By Steve Gregg
More correspondence with Kerry, my WOKE, SJW, pro-abortion critic:
Re: Protecting one’s children from pro-abortion influence from family members.
Steve,
Once a blue moon I scroll through Matthew713.com to listen to some of the interesting (and sometimes whacky) calls you've gotten over the years. I heard one call on abortion where the question and your answer totally blew me away and clarified to me how sick and extreme some people can be over this abortion issue.
This particular call was on 4-2-2020 and was from a man who said he didn't want his parents around his very, very young children because his parents didn't share his political view about abortion. First of all, I was shocked that someone could be so myopic and narrow-minded as to even think of cutting off their parents from seeing their grandchildren over their view of abortion. I was even more shocked at your deplorable sympathetic, compassionate posture to what he proposed. After a lot of your usual drivel you ultimately said "perhaps" he was going too far; however you should have said that the instant he finished his comment. There shouldn't have been a second of hesitancy in your voice!!! Not only are many far right extremists willing to make abortion the foundation of their religious/political views, you're now also willing to let abortion be a disrupter between generations of family. OH MY GOD!!! And the kids were so small, one was a newborn. You actually proposed letting the grandparents see the grand kids as long as the parents were also there. How SICK is that!!! You're treating the grandparents as if they were pedophiles!! And did you ever stop to ask yourself if this is the behavior Jesus would want us to portray, where we become sooooo consumed with a single political topic (abortion) that we're willing to tear up generational family relationships over it?
Question for you Steve, if the grandparents were unbelievers would you support the caller keeping the grandchildren away as well? If the grandparents didn't share the same views on marriage/divorce/remarriage as the caller, should the caller use his kids as pawns and a bargaining chip against his parents? If the grandparents believed in tithing (as most Christians unfortunately do) but the caller didn't, should the children be dragged into the debate? Steve, your 'judgement' can be very dangerous and I don't know who in their right mind could suggest or agree with what you said, treating the grandparents like pedophiles because of their view of abortion when we're dealing with very minor children and an infant.
I tell ya, this call really opened my eyes to how sick and obsessed many abortion opponents are, as well as the extreme measures some are willing to pursue under the guise of "taking a stand". But the saddest part of it all was your compassion, sympathy and understanding of the man's actions when you should have rebuked him immediately after he got those words out of his mouth!
Kerry
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Hi Kerry,
You have very strong visceral opinions, exhibiting no part of rationality. You did not identify from which standard or absolute foundation you derive them—and it is in no sense obvious. You certainly did not derive them from the Bible or Christ.
It is the parents' decision in child-rearing to choose to which influences they will expose their children in their moral formation. I believe that a wise parent, for example will not give his or her children unsupervised access to the internet, will not give them smartphones, and may choose to forego having a television in their home. This is because there are humans out there who will seek to corrupt the children morally, and it is the parent's responsibility to supervise any such exposure of the child. I did not advise either way about the grandparents. I just urged the father to make the call himself, as every responsible parent must do.
While it may be true that most grandparents are safe moral influences in their grandchildren's live, only a fool would image that this is always the case. Very many children have been molested, exposed to pornography, or deprogramed from their parent's Christianity, by their grandparents. It is the parents' responsibility to discern where such dangers exist, and, yes, in certain cases, to protect their children fro such influences. The fact that grandparents are biologically related does not automatically confer the right of access to the children. Our legal system rightly recognizes that some persons in a child's family may be a detrimental influence upon the child, and may be denied unsupervised custody.
You may not be a parent (or maybe not a very attentive or concerned one) so that you would disagree with the points made above. That is your prerogative. It is also your prerogative to be "shocked" to find that there are involved and concerned people who actually are committed to parenting their own children. Such has become the ethos of our society—i.e., to be shocked upon finding that some people still wish to fulfill their parenting role conscientiously and who wish to protect vulnerable children from corruption! There is, indeed, occasion here for shock!
Of course, I will give you more credit than that (though you have given me no particular reason to do so). I assume you would protect your children from a grandfather who uses his grandchildren in the production of child pornography (I hope I am not giving you too much credit here). However, you disagree with protecting children from the influence of people who favor and advocate the murder of babies. Close attachment to grandparents has often led to children's adopting their grandparents' standards, rather than those of their parents.
Of course, none of this concerns you because you persist in the fantasy that abortion is not the moral equivalent of murdering a living baby. This being so, you must forgive those of us who are actually governed by Christ's teaching to be the ones who are "shocked" at your sympathy with Nazis and eugenicists who regard life as human only when it is not inconvenient to themselves..
As I have mentioned to you previously, abortion is not a political issue. Murder is both a moral and criminal issue. Murder is not an issue upon which good people disagree. That it would ever have become a political issue can only speak of how far a civilization has fallen from being civilized.
I presume that you. will say that abortion is not murder. So, let me define murder and you tell me where my definition. fails:
Murder occurs when one human being deliberately and gratuitously ends the life of an innocent human being.
This definition does not include accidental death, the execution of one who has done crimes worthy of death, nor an unavoidable killing which is necessary in the preservation of other lives.
Does abortion fit this definition (and if not, why not?)?
1) Abortion is, by definition, the act of one or more human beings conspiring to kill, and executing a human baby.
2) It is not a necessary procedure to save a life in anywhere near 1% of cases (e.g., in the case of tubal ligations)
3) The target of the hit is a living human baby. This is unmistakeable, because if it was not alive, it would not be growing and developing, and there would be no "need" to kill it through abortion
4) This living being is a human being, in possession human blood—which, from a very early age, is separate from the mother's blood supply and is circulating in the baby by means of a beating human heart. Shedding human blood is a biblical definition of killing. "Whoever sheds mans blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen.9:6). This is why, biblically, the shedding of Christ's blood is a synonym. for His death.
There was a time when abortion advocates justified the action by the lame (and entirely artificial) claim that a "fetus" is not a human person. They did this by creating out of thin air, disingenuous definitions of "person." The pro-murder wing of leaders in the USA (unlike those in any other country presently) are advocating that an unwanted baby may righteously be murdered, not only in the womb, but now also after a healthy delivery. In this, they abandon their fake narrative that abortion is not killing a baby, and exchange it for a narrative that an unwanted baby, already born (some are saying, up to the first month after birth) can be murdered by the same ethical basis as killing the same child inside the womb.
In other words, apparently there is no expert consensus that the baby inside a womb is any more or less human that one that has safely emerged from the womb. The crossing of this line proves that their earlier arguments were fake and opportunistic, and removes any argument against killing any inconvenient human being of any age. This was the approach to human life advocated by the Nazis, but no society significantly concerned about Christianity ever would have tolerated such reasoning (because it is satanic).
Intelligent people lacking agendas have always known that there is no existential difference between a baby inside its mother and the same baby outside its mother. Calling the former a "fetus" is simply a dodge ("fetus" is simply the Latin word for "baby"). It is clear that, with proper interventions, a human baby born at 20 to 25 weeks can survive outside the womb, just as a baby born at 40 weeks can. The need for adult intervention does not change the morality or the definition of a living person. All babies will die without adult intervention for the first several years of their lives. My first daughter was born at 32 weeks, and required exceptional intervention for 30 days before she could leave the incubator. She was fully human the whole time, of course, and was not the more or less so because she was "wanted." Being wanted is not one of the definitions of human personhood.
You have three options:
1) Prove me wrong,
2) Repent and become a true follower of Jesus, subject to His teaching, or
3) Contact me no more with your advocacy of Nazi viewpoints. I am immune to conversion on this point.
Steve Gregg
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Todd
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