all readers. We are an apostate nation. Despite the efforts of churches of God and singular prophets or para-church ministries to shine the light of Truth feeble though they be, we continue to despise the Law of God. We may well judge that the normal ethical demand for our intervention and rescue of the “innocents” (no one is ultimately innocent as all are sinners under national judgment) is attenuated. But just as such an interpretation of historical events through the eyes of a theological framework is not fool proof (we being prone to foolishness), it is, nevertheless reasonable. It is as if we see the judgment falling – now – and as we would not run (and would have no obligation) to the rescue of children in Sodom and Gomorrah or Jericho, we may not be obligated now to rescue those who bring judgment upon themselves by murdering their own offspring and add to the indictment which the Father will read to them on Judgment Day.

End Notes:

1  The Evangelical Theological Society held their 1990 meeting at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans where the author read a paper on the “Ethics of Operation Rescue.”

2 Michael Griffin shot David Gunn on 10 March, 1993 in Pensacola, Florida.

3  The Book of Concord  is the summation of theology set forth by those who came to be known as Lutherans.  Prominent leaders of the Reformation gathered in 1576 for the purpose of setting down their articles of faith and resolving points of controversy.

4 Incidental to this attitude is the fact that the Scriptures permitted slavery anyway under particular conditions.  Biblical civil law regulated it to protect the slave from abuse (seven year limits, limited occasions for enslavement – debt, conquest, personal choice to pay a debt, prohibition of man stealing on penalty of death for the captor), contrasting it from American slavery which was rightly denounced for its establishment upon man stealing lack of provision for manumission.   But civilized slavery (especially the rightful ownership of the labor of another) is a fact of biblical social life.  It is not condemned in se.  And neither Jesus nor his apostles call for manumission; rather they call for masters to treat their slaves justly and for slaves to serve their masters, especially Christian ones well.

 

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