Life Sells Chips (or, Chips Sell Life)

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post first appeared on 8 February 2016 on the blog Principium et Finis. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers please see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Alison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

If you want to sell something, what better place than the most-watched television program of the year?  That, as those who follow American football and/or American pop culture could tell you, would be the Super Bowl, the National Football League’s annual championship game. Small wonder that advertisers spend millions of dollars for a single 30 second ad during the broadcast. Most often these ads are for things like beer, cell phones, cars, insurance, etc., but sometimes something a little different shows up.  Six years ago, for instance, Focus on the Family ran a pro-life ad featuring the mother of college football star Tim Tebow, which created a lot of discussion about the cause of life and, as I detailed in this post last week, saved at least one life.

Freddy Carstairs appearing in Doritos Super Bowl Ad (image from youTube)

    A Super Bowl ad promoting human life made waves again last night [7 Feb 2016] . . . but not in quite the same way as the Tebow ad did.  The commercial in question was advertising Doritos tortilla chips.  In this one, we see a mother happily looking at an ultrasound image of her late-stage unborn baby on a monitor; the mother then turns to her husband, who is contentedly munching on Doritos.  To the mother’s increasing annoyance, the father waves one of the salty snacks in front of the screen, where we can see the unborn baby reaching for the chip.  Finally, the exasperated mother grabs the chip from her husband’s hand and hurls it at her feet, at which point the unborn baby on the monitor, apparently eager to eat the chip, appears to dive for the “exit”, at which point the mother goes into labor.

    First of all, it’s a pretty sure bet that this ad is not intended (certainly not by Frito-Lay, the producer of Doritos) to make a pro-life statement.  According to an article at lifesitenews.com, the creator of the ad, an Australian filmmaker named Peter Carstairs, came up with the idea when he saw ultrasound images of his unborn son Freddy (who was born last year), and thought it would be a funny and (most importantly) an effective way to sell chips.  Frito-Lay chose Carstairs’ ad because it tested well and was unusual enough to stand out from the the welter of weird and ridiculous ads striving to make an impression upon Super Bowl viewers.

Ultrasound baby reaching for chip (image from Youtube)

    And make an impression it did, in some cases positive, in some, well, less so.  Apparently, NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League) found this tortilla-affirming commercial to be guilty of the shameful “antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses” (see article here), demonstrating yet again that pro-abortion fanatics cannot abide any suggestion that unborn humans are, well, human.  That’s why they insist on using dehumanizing terms like “fetus”.  That is also why they despise ultrasound, because sonograms make unavoidably obvious the already irrefutable scientific fact that unborn babies are not just “clumps of cells”, but little people.  Their objection to this particular commercial is not so much that the “fetus” is doing things that an unborn baby can’t do (which everybody watching knows: that's what makes it funny), but that the ultrasound image is being shown at all.  That’s why they fight tooth and nail against laws mandating that women seeking abortion first be shown an ultrasound of the “product of conception” in their womb, because ultrasound,  even ordinary ultrasound images of unborn humans doing ordinary things, changes minds.  As I detail in my post "The Truth Is Pro Life":

    The abortion providers can only argue that simply requiring them to show truthful, unaltered pictures of what (or more accurately, as the images show, who) is being aborted will dissuade some of their customers.  A federal court, in striking down one of these laws in North Carolina, said in its decision [according to pro-life attorney Howard Slugh] that the law “explicitly promotes a pro-life message by demanding the provision of facts that all fall on one side of the abortion debate.”  Notice that the law does not require the suppression of “facts” that fall on the other side of the debate: it simply requires that the mother know all the facts before undergoing abortion, and the facts happen to be pro-life.  And so the abortionists are reduced to asking the court to help them hide the plain, incontrovertible truth.  As Slugh notes:

All these sources agree that the more a mother knows about her child, the less likely she is to abort him.  This is not because ultrasound images are misleading or politicized; it is because they supply a mother with truthful information necessary for making an informed choice.

