MM#279--Ohio Issue 1 - Two Appeals (the most important to men) and an Analogy From History

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Today's episode could be graphic, so I urge you to not listen to this podcast with your children. Today's episode will be controversial because we have to talk about difficult things once in a while and have an honest conversation about our world and where it is going. If we don't have honest, heart-to-heart conversations, we will be, in fact, living in a fantasy land, and probably the reason our culture and our world is the way it is today is because we have been living in a fantasy land for the last 25, to 35, or 40 years. Everyone wants to stop talking about anything important. Everyone wants to shut down the conversation between adults even before it starts. It's kind of like that phrase politics, religion and her. Actually, isn't that an old country song? Let's talk about politics, religion and her. I will not sing. I will not cause you to turn off this podcast right away, but that was a country song, was it? Who was that guy that sang that? Oh, yes, the old Sammy Kershaw. After a good Google search of that, in case you don't know that song, here are some lyrics from the song let's talk about baseball. Let's talk a little small talk. There's got to be a good joke that you've heard. Let's talk about NASCAR, old Hollywood movie stars, let's talk about anything in this world, but politics, religion and her. He goes on in a fantastic song. Love the song. Politics can start a fight, religion's hard to know who's right. And one more topic I won't touch. Well, that one is her and it hurts too much. So that is a fantastic song, but that doesn't help us in society when we can't or won't or don't talk about the important things, when we are not adults, when we don't get down to the truth on the big topics of our day, the big issues confronting us as a society. In our last episode we talked about the great gift of the theology, the body brought to us by John Paul, saint John Paul II, and how it's the very antidote we need for our hyper sexualized world. But embedded in there and I brought it up that I wanted to talk to our own side in that podcast episode was my side. I wanted to talk to my side, the pro-life side and, more importantly, in the case of killing a number one child, the side defending the life of the child and the life of the mother. I implored that side for a life-side, to dig deeper into this teaching because it paints a more holistic, better vision of the world than the very dark horizon that we are looking out upon now. We have been living in a culture of death for the better part of fifty years in the West and our eyes are now too used to seeing the darkness as normal, the normal way the world should look. That's not true. It's as if you were born in Ohio and because it's cloudy here ninety-nine percent of the time, you would think the rest of the world must be cloudy ninety-nine percent of the time because the sun barely comes out in Ohio. But for the rest of the world that's not true. And we've seen the ability to see the sun if we travel to a different location, perhaps sunny South Florida, where the sun shines ninety-five percent of the time. Just a much different world there, isn't it. But that's how our culture has been for the last forty-year-plus years One gray cloud of darkness. We're to make a better analogy, a better analogy that Christopher West, our previous author from the last podcast, uses all the time in his talks. He's talks about sexuality in our world these days. He says it's as if we're driving around with four flat tires, just driving around with four complete flat tires. And everyone is doing this. Every car you see has four complete flat tires and we all just assume that's the way it's supposed to be. But what did our Lord reply to the group asking him about divorce, say Matthew nineteen-eight tells us. He said to them it was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. Again, that's Matthew nineteen-eight. Did you hear the nugget of wisdom, actually the nugget of divine wisdom? From the beginning it was not so. That means in the beginning we were not driving around with four flat tires. And how do we understand what the beginning was like? And then to understand how far we have fallen? Well, we need to take that masterclass of theology of the body. We have much work to do on that front. But the most immediate front we have to talk about and discuss is the radical Ohio proposed amendment language. Just on the legal language itself, on issue one, it is written so vague that it has made that proposed amendment radical by its very nature. You can actually check out the video at see the language dot com. I'll put a note. I'll put a link in the show notes for that. It's very powerful. And there's four things that equally make this radical and an over the top type of amendment, and I'll stick a link in the show notes to that PDF as well. It goes into each goes in the actual language and a lot the language is radical. So to my fellow Ohioans, I appeal to you to vote against Ohio issue one because of the radical nature of the proposed amendment language. But more importantly, I want to transition to a great book, a great book that gives us the straight answers on the difficult questions, and one of those difficult questions in this Ohio issue one is abortion, and the title of the book is Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments by Randy Alcorn Fantastic books. It gives us so much clarity and truth beyond the 30-second sound bites that happen in our major media today. I want to share and echo some final appeals from Randy to certain segments of our society. Alcorn has many appeals at the end of the book, but most importantly, his love for women who are considering abortion, to everyone else involved in the decision-making process. These appeals are quite powerful, which is why I wanted to share these with you today. So we're going to go through two appeals actually two appeals and a great