A few days ago a few pictures of President Obama surfaced that put a spotlight on his interaction with kids. One of these pictures was especially powerful. The first African-American president reaching out with compassion and touching the face of a young African-American boy.
Now I’m not so politically driven that I think these are fake or that he doesn’t really care about kids. My Bible tells me to respect my leaders and to pray for those in positions of authority. Despite all the areas where I differ with our president, I do not think he is a person full of hate whatsoever.
He is the President but also a husband and a father, and it is safe to say that he loves his kids and those kids in the pictures. These pictures were so powerful that the hash tag #obamaandkids went viral. The day the photos circulated, I found myself lying awake in bed, and the weight of my thoughts was physically evident to my wife. She asked me what was wrong, and the only way I knew how to respond was to simply say, “The world breaks my heart.”
How could photos of our president being nice to kids break my heart you might ask? It’s rather simple and difficult at the same time. I always try hard to see things through the eyes of others, especially when I might disagree with them. I’m not so closed off as to believe that I am always right on any given position. But when it comes to how “liberals” (for lack of a better term) view children, I just cannot make the dots connect.
There is no doubt that many liberals truly love children. However, I cannot understand how the president can have such compassion and sympathy for kids at one moment and yet defend abortion-on-demand in the next. I cannot see how those two ideologies can co-exist.
Those with liberal views typically want better healthcare for kids, better schools for kids, better opportunities for kids, but somehow within all that compassion, the support for the physical murder of children inside the mother’s womb is even more passionately defended.
It is no longer a question of science regarding when human life begins. Those issues have been settled. We can hear the heartbeat now inside of the womb, we can see the eyelids and fingers as an 8-week-old baby sucks its thumb. The idea that this baby is just a clump of cells is inconceivable (are we not all just clumps of cells?). Why go to such efforts to dehumanize a child? Most women find out they are pregnant 4-8 weeks into the child’s development when the heart beat can be clearly heard and the spine is formed, transferring signals of pain to that child’s brain.
What I have been struggling to understand is the level of cognitive dissonance required to love life and equality so vocally on one issue yet in the same breath defend a woman’s right to kill her child if she so chooses. (And I don’t use words like “kill” or “murder” to manipulate or frame the argument in my favor; it’s just a reality that when we willingly stop the development of another human being, whether that human is 6 years old or 6 weeks old, we are taking an innocent life.)
I think the best way for me to understand their position is to take a closer look at postmodernism. The 1960s and 70s produced a generation railed against authority, rejecting what was perceived as oppressive rules of morality regarding love, gender, religion, sex, and just about everything else. It was never replaced with anything, nor was a standard for morality ever agreed upon. This left a void at a very foundational level that has never been replaced.
Postmodernism is a term used to describe the mindset made famous by the singer Sheryl Crow that says, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” Postmodernism determines truth not by sound debate or evidence but by feelings. Postmodernism is like a tyrant king who can’t defend his actions, so he has to implement them by force. We see this on many fronts.
If you want to have a conversation about something as serious as abortion, you might be accused of hating women’s rights. If you want to talk about the importance of marriage, you run the risk of being called “homophobic.” Since these people to which I refer have thrown away the absolute moral law of God, we must now accept every ideology as equal, less they be labeled as a hypocrite themselves. This is why we see, at the extreme ends, “a white women demanding to be treated as a black woman because they ‘identify as black.’”
Even recently I saw a woman in England who identified as a cat and demanded to be treated as a cat. Postmodernism has to support these extremes because they have thrown out any tool that might be used to counter such idiocy. Now, this can be comical to think about when it comes to people wanting to marry their cousins, but when it comes to people wanting to kill children, then for me, the laughing stops real quick.
I know all too well that Margret Sanger started Planned Parenthood because she believed in social genocide and believed that black people were a weaker race that needed to be exterminated. We can try to sweep those things under the rug because facts don’t matter when it comes to postmodernism, only feelings. And if people feel like they should be allowed to kill kids then who are we to say otherwise? You can never take liberal thinking to its core ideological roots in a consistent way, because it has not roots or moral foundation. It cannot be defended in the public square so it must be defended by vilifying the opposition with name-calling and hate speech.
This insanity is so wide spread that universities are teaching that truth and morality are relative, and then suddenly display outrage when someone disagrees with their truth and morality. You can’t have it both ways.
When I see the picture of Obama and the little black boy, I don’t see compassion; I see a little boy who survived, despite the efforts of the man touching his face to make sure that if his mother had so chosen, she could have killed him before he even had a chance at life. That little boy is a survivor of a broken system.
Reports suggest that some 15 million African-American kids have been aborted since 1973. That means around 1,800 children are aborted every day. So that little boy, he is most definitely a survivor, as is President Obama. Despite ever effort of the world to keep them from having a full life, they have made it. The opposition wants you to think it is because of their efforts, but the truth is, they made it because Christian values still have a foundation for morality despite every effort to weaken and destroy it by postmodern thinking. Where Christianity has spread throughout history life has been valued, freedom has increased, schools have been started, women have been elevated, and slaves have been set free. Of course there are instances of great failure by those who claim to be Christian, but because our foundation is beyond man’s ability to legislate away the self-correcting nature of Christianity always pulls us forward.
The hand of our president, which so compassionately reached out and touched that young boy’s face, is tainted because of the loss of innocent unborn life. We all share in that shame. Those who support it, and those who are silent – we all share in that great guilt.
Of course “black lives matter,” even in the womb. Children matter, even in the womb. Women have equal rights, even in the womb. If it is wrong to do it to a child outside the womb then it is wrong to do it to a child inside the womb. As I roll over to sleep and look at my bride, nine months pregnant with our second child, I fear I will not be able to protect my son from such a violent world. I fear that he might elevate feelings over truth. I fear that he will be exposed to so much violence at a young age that he will grow numb to it all.
I sometimes dream of buying some land to raise my kids in isolation. I want to protect them from a world gone mad, foaming at the mouth as it seeks to devour all the innocence that is left. I see the photos from the ultrasound of my son taped to the mirror in our bedroom, showing his development. And my heart breaks knowing that it would have been totally within the law to have killed that small little boy. That clump of cells? That is my son, your son, your daughter, even you.
Arise, O LORD, do not let man prevail; Let the nations be judged before You (Psalm 9:19).