We are a Culture of Death

As each of you reads this, I pray you know two things:

1.  I am pro-life and it extends to every part of my being.

2.  I deeply respect the right to have a different opinion than mine.  That was never more evident than this week, as I saw posts on both sides of the fence from sweet friends of mine.  We were college roomates, sorority sisters, colleagues, friends and neighbors.  They aren’t just my “friends” on facebook.  They really are my friends.

Even though we may disagree, I choose to write what I feel.  To put it all out there.  You know, because this is my blog, my rules.

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I refuse to be sad.  I refuse to put on rose-colored glasses.  I’m calling a spade a spade.

I will, however, get riled up enough to write this and put it all out there – in a sweet, southern girl, kind of way 🙂

If you’ve been living under a two-ton rock this week, then you may not have heard about the craziness of Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood.  Interestingly, so many folks refused to believe they were involved with one another.  It’s the primary reason I opted to find other avenues to support breast cancer research and declined supporting Komen during their annual Race for the Cure.  I would have a slew of friends ask me to donate and when I told them why I opted not to, they scoffed at my remarks and said I was crazy.

Who’s crazy now?

So, Komen and Parenthood are dating, then they weren’t, now they are again?  I think their Facebook status should read:  “it’s complicated.”

Aside from all that mess, what it has brought to light once again is this cold, hard, ugly, embarrasing truth:  We ARE a culture of death.

We legalize the murder of babies in the womb and we say it’s okay because it’s just a clump of cells.  It’s in the uterus and therefore, not our concern.

We kill the spirit and soul of a woman by allowing that to happen.  Because pro-choice or pro-life, whenever a women walks out of an abortion clinic she is never the same again.  Ever.  I’ve never heard a woman say, in any state of rational thinking, “I LOVE abortions.  They’re so great!  I need to do that every year.”  Yet, I have heard and read countless stories of women who suffer lifelong emotional and psychological pain from that decision.

We kill our children’s innocence when we allow them to be sexualized in the media.  When we honor and uphold celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears, we are telling our children, girls especially, that modesty doesn’t matter.  That selling yourself to Playboy is okay.  That showing off your temple of the Holy Spirit so that a man can receive pleasure is okay.  It. Is. Not. Okay.

We kill the institution of marriage by allowing the media to trivialize and mock the sacrament.  It’s become okay to have children out of wedlock.  To get pregnant by one man, marry another, divorce and then pledge to co-habitate with any number of other suitors.  THAT is not okay.  Our kids are growing up completed whacked out and we wonder why?

We kill the sacramentality of marriage by telling couples its okay to sterilize and artifically contracept.  I shared this a while back, but I think it’s worth repeating.  When a marriage is based on take and not give, when we see pregnancy as a disease, rather than a gift, we have already killed the sacrament.  Life is to be honored and reveered, not shunned and feared.

We kill the beauty of life in all its stages when we shun the elderly and medically challenged to a nursing home and line the streets telling people their life has no value.  What if Pope John Paul II had been shuttled to the dark corner of a hospital and left to die?  He reminded us, in a very public forum, that every life has value.  We don’t get to judge, that’s not our role.

We murder people who we think are guilty only to find out our justice system did them wrong.  How do you explain that mistake to a grieving family?

I am enraged at this recent debacle of PR spin (and that is all it is).  We have forgotten what it is like to live and love in our society.  Money and fame and good PR steer our values, rather than faith and prayer and common sense.  We villify the wrong people.  As Matthew Kelly reminded us last weekend, “We love things and use people, rather than loving people and using things.”

St. Blaise, pray for us.