Confession: I don’t care about the gay marriage debate.
There, I said it. I don’t care whether gay people are allowed by the government to say “I do”. Do I think homosexuality is a sin? Yes. Do I think that the government declaring it legal for them to marry makes it more or less of a sin? No.
One of the reasons I don’t get worked up about this whole thing is because there are much bigger issues that we should be concerned with. One of the biggest of those issues is pointed out in this disturbing and insightful piece by USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers.
An abortion doctor in Philadelphia is on trial for murder. The testimony in this trial has been shocking, disgusting, and eye-opening. He is accused of beheading children, keeping infant feet in jars, and killing children after they screamed outside the womb. Yet, somehow, this story hasn’t been dominating headlines.
I was in the Atlanta airport for seven hours after Spring Break. Headline News was on almost every TV in the airport. Every time I looked at it there was a story about gay marriage. In the seven hours I was in the airport, I probably saw ten different stories about this issue. Many of them were repeated throughout the day.
Listen, I get it. To some people this is a major issue of civil rights. Some people see this as a continuation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, somehow equating the Montgomery Bus Boycott with changing a Facebook profile picture to a red equals sign. Let’s get real though, our generation seems incapable of caring about something enough to go to jail for it. And not being allowed to marry is hardly equal to not being allowed to sit where you want on a bus or use the same restroom as everyone else.
But if there is ever anything that we should care about it’s a “doctor” that was beheading newborns in a place that was “literally raining fetuses”. If the news media cared about making a difference so much that they constantly ran stories about a “modern civil rights” movement, shouldn’t they be running stories about infants being murdered in gruesome ways?
How have we become so desensitized to an issue like this? Tens of millions of people watched “The Bible” series on History Channel. Two of the most shocking and gruesome scenes were scenes depicting the Egyptian murders of Isrealite babies and Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem after the birth of Jesus. These scenes are unbearable, we struggle to even fathom the depths of depravity required to order these killings. Chinua Achebe’s book Things Fall Apart describes how members of the main character’s tribe must place newborn twins in the woods to die because they believed they were evil. These scenes are disconcerting and hard to believe. When reading it I remember thinking that I was fortunate to grow up in a society that was educated enough to know that this was deplorable.
Obviously I was wrong. Only the least educated could conceive of such an evil and only the most educated could conceive of a way to condone it. It takes a simple argument to say that the killing of unborn children is evil, while it takes a complicated argument of “what ifs” to argue against it.
I’m not breaking new ground with these arguments. People who know a lot more than me about this issue have written extensively about it.
My point is that while we wait and “protest” with Facebook pictures and rainbow t shirts about equality, we live in a country that sanctions the elimination of human life. Over 56 million children were treated as subhuman. Sure, maybe homosexual people are not treated as “equals” by some in society, but at least they were given the shot at living and breathing and making their own decisions. Who knows how many children were legally aborted at Kermit Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, but he is charged with the murder of seven babies whose spines he snipped during late term abortions.
Someone who murdered seven children is a serial killer by most standards. Do you think Headline News would be all over the trial of Gosnell if he was charged with killing seven 1 month olds? Or seven 3 year olds? Or even seven adults? Of course they would. He would be more infamous than Casey Anthony. But somehow, we have decided as a society that seven babies just outside a womb don’t matter as much.
To paraphrase a quote from David Letterman after 9/11, if I live to be 1,000 years old this will never make any sense to me.
So, sure, change your profile picture to an equals sign if that’s what you think activism is. Or get riled up and preach messages about the evils of gay marriage if that’s what you think is important.
There will never be true equality until all humans are given a chance at life.
The Jesus I believe in, the Jesus of the Bible, cared for the poor, the helpless, and the uneducated of society. There is nothing more helpless, poor, and uneducated than a child not given the chance to live. If you care about anything, care about this.
Scott Bedgood 