Champion of Human Life?

    Last night’s silly little Doritos ad, has (most likely unintentionally) reminded millions of people about the truth of human life in the womb. Again, I doubt very much that Frito-Lay was trying to make a pro-life statement with their ad: they probably saw it as just a funny take on an everyday experience that would make people laugh and, consequently, help sell their product.  It’s quite possible that, if they determine that the unfavorable attention from abortion promoters is hurting the bottom line, they may issue an apology and pull the ad from the internet (if YouTube doesn’t do it first).*  Let’s hope not; we shouldn’t allow the abortion industry and its apologists to silence the Truth.  Who knows? It might even be worth buying a bag of chips . . .   

*A year later, the ad is still there:

Killing Is Not Compassion

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him . . . (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

True Crime Story?

    Imagine you’re reading a book, or watching a film.  In this story a caregiver, a trusted figure, secretly puts a sleep-inducing drug in the coffee of an unsuspecting person under her care.  Once the victim is no longer conscious, the perpetrator tries to administer a more powerful drug, a lethal drug.  The victim (who had previously expressed to her care provider a desire to continue living) wakes up and fights back.  The caregiver calls upon accomplices (from the victim’s own family, no less!) to restrain her, and forcibly administers the deadly injection. Sounds like a crime thriller, doesn’t it?  But wait, there’s more . . . here the story changes from a crime thriller into a Kafkaesque dystopian nightmare. The deed comes to the attention of the authorities, who conclude that the killer should indeed go to trial . . . but not to punish her wicked crime.  Rather, despite conceding the lurid details above, they conclude that she “acted in good faith”, and seek a trial in order to establish a legal precedent that other health care providers may likewise kill unknowing, and even unwilling, persons without fear of punishment.

Healer, or killer? (detail from painting by Mikhail V. Nesterov)

    As you may have guessed, the scenario above is in fact a true story, which recently took place in the Netherlands, as detailed in this article from LifeNews.com. The only major detail left out of my retelling, and the only thing (at least in the minds of the Dutch Review Committee that investigated the case) that makes what appears to be an act of unspeakable wickedness into a “good faith” medical procedure, is the fact that the victim was suffering from dementia.  As more and more places are following the Netherlands along the path of the legalized killing of the old, infirm, and, increasingly, those who are simply unhappy, it would be wise to take a look at cases like this to see what lies ahead.

In the Eyes of the Law

Prof. Theo Boer (Daily Mail photo)

    The case above is a chilling illustration of how, once we cross the line of giving legal sanction to the direct taking of innocent life, we unleash a force beyond our control, in which the “logic” of death overwhelms supposedly rational considerations.  Let’s start with what Dutch law provides for, and see how it compares to what actually happened in the situation above.  Theo Boer, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Kampen Theological Seminary in the Netherlands recently published an article in the British Catholic Medical Quarterly explaining why he no longer favors the pioneering Dutch law allowing physician assisted suicide. We’ll get to his reasons in a moment; first I’d like to take a look at his summary of the law in question.  Pr. Boer explains that, according to Dutch law:  

-1. “First, there should be a request from the patient” - There was no such request, and in fact, according to an article in the UK’s Daily Mail,

. . . the patient said several times ‘I don’t want to die’ in the days before she was put to death, and that the doctor had not spoken to her about what was planned because she did not want to cause unnecessary extra distress. She also did not tell her about what was in her coffee as it was also likely to cause further disruptions to the planned euthanasia process.

-2.  “there should be unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement” - The daily Mail tells us that “she often exhibited signs of fear and anger, and would wander around the building at nights. The nursing home senior doctor was of the opinion that she was suffering intolerably”, but  adds that “she was no longer in a position where she could confirm that the time was now right for the euthanasia to go ahead”. In other words, in the subjective judgment of outside observers her life was no longer “worth living”; other facts in the case indicate that the person living that life didn’t concur in that judgment.

