Disposable human beings

 Disposable human beings:

How politics of pro-life turned against the American family

 

I, along with nearly every American citizen, am against abortion. But we need a different kind of talk. Recent political debates regarding whose lives are disposable and whose lives are to be more valued have been raging. The abortion issue in our nation and right here in Montana remains prominent. Government biases prioritizing some human lives over others is against our Constitution and our common sense. Yet the value of respect for life for human beings from conception to 3-score-and-10 is Constitutional and Biblical. look up “neither Jew nor Greek,” or “all nations.”

 

Some of us opposed to abortion want protection for the totality of human life regardless of political differences. Others of us, and many in Southern Montana, want to parse this out and end up exacerbating illicit demand for abortions. Recent nation-wide legislation banning abortion further removes families’ power, endowed by the Creator, to protect their own. This writing is in support of those who take seriously the Bible’s respect for family relationships over government intervention to protect the unborn. 

 

I remember well a scene in my childhood when I threw a fit. I was outraged because all my childhood senses were obsessed with the immediate scene.

 

My grandmother picked me up and stood me on a stool beside her at a table in the barn. I was to help scrape sheep guts clean. Being a kid in a sheep-shearing family, I already had nasal passage revulsion fits if detecting sheep odors. I saw, smelled and felt the slick slimy goo my grandmother was removing and washing from each length of sheep gut. She forced into my hand a table knife, not too sharp so I wouldn’t easily nick the gut skin. She placed my hand with hers on a length of gut to press against the board, and told me to hold it down. Then she moved my knife hand to scrape the gut clean. I revolted, and cried for my mother. Mother told me to do what Grandma says. I was abandoned. I protested that I was going to puke. Grandmother brought the slop bucket of entrail washings and set it beside my stool for me to puke in if I needed. I ended up obedient. I watched my fingers push the goo oozing from the edge of my knife blade while holding the stretched out gut over the table board, and getting something done. I did not puke. I did not hear grandmother say, “there you got it,” but I’m confident she did.  

 

Later that day I recovered enough to gather with my cousins to watch “the sausage snake.” Uncle Willis ladled spiced, good-smelling ground meat into the press cylinder, clamped the screw motor over the piston, started it turning and smashing down the sausage grindings. We watched transfixed as a snake of ground sausage pushed into a tube fastened to the output at the bottom of the press. The motor chugged, the tube of sausage casing grew longer, and Uncle Willis struggled to keep the snake from kinking.

 

He missed a kink. The casing burst. He quickly stopped the motor, made a snide comment about dapich (clumsy) kids cutting holes in the casing. He carefully gathered up each tiny morsel of the spilled ground meat. He reached into a tub for something familiar to me: sheep gut like I had been cleaning. He cut two short lengths, twisted each of them into a twine, and used it to tie each of the two ends of broken casing.  In no time he started the motor. He then kept filling a series of tubs, one for a year’s supply of sausage for each of ten households in my extended family.

 

Maybe it’s time now to back up from asking big government protection of one unborn child at a time. Maybe it’s better to look at the larger picture God designed for us in families, clans, tribes and nations. We need to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, touch with our hands, and even maybe smell, in order to imagine a better way. I don’t remember anyone telling me I had a role to play in my family’s needs for food. It was there, and respected. In time, a long time, I became aware of the value of the connections my traditions built.  At the time, I had no idea each November family butchering event was in itself sacred. Our religion supported us with thanksgiving for divine blessing, and generosity to share. I didn’t get the bigger picture.

 

Government take-over of the protective function God ordained for the family has left us in the United States with a mess of more abortions, more dysfunction and early death. Children suffer trauma born into households where government anti-abortion is just one way parents are branded disposable or unfit to protect their own. The consequences are huge in schools, prisons, crime rates, policing practices, illness, and early death.

 

THIS ENDING?

We in the United States did that in past generations.  In fact, most of our nation’s existence provided legal protection for slavery.  Are we still in mental slavery? My grandmother didn’t intend this, but was she, and was my experience as a child, part of our American culture of slavery blocking me from seeing and her from saying I belonged? Or was my fogged vision, not seeing my importance to what my family needed, simply an aversion to smelling and handling sheep guts?

 

OR THIS ENDING?

We might agree that even just one child growing up marginalized for interventionist profit, prison profit, and any consequence like suspension and expulsion is too many. Our sense of what’s good for our families and neighbors of any race, age, or gender was not meant to be taken over and protected by judicial force outside the family, neither in our Constitution, nor in our Bible, nor in any of the heritages of family life and languages here in Southern Montana. This writing is an invitation for an evidence-based conversation on better roles for judicial processes affecting those leading our families, schools, county, state, and leaders of our great nation. What might it mean to return to the Biblical basics of family? Let’s talk about it.