The Wizards of Babylon!

I was explaining (or trying to) to Marjorie what happened in court yesterday and I showed her the governing statute. She said, “well, it’s obvious.” Of course it was. Your rights were not preserved. The judge and the prosecutor did not follow the law, which requires specific conditions and written warnings of the consequences of their violation to be given to you. None of that happened. Truly, you did not know the rules you were accused of breaking. That is why that statute was drawn up. And yet, that judge sat there for five minutes trying to find a way around it before he begrudgingly conceded that he was bound by the law. His pronouncement of same was mean-spirited and churlish, implying that you had skated by on a technicality. Even when I was an atheist (or a theist or whatever demonic thing cold hearted thing I was before I knew Christ) I didn’t like injustice and unequal scales, but here was a judge, prosecutor, two cops and some seemingly Nice Lady from the Peninsula who wanted you in jail despite the fact that you were treated unequally under the law. Their coldness was difficult for me to fathom. It felt dark in that courtroom to me. 

We are in Ephesians 4 in my Friday Bible Study, and that morning (before the hearing) I led the discussion about Paul’s description of the Gentiles former selves–the ignorance, darkness, hard-heartedness and insensitivity of a people separated from God, whose lives have been given over to sensuality. A people consumed by greed. Paul’s implication is one of sexual idolatry, but of course it could be any sensual thing over which the Gentiles had passed themselves. 

 

It occurred to me this morning that Paul’s description (perhaps, I know it is not mine to judge) was applicable to the judge et. als. They have given themselves over to a progressive worldview that has hardened their hearts such that they cannot see the irony in the things they say and do. The prosecutor who would see you incarcerated for advocating on behalf of the unborn herself was at least 5 months pregnant. The Nice Lady testified that it saddened her to see “children” handing out wanted posters was oblivious to the plight of the children destroyed by men whose faces appeared upon them. The Cornelius police officer who testified that his town’s entire police force was deployed as a “show of force” when notified about the Peninsula protest could not say why he was ordered to do so. Finally, the judge–the man charged with upholding the law exuded bitterness that it restrained him (just barely) from incarcerating you for exercising your right of free speech, a right so important that our founders enshrined it as the First Amendment to our constitution. 

The Truth is a powerful and scary thing Brother. It cuts to the quick. The opposition I encounter to it rarely, almost never, comes in the form of a counter-argument–which is what you would expect from those who think the Truth as I see it is not so. In other words, if those things that comprise our worldview are not Truth, than one would expect a substantive argument from those in opposition. But rarely if ever is that so. What I encounter in opposition to Truth is generally a demand for silence. That is the best that the opposition can garner when faced with the Truth. Shut up. Be silent. And that is what these cold-hearted people wanted of you in court yesterday. They do not care about your right to speak (and by implication their own right to speak), they just want you to stop speaking because, having no counter-argument to the Truth they risk conviction by it–and then what?

Thus, the charade that your speech, just your words and the volume at which you say them, is a crime. To them, there is no crime in the legalized homicide of a human being with the bad timing to be drawing breath within rather than without the womb. But to question it? To declare publicly that despite abortion’s transient legality it is nonetheless a moral outrage (the precise thing the abolitionists argued in regard to slavery)–that, to them, is a crime so foul that at least two lawyers (judge and prosecutor) were more than willing to disregard the law yesterday, despite having sworn before God that they would uphold it. 

It saddens me to say so, but I believe that this charade will never stop as long as there are hearts of stone that seek to resist the Truth by silencing it. Like the Wizards of Babylon they will search for any transgression upon which to hoist you and, finding none, they will fabricate one–if need be. For now, they have the power of the state at their disposal. For now. But we have the Truth. Which do you believe more powerful? 

Aye.