-3. “the doctor should inform the patient of his situation” - demonstrably no.

-4. “doctor and patient together should have come to the conclusion that there is no acceptable alternative” - again, manifestly not.

-5. “the doctor should have consulted a colleague” - it is unclear from the Daily Mail article whether the “senior doctor” is the same who administered the lethal injection, but it is likely that more than one doctor on the staff participated in discussing the case.  If so, this is the one point on which the doctor unambiguously complied with the actual requirements of the law.

-6. “The assisted dying should take place in a medically sound manner” - well . . .

. . . secretly drugging a patient, then forcibly injecting her as she fights for her life doesn’t fit my standard of sound medical manner, but others may have a different opinion. In any case, the attending physician incontestably violated provisions 1,3, and 4 of the law, arguably number 2 and, if one is to take a civilized view, number 6 as well.  Setting aside for the moment the morality of any such law (I’ll get to that), the doctor euthanizing this patient blatantly flouted most of the specific provisions of the law. How in this world is it possible that the Review Committee would not only bless the doctor’s efforts, but would also be so confident that the courts would agree?

Gospel of Life

    To answer that question, I suggest we go back to St. John Paul II’s Encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), published in 1995, six years before the passage of the Dutch assisted suicide law.  St. John Paul, in speaking of both legalized abortion and legal euthanasia, wrote (my bold):

The end result of this is tragic: not only is the fact of the destruction of so many human lives still to be born or in their final stage extremely grave and disturbing, but no less grave and disturbing is the fact that conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life. (Evangelium Vitae 5)

St. John Paul II

In other words, not only are the acts themselves immoral and unjust, but they tend to corrupt the moral understanding of society as a whole, and consequently the morals of everyone in it.  Why should we expect anyone to honor the specific provisions of man’s laws if we no longer recognize the legitimacy of the moral law, God’s Law, itself?

    There is a clear pattern to the way this corruption works in concrete instances, which we can see in the legal history of contraception and abortion over the past century: The rare, extreme case is offered as an exception to a ban on something that had previously been considered intrinsically wrong; once the line has been breached, however, there is no longer any reason in principle to deny to others what was at first permitted to only a few.  If it’s not wrong for married couples experiencing certain difficulties to use contraception, why should it be wrong for others? If it’s not murder for one woman to abort her baby, how can it be so for another? We have now seen the same thing happen here in the United States with marijuana laws: first only “medical” marijuana for people with glaucoma and other conditions, but followed in short order by the general lifting of restrictions.  We should expect that, once rare “hard cases” have been used to legitimize legal euthanasia, the killing will become increasingly more commonplace, and “acceptable” in an ever wider range of situations.

It Can’t Happen Here . . . Can It?

    Pr. Boers details how this exact thing has happened in the Netherlands with assisted suicide and direct euthanasia.  The law was proposed to apply to people who were suffering late-stage terminal illness and suffering extreme pain.  Before very many years, those people became the exception to the rule:

. . . what was once considered a last resort, now becomes a default mode of dying for an increasing number of people. The unbearable character of the suffering is lesser described in terms of physical suffering and more in terms of ‘meaningless waiting’.

    In fact, most of the people requesting euthanasia aren’t dying at all:

Whereas in the first years hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering consisted in age related complaints. Loneliness occurs in 50 out of the last 500 cases that I reviewed before stepping back. Many of these patients could have lived for months, others for years or even decades. We have seen a number of ground breaking cases: ‘euthanasia for two’, for example couples in which the caregiver gets cancer and his partner chooses to die the same day and the same way; euthanasia in blindness; euthanasia for a man with autism who fears retirement; assisted dying for a mother of two suffering from tinnitus. Undeniably, assisted dying for one group of patients leads to demands from others.

