And I'm agin that.

I wish there were nearly zero abortions ? families should be free to choose between the life of the mother and that of the child. And some situations are so hideous, like incest and rape, that society should not have the right to coerce the girl to bear that fervently unwanted child to term.

Maybe as a Christian, that is an evil point of view. But as an American and a hater of bullies, I am obliged to be for the rights of women to choose what they do with their own bodies. It's in the Declaration of Independence. And it's in the Bible, implicitly ? that women are people, and the least of us are known to God.

So much untruth-telling going on, such as that late term abortions are common. They're rare. The vast, vast, vast majority occur in the first six weeks of pregnancy, months before the "quickening" that early Jewish scholars noted as the onset of life.

I would feel differently if I saw tons of kindness and nurturing for young women on the part of the pro-life side. But mostly I see narcissistic fervor and moral superiority. And occasionally, outright hate.

And I think of our pro-life ethic acted out in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, where we dropped 30,000 cluster bombs ? bombs whose one purpose is to shred human beings. Radical conservatives were positively gleeful about the prospect of ?precision? bombing ? but there is nothing precise about a cluster bomb.

Of course, being devoted to the truth, we forbade our news outlets from showing pictures of what a cluster bomb does to a child. The whole world saw it, but not us. Because we knew from Vietnam that if we see the girl on fire, running naked down the road, it pricks our consciences.

We have the power, and wise little girls will get out of the way.

And if they don't, let ?em burn. If little girls die in back-alley abortions, as they did in uncountable numbers for the ?good old moral days? decades before Rowe-v-Wade, they were not wise little girls.

Do we sound like Christians, or do we sound like the Romans, steamrolling those who get in our way?

Christ offered the world an alternative to might, and it was mercy. The law is a rough approximation of mercy. The law is supposed to be about keeping little girls from bursting into flame. It's not perfect. It's often awful. It's our pathetic effort to mount an alternative to male brutality.

And I don't think this contradicts what I take to be your stance on the difference between men and women, which I think I agree with. Your talk on what women want vs what men wants was totally right on.

I have a mental picture of the ?way things ought to be,? and it does not involve abortion mills. Under our roofs and in our church communities we are free to impose whatever vision of God's plan for us we discern ? from the catacombs to Waco.

But in America, we have rights, and they too are rooted in the Judeo-Christian view, that individuals matter, that little girls matter.

 
In friendship - Mike