Heartless women proud of their abortions

By Krista Kafer (krista555@msn.com) “I’m glad I had an abortion and I want the world to know it” declare the over 5,000 signers of Ms. Magazine’s new petition. According to the magazine, the purpose of the “We had an Abortion” petition, a repeat of a similar one published by Ms. three decades ago, is to “help eliminate the stigma” of abortion and to demand the repeal of restrictions on abortion.

At present it is legal to kill an unborn child until the point of natural birth. The few restrictions that exist cover issues such as public funding or notification of parents when their teenager seeks an abortion. Presumably, anything short of publicly funded abortion-on-demand would be too restrictive for the signers.

As for the elimination of stigma, abortion proponents are fairly close to their goal. Abortion garners uncomfortable looks in polite company, not sadness or anger -- and the shallow pool of pity evaporates when they’re told that the death of unborn children might produce a future cure for disease. The absence of pity is a sign that the heart of the nation grows ever colder.

Every day 3,500 children die from abortion in America. The profitable $400 million a year industry has claimed the lives of more than 40 million children in three decades. For the vast majority (93%) of these cases abortion served as birth control after the fact. As one signer of the Ms. pledge said, she had other plans and “didn't want to be stopped by anything.” Or anyone, apparently.

When life is easily taken, any reason will do. A few months ago Vincent Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News wrote about late term abortions of children with club feet or webbed fingers problems that are easily fixed through surgery. Without stigma, there is no need to justify.

All of the women I know who have had abortions regret the death of their children and would take back that moment in time if they could. Some cannot have children because of the damage done to their bodies. Abortion has wounded them deeply. Through counseling and the acceptance of God’s love and forgiveness, these women have become courageous advocates for children and vulnerable women. They have not traded shame for pride, but shame for grace and for love.

The nation must follow them on the road towards mercy.

Coerced conversion meets secular tolerance

By Dave Petteys (dpetteys@comcast.net) Mssrs. Olaf Wiig and Steve Centanni of Fox News were recently converted to Islam at gunpoint and released by their captors. To conclude “Piece of cake! They could recant tomorrow” may be an oversimplification. The experiences of prisoners of war in Korea (termed “brainwashing” after the war ended), as well as the famous “Stockholm Syndrome”, where captives formed bizarre attachments to their captors, could come into play here.

The extreme trauma of having your very life hanging by a very slender thread for several days, and coupling this with the immense relief and gratitude for the nightmare’s end may have unintuitive consequences. First of all, these men have been sternly warned that the penalty for recanting Islam is death. Secondly, after returning to their homes, should they begin attending the nearest neighborhood Mosque, the overwhelmingly warm and congratulatory welcome they would receive would be completely disorienting. And as they began their instruction in the Faith, the Imam would apologize for the “harshness that brought them to the correct path” but assure them it has been for their long term greater good. To see a complete and genuine conversion of these captives is not out of the question.

I have long thought that secularism is doomed. The experience of Mssrs. Wiig and Centanni explains why. Any person of faith in a similar situation would merely have been administered the bullet to the brain. The history of Christianity is filled with stories of martyrs who chose death rather than apostasize. But a secularist would see conversion as the better course. It is a perfect example of what happens when “Convert or Die!” confronts “Tolerance and Understanding at all costs”.

A pagan bishop and her female Christ

Editor's Note: We invited Backbone bloggers to reflect on the ever-greater influence of the Humanist Manifesto, one of the strongest statements of the modern liberal or progressive worldview. Here is the first volley in the resulting dialogue.

By Dave Crater (crater@wilberforcecenter.org)

Last month, the first woman in the history of the Episcopal Church was elected to the post of Presiding Bishop. For the next nine years, she will serve as the primate, or highest ranking bishop, in the Episcopal Church, representing Anglicans in the United States to the global Anglican Church and to the rest of the world.

Bishop Katherine Jefferts-Schori, who three years ago supported the consecration of practicing homosexual Eugene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire – the first openly homosexual bishop in Episcopal history – in her inaugural sermon as Presiding Bishop observed the following about the crucifixion of Jesus:

“That bloody cross brings new life into this world. Colossians calls Jesus the firstborn of all creation, the firstborn from the dead. That sweaty, bloody, tear-stained labor of the cross bears new life. Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation -- and you and I are His children.”

