By Judie Brown
Saint Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “The message of the cross is folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.”
We put this in the proper perspective by realizing that while some people believe that Christ’s message is sheer folly, we of faith understand that the truths He came to teach are an immense blessing. Yet if we fall into the trap of believing that Christ’s message was folly, we may inadvertently or intentionally become tools of the evil one, the ruler of Hades.
We see evidence everywhere of those who have become tools of the evil one, and these people pose some of the greatest dangers to moms and to babies not yet born. The businesses that provide abortion pills to women are the very same entities that abandon those mothers when they deliver fully formed babies into their toilets. The telemedicine cartel is “a system that offloads risk onto women, shields abortionists from accountability, and leaves some of the most vulnerable in our society alone in pain.”
Judicial hutzpah is not far behind. Recently the Little Sisters of Poor were the victims of a judicial ruling that found that the nuns must pay for contraception for their employees. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the nuns in court, said, “The district court blessed an out-of-control effort by Pennsylvania and New Jersey to attack the Little Sisters and religious liberty. . . . It’s bad enough that the district court issued a nationwide ruling invalidating federal religious conscience rules. But even worse is that the district court simply ducked the glaring constitutional issues in this case, after waiting five years and not even holding a hearing.”
We pray that the Little Sisters of the Poor appeal this decision, but the glaring folly of the ruling is that, as in the times past regarding other judicial fiats, human beings will suffer at the hands of detestable court rulings.
When a judge says that rules attempting to protect religious freedom of employers, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, are, according to The Hill, “arbitrary, capricious and an overreach of the authority of the agencies that wrote them in 2017,” a watershed moment is at hand.
This should never have happened in a democracy! Yet history teaches a valuable lesson here.
Judicial follies like Roe v. Wade and its progeny occur when men and women who are judges deem it appropriate to rule as if they were gods with no adherence to moral teaching. This vacuum is filled with all manner of wobbly irrationalities, each designed to weaken the value and dignity of the human person.
We might well wonder how much further this decline into immorality can sink, as we have seen sincere pro-life Americans like Bevelyn Williams arrested for simply praying outside an abortion mill. One wonders how it is that public prayer could offend anyone. Yet we know it does.
US Army Captain Jonathan Darnel, a pro-life activist who was also arrested because he acted in defense of life, offers us some advice. He suggests that direct action, such as nonviolent civil disobedience, if done by many people in an organized fashion, could be “massively influential in ending abortion.”
Williams and Darnel are viewed by the secular world as fools because they will not stop defending the innocent regardless of public harassment, arrest, and worse. So we again reflect on Saint Paul’s words, “The message of the cross is folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.”
And that, my friend, is what defines us as we walk that very road every day. Thank God!