analogy from history. He's actually made way more than two appeals, but we only have time to cover two. He actually I think has 10 or 11. But the first appeal is to women directly considering abortion. Let's go to the book, be honest with yourself. Don't buy the pro-choice rhetoric that would try to make you feel heroic by exercising your precious right to kill an innocent child. Naomi Wolf responds to a fellow feminist claim that women get abortions in order to be better mothers. Wolf says this of her own chemical abortion quote. If what was going on in my mind had been mostly about the well-being of the possible baby, that pill would have never been swallowed. For that potential baby brought to term would have had two sets of loving middle-income grandparents, an adult mother with an education and even, as I discover later, the beginning of diaper money. For its first two years of life she had the graduate fellowship I was on for bed. The graduate fellowship I was on for bad marriage, but in frozen time before women, where its beneficiary said nothing about an unwed motherhood. So she would have had the money Because of the baby's skin color. Even if I chose not to rear the child, a roster of eager adoptive parents awaited him or her. If I had been thinking only, or even primarily, about the baby's life, I would have had to decide to bring the pregnancy had there been one to term. No, there were two columns in my mind me and baby, and the first one out. And what was in? It looks something like this unwelcome to intensity in the relationship with the father, desire to continue to develop as a person before real parenthood. And I wish to encounter my eventual life partner without the off-putting incombrance of a child, resistance to curtailing the nature of the time remaining to me in Europe. And essentially this column came down to I had not done, I am not done, being responsive only to myself. Yet At even the possibility that the cosmos was calling my name, I cowered and stepped aside. I was not so unlike those young louts who fathered children and run from the specter of responsibility. Don't succumb to the pressure to kill your baby. The testimony of one woman who gave into that that pressure echoes the feelings of hundreds of thousands of women. End of quote. Now, speaking of the young louts who fathered children and then run from their specter of responsibility, we're talking about men here. We will talk to them. Next we will have some strong language for them. But going back to the book, she goes on to say or actually, randy Alcorn, the author, goes on to say every pregnant woman has an inner voice telling her not to abort her child and that she will regret this decision the rest of her life. Don't let the loud voices of society drown out this small voice. Listen to it. It's your conscience. It's telling you the truth. There are people who will gladly help you. You can look up abortion alternatives in the Ella pages and or online and call for help. You can go to abortionalternativescom for a listing of people to call or call one of the toll-free hotlines for women in crisis pregnancies under the first listing in appendix K. I'll put a link in the show notes for the Ohio version of that. Instead of finding people who will help kill your baby for a fee, you will find many people who will understand, not judge, and help you for free. If you don't know how to find help in your area, contact our organization listed on this page I will put a link in the show notes for the Ohio version again and we will gladly assist you at no cost. We will help both you and your baby, anyway, we can. So again, I'll put a link in the show notes for all those places that will help you Crisis pregnancy centers. There's people there that completely understand. Often they are people that have actually, sometimes have unfortunately, had abortions, so they know the amount of suffering that you could potentially go through. So they're non-judgmental, they're very approachable, very welcoming and they want to help. They want to stop this from happening. Most importantly, most importantly here, no matter what you do, please get a sonogram or an ultrasound before anything else happens. They are free, they don't take long, but they provide you with the truth of the matter on your own child, and that's extremely important to both you and the child. Now our last appeal is to men, because this is the one, this is the one that breaks my heart the most. It just breaks my heart deeply. Let's go to the book. The history of abortion in America should bring more shame to men than anyone. No pregnancy happens without a man. Men should take the responsibility for their own purity and to protect that of a woman. When they fail to do this, they should be the first to accept full responsibility for the consequences of their actions, including the conception of a child, as George Gilder argues, in men and marriage. When men exercise deep loyalties to women and children, when we take responsibility to protect and defend them, we are at our best. Let me repeat that when we men take responsibility to protect and defend them, the women and the children, we are at our best. When we violate these loyalties, we are at our worst. We become abusers on the one hand and passive cowards on the other. We place ourselves under the rightful scorn of women and under the judgment of God. When I spoke on this subject at my church, of man in his 60s told me of a girl he got pregnant 39 years ago. She gave him the choice of what to do and he chose an abortion. He said it haunted him since. He thinks about the woman he failed and the son or the daughter that he lost and he wonders about the grandchildren he now could be holding. He said to me tell people about the consequences, warn our young men, tell them that God will hold them accountable for what they do with their children. And then he broke down in tears and said I don't want our young men to do what I did 39 years ago. What a powerful story. And did you get that negative wisdom? I'll