Any genuine Christian would enthusiastically agree the cross of Jesus brings new life into this world, and that when Jesus walked out of His tomb three days after dying, He indeed became the “firstborn of all creation.” However, the imagery of female labor, and of Jesus as our mother, strikes the authentically Christian ear as curious, particularly when the masculine pronoun “His” is used at the same time. And well it ought, for this is not Christianity, but paganism baptized in Christian language.

Femininity worshiped as the spiritual source of life – often accompanied by temple prostitution and other sexual profanity – is a distinguishing feature of primitive pagan religion. Bishop Jefferts-Schori can perhaps be forgiven for mixing a masculine pronoun with her feminine metaphor, for she is appealing to the New Testament book of Colossians for spiritual authority, a book full of exclusively masculine language about both Jesus and God His Father.

Yet there is no doubt Bishop Jefferts-Schori was educated not for paganism, but for humanism. Before becoming a bishop, she was a scientific researcher off the coast of Oregon and holds a PhD in marine biology. Her doctoral dissertation addressed the history of organic evolution in the various layers of the ocean. She is a Darwinist, likely sympathetic with the doctrine of the Humanist Manifesto that, like biological life, our philosophical and ethical worldview has “evolved through the ages and continues to develop through the efforts of thoughtful people who recognize that values and ideals, however carefully wrought, are subject to change as our knowledge and understandings advance.”

How else would she now justify the consecration of a homosexual bishop, something the Episcopal Church has opposed since its founding on these American shores? Only on the grounds that our values and ideals have now evolved to a higher plane.

Or perhaps a lower plane. Because human beings are incurably religious, as the great Christian theologian John Calvin once opined, humanism is an unstable compound. Humanism’s goal of pure naturalistic secularism, denying the very premise and raison d’etre of prodigious ecclesiastical structures like the Episcopal Church, is always the opening act for a slide downward to paganism, sometimes resulting even in quasi-religious criminal messiahs like Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin.

The Humanist Manifesto itself has a certain aura of scripture about it – an eastern quality of natural metamorphosis and human unity with a creation that has assumed the status of the divine. When this view of God and man then attempts to take up Christian language and hold ecclesiastical office, it should not surprise us that Christianity begins to sound very un-Christian, man begins to sound like woman, church becomes less and less sacred, and talk of values, ideals, meaning, and purpose becomes little more than a fig leaf for a thoroughly amoral conception of human life and society.

What has happened in the Episcopal Church is a microcosm of what has happened throughout the once-Christian West.

Who says marriage is dangerous to young women?

Note: The case discussed here is an agenda item for Colorado's legislative special session that began today. By Dave Crater crater@wilberforcecenter.org

The recent bizarre case in Colorado of a 38-year-old man with a criminal record, his 15-year-old girlfriend, and their common-law marriage has made national and international news. A Colorado Appeals Court panel, in the absence of any state statute to the contrary, unanimously upheld the marriage as consistent with historic Anglo-American common law.

Indeed, though the court did not mention it, the minimum common-law marital ages of 14 for men and 12 for women appear to date at least to the great 6th-century expositor of Roman law, the Emperor Justinian. So this means the law applied by the Colorado Court of Appeals has not only prevailed in Colorado since statehood and in the United States since the Revolution; it has been the law in the Anglo-American tradition for over 1400 years.

Yet the court’s decision has Colorado liberals licking their chops at such a serendipitous discovery of further support for one of their favorite myths: that marriage is dangerous for women. At the same time, many Colorado conservatives, knowing marriage is the safest social arrangement for any woman outside of a home with her two married, biological parents, but also very much concerned with the modern epidemic of premature sexual activity, are having trouble connecting the dots.

The matter is fairly straightforward. Teens were allowed to marry young in prior centuries because earlier generations understood how safe and productive marriage is for both sexes, because they could safely assume parental supervision of minor children in most cases and a social structure that would support the young couple in their marital life, and because, above these minimum legal ages, the state deferred to parental judgment on when any particular youth was ready to be married.

