Planned Parenthood made news this month for selling parts of aborted babies, essentially being guilty of trafficking human organs. Many are outraged, and should be. The undercover videos released were stomach churning, as profit motivation became the clear reason for Planned Parenthood’s black market trade of flesh. How could this happen, we wonder. All the while, we have our income tax taken to subsidize this organization.
Another tragedy has fallen upon us. In a string of public shootings (and it was neither the first nor the last), Dylann Roof walked into a church in Charleston South Carolina and began to systematically abort people. One of those murdered in cold blood was politician, Clementa Pinckney, who used his political power to fight for the “right” of parents to kill their children because they don’t want them around. The problem is that our post-modern culture thinks a baby is only a live human being if the mother wants him or her. A product of post-modern culture, this church shooter didn’t view these people as human beings deserving to live because he didn’t want them around. This is the post-modern culture of death we live in; this murderer was carrying out the foregone conclusion of Planned Parenthood’s worldview. Pinckney’s view and Planned Parenthood’s view and apparently Dylann Roof’s view is that someone’s life is only valuable if you personally want them. THAT, my friends, is the problem. We live in and promote a culture of death, and we get death.
The ties between mass violence and the abortion industry cannot be overstated. We live in a time when someone is a human being worthy of life only if we say they are. That’s not a human being abortion is killing, we tell ourselves. And yet, the Planned Parenthood executives were discussing the trade of ‘human organs’ for money. How do you get human organs from someone who is not a human, pray-tell? This is a cultural cognitive dissonance. We should not be surprised when our culture produces young men who because of racism, anger, ignorance or spite decide that there are some individuals who shouldn’t be breathing. Why should they be seen a human beings made in the image of God? Our culture has engrained it into our heads that what makes for a human being is up for our subjective opinion. One man’s murder is just another man’s abortion. Whether done at six weeks or sixty years, why does age matter? Destroying life is destroying life.
Another evidence of extreme cultural cognitive dissonance is the apathy towards murder unless it is done in front of us. If babies are aborted in the back of one of the two Planned Parenthood clinics in Billings, we drive by on the way to Taco Bell without a single thought of it. That blood and “bio-waste” is washed down the pipes. But if our local theater (God, please forbid) were to get shot-up, blood would run in the streets and we would be incensed. Do we have to be faced with the possibility of having literal blood stain our hands before we become enraged at murder? And if we’re suddenly enraged at the selling of human organs, I would ask why we weren’t equally – or even more – enraged at the destruction of 50 million human beings in our own lifetime by those who call themselves ‘doctors.’
Abortion is a terrible evil, indeed (as well as mass violence upon the already-born). If you have committed an abortion, please know that Jesus died to pay for that category of sin, as well. Trust in Jesus Christ’s death, burial and resurrection and be forgiven. For the rest of us, let’s pay attention to the root problem in our culture – we have essentially become a culture of death. We have sown the wind…and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
[Editor’s Note: This is a reprint of one of my recent newspaper columns. I said similar things in June, for which I wound up on Right Wing Watch. It was about time.]
