We Will Not Shut Up

The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear arguments against a new Texas law that outlaws abortion once the child has a heartbeat. President Harrison caught a lot of grief - even from many claiming to be LCMS members - because he wrote on the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod Facebook page (September 6, 2021, 9:56 AM), “Thank God the folks in Texas and on the SCOTUS think 63,000,000 dead babies is enough.”

For this advocacy of human life, President Harrison was pilloried. In the comment thread, the Synod President doubled down: “SIXTY THREE million. I’m just not shuttin up.”

And this is precisely what his detractors want. They want to gag him, our church body, and members of Synod, including pastors and representatives of our schools and universities from expressing any support of the pro-life movement. The arguments are the usual canards: we hate women, we only care about babies when they’re in the womb and when they’re born we don’t care about them, men have no right to an opinion on this issue, we don’t support crisis pregnancy centers, the Bible never addresses abortion, the Bible was only written by men, etc.

One lady decided to take a different tack with me. She attacked my personal Facebook posts dealing with politics and historiography. What this has to do with the Abortion Holocaust is beyond me. It is a classic case of ad hominem argumentation, gaslighting, and passive aggression. I’m not going to be bullied or intimidated.

But it is also a case of deflection.

The new Texas law doesn’t outlaw all abortions, but it goes a long way towards defending the innocents in utero (which all of us were at one time, and which our Lord Himself was as well). Ad hominems and deflection are actually the best strategy that pro-abortion Christians - especially LCMS members who are angry about the new Texas law and are on the attack against President Harrison and other members of Synod who support it - can muster.

The best argument for supporting the new Texas law and supporting similar laws to be passed in other states is the simple reality of what the law now bans. Here is a video. And although it is an illustration, it is still disturbing and horrifying. You may not even want to watch it. But those who support abortion as a right, those who oppose the new Texas law, those who are lambasting President Harrison really should watch this:

As you can see, even the decidedly left-biased YouTube finds this too intense to imbed in this article. To watch it, you have to click on the YouTube link and state that you are 18 years of age or older. This is the way our society used to deal with pornography. We all intuitively know across the political spectrum that this procedure is barbaric and morally indefensible. And that is why the argument has to be deflected to ad hominems and discussions of anything and everything except what exactly happens to the baby.

Although the lady’s attack on my views of American History are an irrelevant distraction, there is something to be said about historical symbols of the past and why it is not wrong to honor our ancestors and our heritage in spite of their flaws.

When I’m in uniform, I stand at attention when the flag of the United States is posted. I salute the flag. The flag represents my home and my American ancestors who were already here before the United States was founded. Many of them fought in the War for American Independence and in subsequent conflicts. I have affection for the flag in spite of the fact that it flew over slave ships, segregation, war crimes, ethnic internment camps, adventurous imperialism, and in spite of the fact that every stripe represents a slave state when the states declared their independence. Moreover, Old Glory flies over the Holocaust of the Unborn: 63,000,000 children killed in utero with the protection and blessing of the United States government, namely the Federal court system and the Supreme Court. The decree Roe v. Wade compelled all of the states to legalize, allow, and defend infanticide within their borders. At the time of Roe, gone was the old federalism of the founders that decentralized such decisions and allowed the people of the states to protect the unborn. Hamiltonian Nationalism replaced Jeffersonian Federalism (states’ rights), and until now, the State of Texas has been powerless to protect the powerless.

Without the top-down Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution - not as a compact between the states but as the master of the states - converting the states into provinces of a single unitary state - my own State of Louisiana and many other states (especially, but not only in the South) would have passed laws protecting the unborn. Perhaps the pendulum is now starting to shift from Hamilton to Jefferson, and maybe a new federalism and decentralization of authority from Washington will once more allow the people of the states to protect our little ones without interference from Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. I’m certain the Nationalists won’t simply roll over. This may lead to court-packing so they can maintain their dominance over the Jeffersonian view and over human life itself.

And speaking of Jefferson, I have a bust of him, admire him, and consider him to be a great man. To many people, this would make me a “racist.” But that just isn’t true. I honor Jefferson because of his greatness and because of his ideas of decentralized government and the idea that rights come from God and not from the State. I don’t honor Jefferson because he was a slaveowner, because of his 18th century views on race, or because he did not believe in the divinity of Christ. I honor him in spite of those realities. The Left has no place for such nuance. This is why they are on a jihad against patriotism, against our American heritage, against our founders, and against a Jeffersonian historiography that does not interpret American history along the Socialist lines of Howard Zinn and Eric Foner.

I love my country, its history, its heritage, its heroes, and its symbols: slavery and the Holocaust of the Unborn notwithstanding. Slavery was eventually abolished, and one can hope that abortion will be as well. Perhaps a hundred years from now, there will be museums dedicated to this Holocaust, and the world will look in horror at what their ancestors did.

And nevertheless, hopefully they will continue to uphold the Fourth Commandment by honoring their male and female ancestors (as the Hebrew text reads), flawed as they were.

At any rate, thank you President Harrison and to other leaders of our Synod for defending the unborn, created in the image of God, knit together in their mothers’ wombs, known by God, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.

We will not shut up indeed.