Lambs to the Slaughter

It is a sure sign of the perversity of our world that we find ourselves having to grade, to rate, to rank the perversity of our world. There is not one evil out there, nor even one evil in here. Instead evil has as many faces as the world has fingerprints. It is a second sure sign of our perversity that we succumb to the temptation of grading perversity on a scale of its closeness to us. That is, because we are evil, we judge our own evil to be good, our friends’ evil to be fair, and only evil in distant time zones to be truly evil.

Because I am pridefully averse to jumping on both cultural and sub-cultural bandwagons, I have only just today watched the Kony video. Like everyone else, I was appalled at the great evil of this one man. Like everyone else, I wept with Jacob over his lost brother. Like everyone else I not only wanted Kony stopped, but wanted to help. As the father of eight children there are few things that pierce my crusty exterior than when children are so badly treated. These children, thirty-thousand of them so far, have been taken away from their parents. The girls have been turned into sexual playthings, the boys turned into child-killers.

One need not, however, have a potent imagination to conjure an evil greater still. One need not have an imagination at all. One need only walk down ones own street. There is no Kony in America. There are instead 1800 men and women in this country alone, far more evil, far more perverse than Kony. These 1800 do not steal children from their parents. Instead, the parents, over a million of them every year, give their children freely. Indeed they pay to have them taken away. These 1800 do not turn the girls into sexual playthings, though they do help ensure their moms can continue to be sexual playthings. They do not turn the boys into child-killers. Instead they are child killers, mutilating little unborn babies to pieces.

That the world has been dutifully outraged over Kony’s outrage is not, I’m sorry to conclude, a hopeful sign. I did not come away from the film either discouraged by the evil of men like Kony, nor encouraged by the goodness of those who wish to stop him. I came away sick to my stomach. How many of those earnest young people, I wonder, have murdered their own children? How many of them would show the same passion for protecting their “reproductive rights?” Worse still, how many people like me, convinced Christian pro-lifers, will wear the Kony bracelet, but won’t ask their pastor to preach against the greatest evil of our day? How many people like me, convinced Christian pro-lifers, will be swayed by the magic of viral internet marketing to “get involved” on Kony, who at the same time are embarrassed when hard-core pro-lifers carry around pictures of aborted babies?

Kony, to the minds of most evangelicals, is a war criminal. Abortion, in the minds of most evangelicals, is a political issue. Kony must be stopped in 2012. Abortion, well, we’ll just keep voting in moderately pro-life politicians, hoping they might appoint moderately pro-life judges who might one day hear a case that might one day put a dent in Roe v. Wade that one day might be overturned, but not, thank goodness, until our daughters are all safely married.

There is great evil in the world- an evil that responds with polite, hushed tones to well-heeled white people, living in our neighborhoods, who murder babies for a living. And there is a great evil in me, that I accept this.

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