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I find myself constantly amazed at how easy it is for some evangelicals to link any form of violence whatsoever to abortion, as we see today on Dale Courtney's blog, where a local pastor pontificates about "a way of death" in an America presumably enamored of its right to kill unborn children. <br><br>There is in this country a true disregard for and devaluing of life, and obviously the deranged gunman on the Virginia Tech campus Monday was not consumed with anything other than hate -- hatred for those around him, hatred of societal norms and mores, and hatred for himself. And, since I believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, I have to argue -- and do -- that abortion is not a life-affirming act, even if it is not murder in the legal sense (as I've argued), and even if for reasons that make it appear unavoidable. It's wrong, though, to use societal violence as "proof" of the evils of abortion, just as it's wrong to claim that abortion causes breast cancer or renders every woman who has one profoundly mentally ill afterward. <br><br>First, if abortion is the bad thing its opponents believe it to be, then the arguments against it should be made on that basis -- in other words, if abortion is the taking of human life, that assertion should be the focus of our argument. It's dishonest and dilutes the logical, moral, and intellectual force of the argument to link it to other societal ills. The belief that abortion results in the death of a human person is hardly enhanced by adding that, oh, yeah, it makes crazy people go on campus shooting rampages. That's hardly a given and, in this case, is more of a non-sequiter.<br><br>And that's the real focus of my objection to linking shooting massacres and other acts of violence to abortion: In arguing that legalized abortion so cheapens life that people will inevitably, if not insouciantly, start turning on one another credits abortion with both too much and too little. If abortion is the taking of unborn human life, the argument hardly needs the adornment gained by claiming it also causes the taking of already-born human life. And if it is the taking of human life, and if we believe that its existence has resulted in a culture of death around us, we must also look at the other factors that have given us this violent, sick, angry society. The problem is that "pro-life" activists evince precious little concern about other "death culture" contributors such as poverty, access to guns, broken families, the media, and corruption and warmongering from the highest levels of American government. Because I believe that most women who choose abortion are not basing their choice on their deep desire to kill a baby but rather on a fear and sense of desperation most of us cannot comprehend, I can't argue that their choice, however tragic, translates into their own or anyone else's subsequent decisions to commit acts of mayhem and terror. Instead, it's time that we explore what really does feed America's culture of violence, a pursuit that most conservatives would find uncomfortable because it threatens realities, ideas, and practices that are often embraced and prescribed as "God's way" of living. It's easy to beat up on uppity women or slutty girls; it's quite another to take an unflinching look at the life-killers around us all -- in our culture and in our homes.<br><br>For example, Mary Winkler, who last year shot and killed her pastor husband in Tennessee, took the stand in her trial today to recount years in a marriage that looks like hell . . . and looks not altogether different from most products of patriarchal, insulated and conservative family culture. No one, least of all Mary Winkler, would argue that emptying a shotgun into a spouse is an appropriate way of dealing with marital strife, and it's appropriate that she be tried for the killing. But Mary Winkler, who likely has never had an abortion, was not saturated by the venom of a culture of death. She was poisoned by the very thing that many around us in Moscow applaud and defend -- a family whose head and leader was a man imbued with a purported divine right of authority and control over his wife; a family who worshiped a God seen and defended as male in gender and in nature; a family of people presumed to be whole and healthy and intact simply because the marriage was intact; a family desperately trying to be perfect for other people who desperately needed them to be perfect while unable to comprehend that there might be another equally God-honoring way of doing things; and a family driven to crisis by the unexamined, uncritical embrace of patriarchy and hierarchy, shackles that tighten, trip, and kill precisely because the people bound in them believe they cannot ever be cast off. Matthew Winkler might be dead and buried, but Mary Winkler seems to have died long ago as well. She must pray for the sweet release of death while her critics and her defenders in the church shake their heads and wonder why a woman bound and shackled by bad theology and worse practice nonetheless couldn't run freely to her Lord for help. And while she is now free of the fetters of patriarchal marriage only to enter the confinement of prison, those same chains of patriarchy and sexism will be presented to generations of young women around and behind her, and they will tighten, trip, and kill just as surely as they did with Mary Winkler.<br><br>I suggest that before the church invests much more energy into solemnly declaring that behind every evil is the footprint of legalized abortion, it takes a look inward to see what it itself has birthed. Our desperate grabbing onto power, patriarchy, control and containment in the name of doctrine we're too afraid to seriously examine is sucking the life out of the church's witness and its people, and repenting of the self-satisfied smugness of those who will never face a crisis pregnancy or suffer directly under the ills of sexism would be a powerful first step.<br><br>keely<br><br><br>><br>> <br>> <br>> <br><br /><hr />Get news, entertainment and everything you care about at Live.com. <a href='http://www.live.com/getstarted.aspx ' target='_new'>Check it out!</a></body>
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