I have a hard time believing that most who claim to be pro life really hold all life to be sacred when those very same politicians, pundits and celebrity clergy and social media trolls are the first to rally us to war, who gut school lunch programs, who ignore and despise the homeless and who are the first to argue for the death penalty.
But especially those who ignore orphans and the unwanted children that these people were the first to demand those children be born. It strikes me as both denying the sacredness of all life and as exceptionally hypocritical.
I don't see how one can be Christian let alone pro life when I see one Jesus fish sticker next to a "I love dead terrorists" sticker on a car.
How can people who claim life is sacred put on expensive clothes, get in luxury SUVs and drive past orphanages, prisons, ignoring the homeless and sometimes despising them on their way to a church to learn how to be more like Jesus?
The irony is mind bending.
Why is it that Jesus taught us to leave our offerings to God and make amends with those who have angered us before making an offering to God? The higher law is to make amends and temper our anger and the minimum is not to kill.
Jesus taught us to not only love our neighbors as ourselves He taught us to love our enemies. Yet that is the one teaching that is so often ignored or annotated to provide exceptions for behavior Jesus taught us to avoid.
My point here is that if one wants to be pro life then be pro life and stop making exceptions for some lives being more sacred than others.
It reminds me of a very poignant quote from the book Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
This attitude of some lives being sacred while the lives of those I served with in the Army were expendable. The lives of orphans, homeless people and the mentally ill don't seem to matter as much as those who are in a "better" or "more equal" class of people.
I just don't see most of those I know or have heard from who claim to be "pro life" regarding all the lives of God's children as being sacred when what I'm seeing tells me that only *some* lives matter while others don't.
My point is not that the pro life movement has gone too far, it's that it hasn't gone far enough or at least not far enough in the right direction given its precept of life being sacred.
To me pro life means that all life is sacred not just some lives. It means taking care of the poor, the sick, the mentally ill, the disabled and it means feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison. Because if we truly had a proper reverence for the sacredness of life we would have less of the above groups. We would be closer to Zion than we are now.