    Similar results are reported in Oregon, the first US state to legalize assisted suicide, and in other states that have followed since.  There, the most common reason given is the abstract, amorphous "loss of autonomy" (see chart below). Less than a third cite pain (and not all of those are actually experiencing pain: for some it is only fear of possible pain). In fact, the most common factor among those seeking assisted suicide is not pain or terminal illness but depression, a treatable, non-fatal condition.  Studies conducted in both the United States and the UK indicate that over 90% of those seeking assisted suicide are suffering from mental problems. Nevertheless most of these people receive no psychiatric assistance prior to their death.   In fact, we have seen in the United States, and Pr. Boer reports the same in the Netherlands, that the doctors who preside over these deaths often have no professional relationship at all with their patients, and sometimes don’t even know them.

The Law as a Teacher

    The idea that “The Law is a Teacher” is an old one, going back at least to St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  So what does a law permitting killing people because they are old or sick teach us?  Surely it sends the message that human life is not sacrosanct, but instead something that can be disposed of when it becomes difficult . . . and if difficult lives are expendable, then why not inconvenient lives?  And where do we go from there?  St. John Paul explains that:

It is a problem which exists at the cultural, social and political level, where it reveals its more sinister and disturbing aspect in the tendency, ever more widely shared, to interpret the above crimes against life as legitimate expressions of individual freedom, to be acknowledged and protected as actual rights.  (Evangelium Vitae 18)

    Pr. Boer, in language strikingly like that in the passage above, confirms that such has in fact been the case in the Netherlands, saying that “there is a shift in public opinion. Whereas in the beginning assisted dying was seen as a last resort, public opinion is shifting towards considering it a right” (my italics).  Boer goes even further, however, adding:

. . . public opinion is shifting towards considering it a right, with a corresponding duty on doctors to act. A law that is now in the making obliges doctors who refuse to actively refer their patients to a ‘willing’ colleague.

The Culture of Death

Dance of Death by Venne Adriaen Pietersz

   We can expect the pressure on doctors to participate in killing to grow more intense in jurisdictions that have legalized euthanasia.  The idea of such killing as a legitimate good likewise puts pressure on family members to seek it for loved ones who may be unable to ask for it themselves (which may have been a factor in the Dutch case discussed above), and also on those who are themselves suffering to “spare” their relatives the trouble of caring for them.  This very concern is among the most cited reasons given by those asking for assisted suicide or euthanasia.  And so we see the corrupting power of sin: doctors, who have dedicated themselves to healing, are increasingly compelled to do the opposite and kill; close family members see themselves in mortal conflict with those whom they love . . . and killing off grandma becomes little more exceptional than "putting to sleep" the family dog.

    That’s the future that’s in store for us if we continue down the path of killing as a remedy for suffering, old age, and mere ennui.  We can look forward to more and more people implicated in ever greater acts of injustice, and ever wider waves of corruption spreading throughout society as a whole.  As we can see from events in the Netherlands this is no longer conjecture, but, in many places, a reality, a reality famously described by St. John Paul II as a "culture of death"  (Evangelium Vitae 12). The people who are relentlessly pushing Death as the solution to a myriad of problems will try to paint killing as “compassionate”, but the truth is very different. Killing is not Compassion.     

Death and Human Dignity

The Throwback below was first published 17 August 2015

Here is a sign of things to come, or more accurately, a present reality that is becoming all too common:

A British woman with no serious health issues ended her life July 21 at a suicide clinic because, she said, she didn't want to grow old. Gill Pharaoh, 75, said her work in a nursing home revealed the "awful" truth of old age and burdens placed on loved ones and caregivers, the Telegraph reports by way of the Sunday Times.   

Gill Pharaoh, in a photo from her blog

     Let me emphasize at the outset that I don’t wish to ridicule Pharaoh: I pray that she can find God’s mercy in the hereafter.  She provides us with a concrete example, however, of how today’s conventional wisdom promotes death as the solution to our problems.  The appeal to relieve the “burdens placed on loved ones and caregivers”, for instance, is one of the primary emotional appeals that euthanasia advocates use (and both euthanasia and abortion promoters rely heavily on an appeal to emotion). Pharaoh herself, who wrote extensively about her decision before she killed herself, dismissed the idea that she should expect the support of her children in her old age, saying: "I had children for the personal and selfish reason that I wanted them for the pleasure and joy they bring. I want them to enjoy their middle years without having to worry about me."

