An open letter to Scott Brown

Scott Brown for United States Senate

337 Summer Street

Boston, MA 02210

(857) 263-8346

September 26, 2012 

Dear Senator Brown:

In Steven Ertelt’s article, “Scott Brown Says He Supports Abortion, Limits, And Opposes Health Care Bill,” you acknowledged Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land.” This is true, yet nearly fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote from Birmingham City Jail, "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal.'"

You also said, “I feel this issue is best handled between a woman and her doctor and her family.” In 1975, my mother was forty-five years old and pregnant. Roe v. Wade and a woman’s “right to choose” had been the “law of the land” for two years. Doctors, friends, and family members advised her to have an abortion in case I was born with Down Syndrome. She resisted, and on June 10, 1976, I was born--perfectly healthy.

You are my Senator. You wrote the Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2012 about “a woman’s right to choose”; if you had been my Senator in 1975, would you have fought against laws that would have violated my right to live?

I commend you for your stance against partial-birth abortions, federal funding, your support of parental consent notification and your desire to reduce the number of abortions. I realize that abortion is a complicated issue and it is very unlikely that Roe v. Wade will ever be overturned, but like the Civil Rights Activists before you, I would hope that you would do everything in your power to fight for the rights of the most easily marginalized members of our society: the unborn.

Sincerely,

Carilyn Flynn

An Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth for MA
PO Box 290568
Boston, MA 02129
(617)-286-6715

September 19, 2012

Dear Ms. Warren:

In one recent campaign ad, you said, "We're still fighting to protect a woman's right to choose." You are a good person, so I am assuming that rather than advocating for this right at the expense of human lives, you must honestly believe that an unborn child is not a human being. Do you realize that it was this kind of thinking that persuaded the proponents of slavery and the Holocaust?

In John Ensor's book, Answering the Call: Saving Innocent Lives, One Woman at a Time, and I was struck by this comparison:

          "Abortion simply cannot involve the murder of a living
          human being. Our self-image precludes it. This is why
          it took hundreds of years and a civil war to face what
          is now clear to everyone. The people who defended
          slavery saw themselves as good people who would
          never hurt or abuse another person. Therefore, their
          slaves must not be persons, or at least not 'full'
          persons as they are."

You also stated, "We're still fighting to protect a woman's right to choose nearly forty years after Roe v. Wade, and we could be just one Supreme Court justice away from losing it." Yet Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote nearly fifty years ago from Birmingham City Jail, "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal.'"

Finally, you asked, "How could this be happening in 2012?"

Indeed, Ms. Warren, indeed.

Sincerely,

Carilyn Flynn

I Don't Stand With Planned Parenthood

PLEASE NOTE: I did not compose the following letter. I cut and pasted a letter written by a Planned Parenthood supporter ("I Stand With Planned Parenthood") and changed some key words and phrases. All words changed or added are in CAPS (with the exception of the final "ME").
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This is for all the anti-LIFE anti-UNBORN people out there.

Listen up.

You can spend every minute of every day trying to force the rest of us to live by your ideology. You can go after federal funds for PLANNED PARENTHOOD and pressure private organizations like the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation to CONTINUE FUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD. You can try to make it CHILD'S PLAY to get birth control.

But you know what you can't do? You can't win. You can't break us. THE RIGHT TO LIFE isn't just a family of organizations. It's a movement. It's women and men of all ages who believe that LIFE — including THE LIVES OF THE UNBORN — is a basic human right. We are millions strong. We are everywhere. We act, we give, and we do whatever it takes to make sure that LIFE is there for the women, men, and teens who rely on IT.

Know this: When you go after THE UNBORN and the people THAT serve THEM, you go after ME. I stand with THE UNBORN. I stand with them against anyone who wants to stop THEM FROM RECEIVING LIFE. I stand with them today, tomorrow, and for as long as I need to.

--Carilyn Flynn

What's the big deal about Tim Tebow?

This might be the understatement of the year, but there certainly is a lot of talk about Tim Tebow these days. Some talk about him because he has shown great promise despite his unorthodox methods and the ups and downs of the season. Others talk about him for his now infamous prayer stance after plays. Some talk about what a great role model he is; others say his public displays of prayer are--to put it mildly--insincere and that he divides fans the way that Ron Paul divides the Republican party.

In spite of such harsh criticism, what I find interesting is the attention that is being focused on Tebow's intended message. More than one media outlet (and not just Fox News and The Wall Street Journal) has reported the coincidence between Tebow's eye-black (a reference to John 3:16), his total yardage (316), and his average passing distance (31.6) in last Sunday's game. While there will still be some that scoff and judge his motives, according to Sally Jenkins from The Washington Post, "Tebow has never once suggested God cares about football."

But he has suggested that God cares about you.

Stumbling through the dark

I recently read a book a dear friend sent me: Evolving in Monkey Town: How a girl who knew all the answers learned to ask the questions. It's a coming-of-age faith journey that is part To Kill a Mockingbird--in the way the author delightfully weaves Scout-like stories of her childhood into the narrative--and part Christian Living. Author Rachel Held Evans grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, until her family moved to Dayton, Tennessee, when she was thirteen. Dayton is famous for the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which, for-better-or-for-worse, put Dayton on the map. This was exactly the intention of those who decided to stage this trial and essentially pitted evolution against Christianity. The defendant was a local schoolteacher by the name of Scopes, who admitted to breaking state law by teaching evolution in his classroom. The defense was taken up by agnostic Clarence Darrow, while the prosecution was heralded by fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan. The trial became a spectacle--boasting thousands of spectators--and while Scopes was found guilty, it was the Christian faith that really took a beating.

Evans frames her book with the thesis that faith must evolve in order to survive. She asserts, "Evolution means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we're not sure we want him to be" (23). While I agree that faith can and should evolve, truth does not. Truth is truth, however "inconvenient" (to filch a phrase from Al Gore). In the history of the Church, truth has not evolved, but our understanding of truth has. The fact that the Church came to reconcile Copernican theory with faith is not because truth changed--the earth had always revolved around the sun--but because the Bible was interpreted in light of this new understanding. Rather than declaring Scriptures that seem to support a Geocentric view of the world irrelevant (after all, don't we still use unscientific words such as sunrise and sunset?), they should be viewed as historical accounts that reflect the scientific understanding of the time. There are those that might suggest that if the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then He should have directed the writers to get their facts straight, but perhaps that misses the point. Our limited understanding of truth does not affect its "trueness." Either something is true, or it isn't; either God is real, or He isn't. The fact that we might hold erroneous beliefs about God or haven't "figured Him out" yet does not negate His existence.

At the same time, sometimes I become incredibly frustrated with my limited understanding or the things in the Bible that appear unclear. I mean, if God wanted us to do something--or not do something else--wouldn't He make it blatantly clear (the Ten Commandments come to mind) so that there could be no argument about it? How are we supposed to sift through moral and sundry laws thousands of years later--now that eating pork is not so iffy--and know which we are supposed to keep and which are to be abandoned? People are protesting at the funerals of gay military with "God hates fags" signs because they think the Bible makes this perfectly clear, yet the aforementioned sundry laws that don't necessarily apply in light of current Board of Health standards. So how are we to know what is wheat and what is chaff?

While I firmly believe that if Christianity is true, it can stand in the face of doubt, reading this book has certainly muddied the waters for me. Evans writes, "Sometimes God uses change in the environment to pry idols from our grip and teach us something new" (22). At times like these, I can stand on one thing that I know to be true: when Jesus was asked about fundamentals, he said, "Love the Lord your God...and love your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27). I'm pretty sure advancements in science and improvements in food handling will never make that one mute.