Protecting The Image of God Among Us

Many dear readers know me as a gun rights guy.  What may have eluded them is why?  I am a gun rights guy because I believe it to be first and foremost, the man's responsibility to defend his wife and children, and secondarily the woman's responsibility to defend her children.  Does that sound too sexist and too traditional?  Well, tough.  That is the reality on the ground.  Guys have the primary responsibility to defend their wives and children.  Of course, one always prays that the one never has to use the gun he carries.  But unfortunately, the Evil One stalks this world looking for people to influence to do his bidding.  One must be prepared for and alert to such evil people.

Less well known, but I have commented on it before, I am staunchly against abortion.  I have not always been so.  I too bought off on the lie that it was a "woman's choice," until I reasoned from the Bible and America's founding documents that here was a human life; a sacred thing to God, and one protected by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  From the moment of conception, the growing child inside her body will become a fully developed human being, if allowed to develop.  From the moment I reasoned these things, I became a believer in the idea that to abort one's own child is murder.

Does that sound harsh, murder?  It may.  But like God himself, I do not believe that the punishment for murder should be executed.  I do believe though that before a child is to be aborted, the mother should be required to go before the court as prosecutor. with a lawyer of course.  The child should have an advocate who can speak for the child, since these people have no voice.  If the child is to be executed, then the court must rule so, after careful consideration.  The child is entitled to the same due process requirements as anyone else.

All of this background is by way of illustrating how I came to be an anti-abortionist.  Today, at Townhall.com, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, has a discussion about abortion, the death of an abortionist, and the lies that are told to support the evil of abortion entitled The Foundational Lies of Abortion Are Crumbling.

Earlier this month, authorities discovered the preserved remains of 2,246 unborn children at the home of deceased abortionist Dr. Ulrich Klopfer.

You should have heard this horrific news by now. Everyone should have heard. And yet, the media gives more attention to President Trump’s joke that fluorescent lighting makes his skin look orange than to the discovery of 2,246 corpses at an abortionist’s home.

...snip...

Abortion has always required the acceptance of a lie. For years, the dominant lie was this: “It’s a fetus, not a baby.” Thus, an abortion only terminates a pregnancy, it doesn’t end a life. But then science revealed the truth. Within a few short weeks, this “clump of cells” has fingers and toes, eyes and a nose, a beating heart and a developing brain. This is not a bundle of tissue, but rather a bundle of joy, a life made in the image of God.

Made in the image of God. Think about what that means. If we truly believed we are made in the image of God, there is so much we would not do. We wouldn't, for example, take harmful drugs to kill our emotions. We wouldn't allow ourselves to become fat and out of shape (I am pointing to myself here), or to drink alcohol to excess. We wouldn't put tattoos on our bodies. Because we would view our bodies as the temples they were intended to be. And we wouldn't tolerate women having abortions.

In National Review there is an article entitled When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense, where the author, Frederica Mathewes-Green has come to a similar understanding from a secular point of view:

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.

I confess that I should have been more forceful in my opposition to this violence against children. Indeed, everyone of us who have felt that somehow it would be more convenient for us if a child was not born have partaken of the evil fruit that Eve first bit into.  We must repent, which means to rethink what we have been doing, and go down a different path.  We all must become anti-abortionists.  We all must protect the image of God among us.