       This is a sad and confused argument.  Again, I don’t doubt Pharaoh’s sincerity, but I can’t believe that she was as selfish as she claims.  Surely she changed diapers, cleaned up vomit, awakened from much-needed sleep to feed or comfort crying babies, none of which is very joyful or pleasurable, and that didn’t deter from giving birth again.  Did she really think of her children as merely a “burden”?  Of course not.  I’m sure she thought the “joy and pleasure” well worth the “burden” and, yes, the “worry” of caring for her children from birth to adulthood.  By even the crassest calculus, isn’t it reasonable to expect her children to return the favor when she needs them to do the same for her?

      Needless to say, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the crassest calculus.  I’m sure Gill Pharaoh endured the discomforts and inconveniences of child-rearing for the same reason that any of us who are parents do: because we love our children, not because of some loss/benefit ratio.  We see the trouble we endure for their sake as a way of expressing our love, of making it real; that’s why, despite all the trouble they cause us, our children bring us joy and pleasure.  Ironically, what she has done now is really much more selfish: she has deprived them of the opportunity to love her in the same way.  Even worse, by citing their convenience as a primary reason for her premature death, she is placing responsibility for her decision on them.

    And, of course, there is more to the ‘"awful" truth of old age’ to which she refers than the purported inconvenience to loved ones:        

  

she recounted a life slowly sapped of former joys like long walks and gardening sessions. "Not to mention the hundred and one other minor irritations like being unable to stand for long, carry a heavy shopping bag, run for a bus, remember the names of books I have read, or am reading, or their authors."  

A few decades ago, when we as a society still recoiled at the thought of intentionally ending any innocent person’s life, euthanasia advocates relied on searing anecdotes about terminally ill people undergoing excruciating suffering, or about people such as Karen Ann Quinlan who were kept alive only by machines, and who seemed to have no hope of ever regaining consciousness.  More recently we have reached the point where few of us seem to find it remarkable that we commonly starve to death people who aren’t even dying or unconscious, but are merely extremely old or disabled.  And so now, apparently, we are expected to accept that simply slowing down, or having to put up with “minor irritations”, is reason enough for otherwise healthy people to take their own lives.

The aged St. John Paul II

     There’s no reason to think that it will end here.  We live in a culture that has increasingly rejected the belief in the sacredness of anything, including human life.  Public schools (and many private, even religiously affiliated, ones) reinforce this worldview in a variety ways, and it is communicated by popular culture in countless messages both subtle and overt. It follows that if all we really are is protoplasm, or a particularly complex assemblage of molecules, what could possibly be sacrosanct? If the materialist view is correct, then there cannot be any sort of “meaning” to anything; human life itself is meaningless and suffering, which (in this view) is nothing but pointless pain and distress, is worse than useless: why not just put an end to it all?  In such a world suicide clinics can only multiply. Is it any wonder that St. John Paul the Great spoke of a “Culture of Death”?

      In response to this Gospel of Despair we Christians can point to the Mystery of the Cross.  Christ showed us in his own agonizing, distressing death that suffering even to the end can be not just meaningful, but redemptive: through our suffering we, too, can accomplish great good.  We have seen the lesson of Christ’s redemptive suffering reflected in the lives of countless of his followers, from the first martyrs to St. John Paul himself, who taught a worldwide audience that “death with dignity” does not mean taking it upon ourselves to cut off the concluding chapters of our lives.

