Over the past month I’ve watched the monsters descend on the students of Parkland, and other young people throughout the country moved to activism after their latest exposure to bloodshed and carnage.
They’ve trolled their social media accounts, attacked their sexuality, made fun of their college application rejections, and unleashed millions of minions and bots on them.
Teenagers.
They’ve been doing this to teenagers—middle and high schoolers, many of whom only buried classmates and teachers a few weeks ago.
Someone’s minor children—kids who are already living in the most turbulent, most confusing, most disorienting time of life. They are joyfully, unrepentantly bringing more turbulence upon them.
And what’s most stunning, most infuriating, is that the monsters doing this, claim to be “pro-life” Christians.
This is apparently their single-vote issue: life.
They treasure it, defend it, celebrate it.
They preach and protest and petition for it.
While they’re dragging these already traumatized young people on social media; manipulating their images, using them as talk show fodder, while verbally abusing them, and excusing every kind of sick harassment of them—they would tell you they fiercely value “life.” (That they support a President who is a bully messiah is a discussion for another day.)
This is the perfect illustration of the fraudulence of so many supposedly pro-life, Evangelical Christians: they largely have contempt for life outside the uterus.
They love the idea of benign, pristine embryos.
Support for them doesn’t cost them a thing.
It doesn’t really require any work.
They merit Scripture quotes and flowery words and effusive praise.
But if it’s distraught teenagers, trying to both grieve and be agents for change in the public eye: Screw ’em. They’re all Tidepod eaters. They have to deal with this if they want to open their mouths. They should shut up and study.
Compassion, gone.
If it’s a young black man executed in a traffic stop: Not my problem. He was probably asking for it. We’ll troll their supporters, criticize their grieving siblings, and vilify any protests.
Contempt, strong.
If it’s a Transgender teenager being terrorized at school: You’re an abomination. you’re a freak. you’re going to Hell. Here’s a hateful meme.
Gentleness, evaporated.
It’s a kneeling professional athlete: They should shut up and play football or get fired or get out.
Hatred, prevalent.
If it’s a Muslim teenager forced to remove her head wrap at school: She gets ridicule and mockery and comments about terrorism.
Enmity, easy.
If it’s an immigrant veteran forced to leave the country they love and the home they’ve built: To hell with them. This is our country!
Empathy, nonexistent.
Over and over, these professed “life lovers,” go to great lengths to make living really, really difficult for so many people.
And that’s perhaps the most distressing reality that sinks in as I watch a vast multitude of supposed pro-life Christian adults, relentlessly going after the students of Parkland and others: they’d have been passionate and loud and unyielding in defense of them—while they were in the womb.
They’d have leveraged their platforms and talk shows and political position and pulpits to declare their inherent value, their God-designed beauty, the sanctity of their individual lives.
But now that they’re here and they’re hurting, and their opinions and politics conflict with their own—suddenly their lives really aren’t of value. Suddenly they’re the deserving objects of ridicule and harassment and violence. Suddenly they can be trolled for sport.
Now that they’re teenagers who don’t like being murdered by the guns these folks really like—to hell with them and their lives.
If only these teenagers had stayed there in the womb: they’d be safe from the pro-life Christians.
There, they’d still be beautiful.
There, they’d still be worth defending.
There’ they’d still be sacred.
- John Pavlovitz
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