A Call for Prolife Orgs to Repentance
Michael Bray
23 November 2002
Those pro-life organizations which have scurried to purge themselves by getting their press releases out in condemnation of James Kopp thwart the very movement they think to be protecting. By condemning defensive action, they belie themselves and nullify all their prolife proclamations, reducing themselves to noisy gongs. Their dignity-of-man protestations ring hollow and their earnest pleas for the lives of the innocents are as cogent as the hollerings of a glossolalist on a hot tin roof. Rather than advance the effort to contend for justice for the womb children in our land and in the world, these “anti-violence” dupes, with their irrational rhetoric, continue to turn the movement backward. What sense can be made of one who declares, “Human beings are truly being butchered by abortionists! They are serial murderers who kill children with every abortion procedure!” and then says, “Damn that man who saved the innocent children by fatally stopping the murderer”?
(Contemplate several duhs, take a breath, and think on.)
It is difficult enough to explain to our contemporary pagan countrymen, who have grown accustomed to thinking of human beings as just another species of a genus of a family of an order of a class of a phylum of the animal kingdom, that human beings are truly unique, created in the very imago Dei. Steeped in modernity with its rejection of the Scriptures as the basis for ethics, they are, like Princeton’s Peter (Animal Liberation) Singer without any principle for regarding a handicapped child with any more value than a pig.
Patience is strained by those who have had this justifiable homicide principle laid before them illustratively in Pensacola by the good deed of Michael Griffin and then Paul Hill almost a decade ago but who continue to fail to apprehend it. It is time we reckon these putative leaders not just not as persons who have failed in following a simple rational process regarding an ethical issue – the right to defense innocent life – which has appeared long ago and often in history, but as the true sinners that they are. It is time to call these people False Teachers. More specifically, we may name them Misleaders of God’s Servants in the anti-abortion movement. It is time to call them false in their calumny – their cowardly judgments – and call them to repent so that justice for the womb children can be established.
Political calculation may well explain the otherwise irrational propensity to condemn the likes of James Kopp. The argument adduced by these slandering False Teachers goes something like this: “We make ourselves look like radicals and terrorists and generally odious in the eyes of all whom we want to win over to our side. Moreover, if we can’t win over popular opinion, we won’t be able to nation over to providing legal protection for the unborn.”
On the contrary, the longer to sit by passively tolerating what we call a holocaust, the less believable is our rhetoric. And when Pro-lifers denounce those who terminate the murders by the use of force they do not instill respect for “pro-life” doctrine – the humanity of the child in the womb; rather, they teach the opposite: that we don’t believe our rhetoric. And so it is that we have made zero political progress in 30 years. The Pro-life movement has made bad political decisions, bad public relations decisions.
Movement leaders have a duty to be faithful to the truth regardless of political speculations. Their duty is other than the politician’s, whose it is to get done what is possible in political reality (real politik). Many have trusted in politics as the savior and complained against President Bush for failing to deliver more hope to the Movement. But in dealing with our system, Jesus could not do better than Bush (get my meaning; I do not blaspheme). Pastors have their jobs to do which can (and ought), in fact, have a political effect.
Yes, imagine, the irony here. That sound, honest, truthful, straight Christian action in response to child-murder, might well have had a fruitful political result. Had there been 50 pastors of churches (not just fellows with an M. Div. after their names, but pastors of local churches) who rose up and commended the deeds of those who wielded forceful protection of the innocent, who can say what the result could have been? (At the risk of giving my plaintiffs, who claim I threaten abortionists whenever I breathe out words, fodder to burn me with, I imagine that such a proclamation in unison by 50 pastors might well have sent abortionists packing to another land out of fear for their lives.) Who can deny that the result of pastors speaking the truth (at the risk of losing members and the respect of some of the heathen they were hoping to draw into membership) would not have resulted in the fear of God and His terror? Who can say whether abortionists, fearing for their lives, would not have sought solace in the Good News. Did pastors, in their failure to speak the truth, withhold the Law which guides men to the Gospel (Galatians 3:24)?
Indeed, let abortionists and their accomplices have no fear of me and the millions of others who know they have the Godly right to destroy their bodies; rather, let them fear the One who is able to cast them, body and soul, into hell (Matthew 10:28).
Joe Scheidler, Judie Brown, Flip Benham, (Buffalo) Bob Behn, and the host of others who have uttered condemnation of God’s servant, James Kopp, I (and I am not alone) call sinners by their self-selving judgment of James Kopp and by their denigration of the womb children through this very same condemnation. And we call you to publicly repent.
Likewise, I call all pastors who have condemned James Kopp false. They have failed to handle God’s word soundly and they have failed to guide our fellow citizens into good citizenship, leading them instead into the same sinful condemnation of a righteous fellow citizen. Moreover, they, by such condemnation, contribute to the prolongation of this bloody scourge. They belie themselves and nullify their proclamation of the sanctity of human life.
Who knows how the movement might have been incandesced had pastors and pro-life leaders risen in support of earnest, efficacious, and forceful rescue efforts? No one can know. But we can be sure that the message sent by these errant leaders was that yes, there really is a difference between womb children and the rest of us. The least of us may be cast off with impunity. Their humanity is denied by our lack of action.
Let all of us who lack in good deeds at least shut our mouths at the sight of one who is not so lacking.
Paul Hill’s Extremist Judges Reaction to James Kopp’s Revelations
Comments are currently closed.