repeat it again we are at our best as men and men listen to me we are at our best when we protect and defend our women and our children. That starts by taking responsibility for them. What a great negative wisdom that it doesn't have to be this way. Our corn makes the very powerful statement in this book, and it's very, very true. Let's go back to the book. Abortion isn't a women's issue, it's a human issue. It affects our devastating to women and men alike. But it's high time for men to take personal responsibility, to stand up for women and children and Exercise the kind of leadership God expects of us Men. We have to stand up and take responsibility for our children. Period, full stop. Our culture is the way it is because we are being led by weak men. We have been led by weak men for the last 25 Correction, the last 20 years, men who have no moral bone in their body. But only us men can change this and change our culture. And it starts by protecting and standing up for our women and our children. And our final, concluding appeal Comes to us from history. Let's go back to the book. When my wife and I visited Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, we were most deeply touched by the Children's Memorial. It has 1500 candles with mirrors designed to reflect each candle a thousand times, representing the 1.5 million children Killed in the Holocaust. We stood in the darkness hearing the names of individual children read one by one. I was struck by the number because at the time it was the same number killed by abortion in America each of the previous few years. This book was written in 2001. The fact that most of these children haven't been given names Doesn't diminish their worth. I've stood at memorials for the unborn where parents had given names to the children and written them expressions of love and grief. If we could only hear the names of each of these children whispered to us in the darkness, perhaps we would wake up Now. Later on he goes into the story of the British parliamentarian William Wilberforce. Let's go back to the book. Shortly after his conversion to Christ in 1784, the British parliamentarian William Wilberforce began his battle for the black man's freedom, relentlessly, year after year, in the face of apathy, scorn and all the opposition of the slave industry could offer. This one man reintroduced to parliament the motion for the abolition of slavery. Rejected again and again, Wilberforce was encouraged by only a few, among them John Wesley and John Newton, former slave ship captain and writer of the song Amazing Grace. Stating that we are all guilty for tolerating the evil of slavery, william Wilberforce said never, never will we detest till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic of which our posterity, looking back to the history of those enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long. A disgrace and a dishonor to this country Because of his colleagues often refused to pay attention to what he said about the realities of slavery. Wilberforce would pull heavy chains from under his chair in parliament and drape them over himself to symbolize the inhumanity of slavery. His fellow parliamentarians who were pro-choice about slavery would roll their eyes, mock him and call him a fool. But it is Wilberforce, not they, who is remembered by God and men as the one who stood for justice and mercy Year after year, while both non-Christians and Christians denied and ignored the reality. Wilberforce suffered sleepless nights plagued by dreams of the suffering black men. Only in 1807, against incredible odds, wilberforce saw the slave trade finally outlawed. Even then, he had to fight another 18 years for the emancipation of the existing slaves. Wilberforce died in 1833, three days after the bill for the abolition of slavery passed its second reading in the House of Commons, bringing slavery and England to its final end. Now, if you don't know the story of Wilberforce, you should. He is a great man. He needs to be studied. So for 18 more years he had to fight to see the emancipation of the existing slaves. Do you think God used his life to bring moral clarity to that issue, the issue of slavery? He died just three days after England abolished slavery. There are no coincidences in God's plan. Yet today we see clearly that slavery was and is morally reprehensible. There is no doubt. All of Western society agrees with this, by default. We agree with this. There's no thought to anything else. Just look at the reaction to the movie the Sound of Freedom. All about human trafficking, essentially human slavery, that is still going on today. In our heart of hearts, we as a society know right from wrong. We are often not confused, even though we claim to be confused. There's all kind of nuances in abortion. Is the fetus really a person? Well, of course it is. One final appeal from Randy, and I would echo this same appeal. Going back to the book, not all of us are Wilbur forces, but had England been filled with people of conviction who would have done what they could for the suffering slaves. Wilbur forces job would have been much easier and untold suffering could have been prevented. Isn't it time for all of those who know the truth about abortion to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves the babies and not only to speak up but to show a better way, a way of love. May we reach out with truth and compassion to the mothers feeling the pressure to abort and may we show a morally disintegrating society the better way of mercy and justice for the innocent children. Let us be a people of conviction in the state of Ohio. A vote no is on issue one is to be just that people of conviction. Unlike England. Let us Ohio and stop the suffering and provide a better pathway for those alternatives to abortion, while providing that mercy and justice for those innocent children we just talked about. Please vote no on issue one in the state of Ohio and, as always, keep fighting a good fight.

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