By Judie Brown
Shortly after the tragic murder of Christian political activist Charlie Kirk, Rabbi Shalom Landau said:
Killing someone because you can’t face the truth didn’t start yesterday. It’s actually from the beginning of mankind. It all started with Cain and Abel. You know Cain was . . . a dirt man. Nothing but body. Even when he gave it was crumbs, not to give, just to get. . . . Abel . . . spoke, he gave, and he offered the best. ‘Cuz speaking the truth comes directly from your soul. And then you don’t hold back. You contribute, you build, you elevate. But when dirt men have no answer to . . . truth, they reach for violence. They kill the voice. Or so they think. But you don’t kill the truth with a knife or a bullet. You just prove you couldn’t handle it. As the verse says, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” If before it was talking, now it’s screaming. . . . Truth doesn’t stay down. It grows . . . because speech is the soul and you can’t kill the soul.
His words struck a chord with me because, as Archbishop Chaput wisely said, “Evil cannot bear the counter-witness of truth.”
In times such as these, we are called to remember and act on the principles enunciated by these two men of God. This is so because we know that the dangers to life and limb go far beyond the events of the past few days. In fact, they are perpetrated against innocent people every day in this nation without pause and in many cases with celebratory actions and comments.
If he were still with us, I know that Charlie would agree. He once said, “We allow the massacre of a million and a half babies a year under the guise of women’s reproductive health. We are allowing babies to be taken away and discarded every single year, just saying they are not humans.”
In the same way that a shooter stole Charlie’s physical life and many are cheering, demons thrive on the blood of the innocent. Such events remind us that every human being is worthy of protection, whether growing inside her mother or sitting on a stool on a stage. There is not a single person whose life is unworthy to be lived.
According to one Heritage Foundation commentator, “The knowledge of death is baked into our political cake.” Yet I would say that this knowledge is not a simple political fact but is instilled in our very souls at the instant we are created by God. It is nothing less than understanding and then acting on our awareness of the difference between good and evil.
In this nation we kill people with medical cocktails and call it assisted suicide. We manipulate the sexual identity of our children and call it gender transition. We brainwash our young with so-called sex education when it’s actually indoctrination. And we could go on.
Certain intellectual giants in our midst have seen these travesties coming and have warned us repeatedly. Professor Anthony Esolen comes to mind as one. He once wrote:
Let the Christian resist. Let him honor the dead, and find wellsprings of life in that honor. Let him be a pilgrim, and know the virtue of stability. Let him not run from distraction to distraction, in a deadening attempt to forget death. Let him know his place, and in knowing it, go forth, even unto the last communion rail he will approach on earth, the moment of his death.
In this era of brutal insanity, we should repeat these wise words often.