Roe V. Wade May Go Away

I spent most of this week sick in bed so I am behind the pack in offering initial comments on the historic, unprecedented leak at the Supreme Court.  Investigations are underway to find the criminal who released Justice Alito’s first draft of the majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson appeal.  If history has taught us anything, the perp is somewhere near the book depository or the grassy knoll.

Attorney Will Chamberlain has laid out an extremely compelling case that the culprit is one of Justice Breyer’s clerks.  Nevertheless, we can be certain this was no ordinary leak.  To sneak a copy of the draft through the extravagant security systems within the Supreme Court is no small task.  Then, to see the lucky recipient was the leftist outpost, Politico, proves this was most likely a controlled release intended to go viral:  Wuhan Gangnam Style.

Take note; news of the released draft opinion hit the wires as the opening credits rolled in the theatrical release of 2000 Mules.  There are no coincidences in the DC Beltway.

This is precisely why our nation’s founders never intended the Judicial Branch to adjudicate rulings like Roe vs. Wade.  Even as kids, Schoolhouse Rock taught us How a Bill Becomes a Law.  If a vote was taken today in our Democratically controlled Congress, Roe does not have enough votes with or without the filibuster.  The fact this decision stood as a national precedent for nearly 50 years is more surprising than its potential overturn.

Sending this life-and-death decision back to the States is exactly what a Representative Republic should do.  We the People loan enumerated powers to the Federal Government in exchange for the protection of rights and liberties.  The reason Roe is a slam-dunk candidate for reversal is that there is not an enumerated power for feticide in the Constitution.  

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

~ 10th Amendment 

But let’s face it, the hysteria swirling through the abortion debate has little to do with leaks or legalese.  In my last piece, I proposed that we are sacrificing a generation of children on the altar of “contraceptive convenience.”  As I continue to follow the frenetic frenzy of this week, I am gobsmacked at the lack of thoughtful, honest, well-articulated debate on sexual ethics.

The Extinction of Restraint

Typically, the debate on abortion always begins with a fertilized egg.  Any attempt to effectively discuss feticide from this premise is a profoundly crippling weakness to both sides of the debate. 

Does life begin at conception or does life begin at birth?  Decades of fruitless arguments on this proposition have yet to satiate or solve the issue.  Its high-time to reframe an abortion argument that includes the prevention of unwanted babies.

For the record, I do not believe life begins at conception.  I hold to a far more glorious, heavenly revelation:  Life begins before conception.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart. 

~ Adonai in the Book of Jeremiah

I am not being a moralist here, but rarely do we hear thoughtful, honest, public debate on unwanted pregnancy prevention, personal restraint, or sexual ethics.  Understanding rape and incest comprise less than 1% of abortions (of those cases, close to 85% of women choose to have their baby) and there are no documented conditions where feticide improves the medical health of the mother, “restraint” is the appropriate character trait to call out.

Don’t hear me wrong; we need to have an endless well of compassion and care for the women who have made this unthinkably dreadful choice and are riddled with regret and remorse.  However, that should never prevent us from waging damnation upon the cultural leviathan slithering through our citizenry celebrating abortion as some sort of prized and protected ceremonial right.

The Young Turks’ Anna Kasparian trended across the socials this week after delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of the millions of women who have no choice but to kill their babies because the economic game board is stacked against them.  I agree with her cost analysis but wholly condemn her single-faceted solution.  

It’s true, we live in an economy that requires a good deal of financial preparation and planning to start a family.  But, why won’t Anna discuss how single women can avoid being placed in this no-win situation through wrong choices and selfish, derelict young men in the first place?  And it’s not just Anna; no one on the left seems to want that debate.

This is why the age-old formularies are time-tested and beneficial.  Stay in school and finish school.  Get a job and stay in your job.  Get married and stay married.  Then the conversations and planning to have children can begin.  Again, these are the vital disciplines of life which should be part of the debate long before there is a fertilized egg.

Jesus Never Talked About Premarital Sex…Right?