      Many of us know family and friends who have likewise embraced the Way of the Cross. In my case I’m thinking in particular of an aunt whose faith-filled serenity during a slow and difficult death from cancer had a profound impact on everyone who saw her in her final days. I couldn’t help but think of this aunt when I read that Gill Pharaoh had said: "I do not want people to remember me as a sort of old lady hobbling up the road with a trolley".  My aunt’s loved ones don’t picture her infirmity when they remember her: they talk about her, how she exuded love and joy despite her suffering, an image of beauty in the midst of the ugliness of her fatal illness.  They don’t remember her depleted body, they remember her.  

     Again, my purpose isn’t to criticize Gill Pharaoh. She, along with the 611 of her fellow British citizens who ended their lives in Swiss suicide “clinics” between 2008-2012, and an ever lengthening list of others throughout the Western World, is a victim of a Godless, and therefore anti-human, worldview, a philosophy that tells us our “dignity” somehow lies in escape from what we are.  The Truth is very different.  St. Irenaeus said that “The Glory of God is Man fully alive.”  Suffering is a part of every human life: we can’t escape from it without denying our humanity.
     

Charleston, The Stranger, And Orlando: The Power Of Forgiveness

Love Overcomes Hate

One year ago, a shocking crime was dominating the news here in the United States, the vicious murder of nine members of a prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina.  The killer, a young man named Dylann Roof, hoped that the crime would ignite a race war (Roof is white, his victims were black).  It didn’t happen.  It’s true that some political activists took advantage of the understandable outrage at Roof’s racist massacre to push for various tenuously related pet causes, such as banning displays of the flag of the old Confederacy (never let a good crisis go to waste, someone once said).

Funeral for victims at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2015

More important than the machinations of the usual political agitators, however, was the reaction of the family and friends of the victims.  They had every reason to rise up in a spirit of anger and righteous vengeance.  Instead, they came together in a spirit of love and forgiveness, forgiveness explicitly grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  These grieving, wounded Christians gave the whole world a moving example of the healing power of Christ’s love.

A Stranger Comes To Town

Last year, however, was not the first time, and these were not the first Christians to have lived out the words of their Savior: “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  I was reminded of another such example a few days ago, when I paid a visit to the town cemetery in Gray, Maine.  There, among other Civil War era graves stands a headstone which reads:

Stranger

a Soldier of the late war

Died 1862

Erected

By the Ladies of Gray

A star medallion accompanies the stone, to indicate that the man beneath was a combat veteran.  There is usually a flag as well; when I visited last week, there were actually three small flags snapping in the breeze.  The Stranger differs from the dozens of other Civil War veterans buried in the cemetery, however, in that, here in the heart of the northernmost state of Yankee New England, his grave is honored not with the American flag, but with the Confederate battle flag, an emblem of the enemy in that conflict.

There’s an interesting story here, going back over a century and a half.  At the time of the Civil War, soldiers who fell in battle would be buried in a military cemetery, usually not far from where they died.  If a soldier’s family wished to bury him at home, they had to pay out of their own resources for the transport of his body.  And so it happened that when Lt. Charles Colley of Gray died in September of 1862, succumbing to wounds he received at the battle of Cedar Mountain in Virginia, his family paid to bring his body back to Maine.

    An unpleasant surprise lay in store for Lt. Colley’s family when they opened his coffin, however.  They found in the casket not their son, but an unidentified young man in a confederate uniform.  The government was not willing to ship him back, and besides, who knew where to send him? And so a group of local women arranged to have him interred in the local cemetery. There he lies today, the gray-uniformed Stranger side by side with one Johnson Smith, his blue-coated antagonist from the Maine Volunteers.

People Are More Than Symbols Or Categories

It might be helpful to consider who these “Ladies of Gray” were.  First of all, the Town of Gray sent a larger proportion of its population to the war than any other community in Maine; 178 of them are buried in the town cemetery.  The “Ladies” were mostly mothers of young men who had gone to fight against the Stranger and his comrades-in-arms.  Many of these women had already seen their sons killed or grievously wounded.  How tempting it must have been to take symbolic vengeance on the remains of this enemy.  The Ladies of Gray were good Christian women, however, and saw him not as a symbol or a category (“The Enemy”), but as a fellow human being whose mortal remains deserved to be treated with the same dignity as any of their own.