William Shakespeare, for example, sets Juliet’s age at just under 14 in Romeo and Juliet, and at the opening of the play older suitors are already approaching Juliet’s father to request her hand in marriage. Juliet’s mother is said to have been only 14 herself when she gave birth to Juliet. Sick? I have never heard anyone say so, even if one regards this as less than the ideal arrangement. In response to the requests for her hand, Juliet’s father does what any good father would do and declines until she is at least the mature age of 16.

Nor is a wide age difference between partners necessarily a sign of evil. The great British anti-slavery crusader and MP, William Wilberforce, married a 20-year-old when he was 37. The marriage was long, peaceful, and fruitful.

This was the near-universal approach to marriage in the English and American traditions until the modern decline in respect for marriage and the corresponding increase of extra-marital sexual promiscuity with all its attendant dangers. Over time, this unhealthy trend led jurisdictions in the Anglo-American sphere to establish new “ages of consent” below which it was illegal for an older person to engage in extra-marital sexual intercourse with a minor. This age of consent differed from the common-law age of consent for marriage, and, indeed, such “statutory rape” statutes very often made explicit exceptions to allow for cases where the two participants were married.

Colorado is such a jurisdiction. In Colorado, a minor over 16 may legally engage in consensual sexual intercourse with anyone. A minor of 15 or 16 may only engage in consensual intercourse with someone less than 10 years older, unless that person is her spouse. Anyone more than 10 years older than his 15- or 16-year-old non-married partner engages in statutory rape. A minor less than 15 years old may only engage in consensual intercourse with someone 4 years or less her senior, unless that person is her spouse. Any other partner, again, is guilty of statutory rape. The spousal exceptions are explicit in Colorado statute, and recognize the possibility of legal marriage for minors under 15.

We should understand clearly that these modern “age of consent” laws are a creature of modern sexual liberation, designed to provide some minimum legal protection to minors from sexual predators in an age of loose and incoherent sexual ethics. In days when marriages and families lasted, and when sexual activity outside marriage was a rare occurrence and even illegal in traditional Anglo-American jurisdictions, such laws were not needed. They are very much needed now.

Yet the trend among American liberals, like those in Colorado who are bewailing the recent marriage ruling, has been not only toward reducing the age of consent for sex, but toward making that age relevant to homosexual as well as heterosexual sex. Since homosexual sex even among adults was illegal in all 50 American states until the second half of the 20th century, the age of consent for homosexual sex was effectively infinite. Reducing that age to 17 or 18, as most American jurisdictions have now done, has been an enterprise carried out by people of the same liberal persuasion as those now demanding that it be more difficult for a teen to marry in Colorado. These same people have also advocated public school sexual education for teens of younger and younger ages, as well as unfettered access to abortion services for teens who become pregnant.

Easier teen sex, unobstructed teen access to abortion, but more difficult teen marriage: what is wrong with this picture?

What's wrong is that policy is being shaped not really by concern for teens, but by a moral and political ideology that is hostile to marriage and to the moral wisdom of our ancestors.

Lowering the age of consent for sex, while raising the age of consent for marriage, is moving in precisely the wrong direction. The extreme case is China, where the age of consent for sex is 14, while the age of consent for marriage is 20 for females and 22 for males. This is the exact reverse of the great legal tradition of the English and American common law, which allowed marriage young, frowned upon extra-marital sexual activity at any age, and went so far as to make homosexual sex a grave offense. We are mystified by the Colorado Appeals Court ruling because we have ceased to understand this ancient wisdom about sex, marriage, family, and the moral foundations of our received legal tradition.

We should be far more worried about this moral and legal deficit than we are about a troubled 15-year-old teen who enters into a common-law marriage with an older man – with her mother’s consent. This particular Colorado teen was already a Dependency & Neglect case in the state welfare system; marriage even to an older man with a criminal record is not likely to dim her prospects for future happiness and stability.

In fact, if she and the man are serious about making the marriage last, it may be her only chance at avoiding the dim future that awaits most teenage girls who by age 15 have become wards of the state. Even if the marriage does not last, she will be no worse off than if she remained a ward of the state and engaged in extra-marital sex with that man outside of any moral, social, or legal commitment.

The General Assembly of Colorado should think twice before it denies that same potential escape and legitimacy to future young Colorado girls, and further deconstructs the legal wisdom that made the English common law the greatest legal system devised by humankind and the foundation of the political and legal rights all Americans enjoy.