Abstinence has long been chased out of the public arena and now it seems protection has been too. Has this helped or hurt the abortion epidemic?  I recently heard the argument made, “The bible doesn’t say premarital sex is wrong, it’s not even in the Ten Commandments.”  In true rabbinic fashion, Jesus’ most masterful moments are when he handles questions like this:

You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’ (Sixth Commandment).  But I say to you, if you even look at a woman lustfully, you have committed adultery in your heart.

~ Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel

Or:

For out of the heart come evil ideas, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander.  These are the things that defile a person 

~ Also Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel

Using his first answer as an indication of how Jesus thinks, be careful how liberally you want to translate sexual immorality in the second.  And take careful note that both answers focus attention on our interior condition.  The exterior behavior is merely the resulting outflow of what is already happening inside.  

Jesus is always pursuing our hearts.

I realize we live in a day where God’s law is mocked at best and jettisoned as regressive at worst.  What unbelievers fail to realize is that Adonai’s prescriptions for living were never intended to be for His benefit — but for ours. 

No Senator Durbin, It’s Not About Privacy in the Bedroom

As I continued to ponder abortion and sexual ethics this week, friend and author John Zmirak unwrapped a deeper, darker dimension very few have:

What we are seeing is the full-on religious frenzy of a cult that is engaged in a blood ritual, a sacrifice to some kind of power.  Not a higher power, but a lower power.  

Child Sacrifice was a common ritual across every ancient civilization we know of.  Regardless of the method, reason, god, or demon, Zmirak is right:  It’s always been a religious ritual.  And the collective power of religious rituals portends the health or demise of a society.

Today, we may not be sacrificing babies in exchange for the promise of rain or a bountiful harvest, but we expect an exchange nonetheless.  This modern-day sacrifice is a sacrament of absolution through which we hope to absolve ourselves from sins like; temporal pleasures, irresponsibility, financial ruin, and public shame.  And in this ritual, we bid last rites to our own children vowing:  Until death do us part.

I was brought up Roman Catholic and there was nothing more sacred than the Holy Eucharist.  Catholics believe in transubstantiation, which is the physical miracle of the bread and wine becoming in substance, the Body and Blood of Christ.

In Satan’s realm, everything is perverse, inverted, similar but reversed.  Abortion is the dark sacrament of anti-transubstantiation where the substance of the body and blood is transformed into medical waste and a departed soul.

Redemption in Resurrection

This is where the Jesus story enters the scene and redeems every other story ever told — even the conceived stories forbidden to breathe earth’s fine air.  Resurrection is our eternal hope, both today and everlasting.

If we could call for a ceasefire and suspend play in this most violent of arenas, perchance we could quiet ourselves long enough to allow the Lord to begin transforming our hearts on these matters.  Remember, once our collective interior worlds are harmonized with The Lord, the healing of our exterior world is the natural outflow.

This is why I can love and care for the individuals who have suffered this trauma or are in a pregnancy crisis right now, yet all the while pour damnation upon the systems and movements that are trying to control the thoughts of a nation. 

To the my-body-my-choice zealots, consider this:  Unless you somehow managed to create yourself, what constitutes that your body is solely your own?  Scripture speaks of mysterious and marvelous realities about our body;

Do you not know your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?

And: 

The body is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

And:

Father, as you are in me and I am in you, I pray they will be in us…so they may be one as we are one.

And:

There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies…it is the same with the resurrection of the dead.  What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.

Our bodies are sacred and promised for resurrection. If we could catch the beauty and breathtaking awe of this reality, we might begin to see the same holds true for — the body within a body.  

Resurrection redeems, reconciles and restores everything.

. . . 

I met a pastor who had two babies aborted in his earlier years.  Even as a married man with young children, he always felt the constant undertow of guilt and remorse.  One Sunday, a visitor came to his church and during the prayer time, had a vision.  

After the service, he introduced himself to the pastor and shared the vision with him:

I saw Jesus holding two babies, one in each arm.  He beamingly says to you, ‘They can’t wait to meet you.’

Unknowingly, the visitor then asked, “Does this mean anything to you?”

References for final scriptures:  I Cor. 6:19, I Cor. 6:13, John 17:21-22, I Cor. 15:42