Enemies in life, together in eternity

The two cases above, in Charleston, SC in 2015 and in Gray, ME in 1862, are vivid reminders of what we can do if we take Christ’s words to heart.  And if Christ’s love can help us to see, and to love, the humanity in someone who has murdered a brother or sister, or who has been making war against our sons, surely we can do the same with somebody with whom we simply disagree.  That’s why it was perfectly natural for Christians around the United States and around the world to offer prayers for the forty-nine people murdered and dozens more injured at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and offer support to their families.  It doesn’t matter if we disagree about the morality of homosexual acts or the proper legal status of homosexual relationships.  They are our fellow beings, made in the image and likeness of God, unjustly slaughtered by a heartless fanatic.  We Christians would be hypocrites indeed if we did not pray for their souls and for the consolation of their loved ones.

J’Accuse!

As it happens, however, there are some people who are accusing us Christians of hypocrisy because we pray for the victims of the Orlando massacre.  They argue that because we oppose gay marriage and the homosexual lifestyle, we must therefore really hate the victims, since they were slaughtered in a gay nightclub.  Some of these critics have even gone so far as to say that conservative Christians are really to blame and not radical Islam, nor even the Muslim jihadist himself who publicly declared his allegiance to the terrorist Islamic State in the midst of the killing.

Some of the purveyors of this venomous nonsense are political operators, intent on exploiting a tragedy to push their agenda. Most of them, on the other hand, are probably convinced of the current secular dogma that our worth derives not from the fact that we are human beings made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27), but from our membership in various ethnic or sexual identity groups.  The fact that Omar Mateen’s victims were mostly members of the LGBQT community is more important than the simple fact that they were people cruelly murdered. In such a worldview there is little sense of shared humanity for its own sake, and to disagree with a particular group is necessarily to hate its members.  In such a worldview it is impossible to love your enemies, and praying for them can only be pretense.  And so large segments of the popular culture have proclaimed Christians who pray for the murdered men and woman of Orlando to be haters and hypocrites.  Case closed.

Speaking The Truth In Love

Now, it’s mighty tempting to lash out in turn at those who are exploiting the crimes of a fanatical jihadist, not to mention the deaths of his many victims, in order to slander Christians.  I was ready to lash out myself a week ago.  That is until I came across this article titled “Pastor: Have Mercy On Dylann Roof”.  It tells about a prayer service held in Charleston on the first anniversary of Dylann Roof’s rampage:

Rev. Dr. Juenarrl Keith gave the invocation for the service . . . During the prayer, he asked for guidance and healing for the families, but also mentioned Roof, the man charged with the murders of the church members.

"Have mercy upon the soul and the life of young Dylann Roof," Keith told the crowd. Some in the crowd could be heard saying "Amen," and clapping after his statement.

Moments earlier, Keith told the gathered crowd inside the area, "help us o God never to deny humanity in others, for it is then we destroy humanity within ourselves."

Rev. Dr. Juenarrl Keith speaking at commemoration service for Charleston massacre victims

After that, how could I not feel ashamed at my own anger at people guilty of little more than name-calling?

It’s not for us, of course, to forgive Omar Mateen: that is for the loved ones of those he has killed, if God grants them the grace. It is our place to respond to our own accusers with forgiveness. That does not mean that we agree to abandon the moral law or to reconfigure society based on the assertions of the ever-evolving sexual revolution.  Nor should we allow slanders against us and our faith to go unanswered.  The trick is to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15), respecting our antagonists as human beings even as we point out where they’re wrong (not coincidentally, what we say will be much more effective if we match it with how we say it). That’s not easy to do (certainly not for me), which is a good reason to keep praying for God’s grace to live up to the example of the families of Charleston and the Ladies of Gray.  Only then can we hope to be that shining lamp (Mark 4:21) that Christ calls us to be.