A tale of abortion — and the evil some men do

As seen at the Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-kampert/a-tale-of-abortion—-and_b_171422.html

Abortion is ready to engulf the nation as a social issue – again. President Obama has restored funding to overseas abortions and is poised to tell pharmacists who object to dispensing the morning-after pill to get a new job.

With even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia telling “60 Minutes” he would not vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the future of abortion seems secure in the U.S. But I wonder if we can move the discussion past the intractable positions of the pro-life and pro-choice camps. I cringe every time I see a man at an anti-abortion rally – not because his body is not the one carrying the fertilized egg, but simply because if men were more willing to be equal partners in contraception and in relationships, there would be many fewer abortions to worry about. If you want to cut the number of abortions in half overnight, get men to act like men instead of self-centered little boys.

These issues came to mind recently as I met with Jane, a successful white businesswoman in her mid-30s who has had five abortions.

She says she told herself over and over, “You’re smarter than that.”

She asked me, a person who claims to follow Christ: “Any judgment?”

No, not here. To begin with, my Bible says so-called Christians have no business judging anyone besides themselves. Besides, the fifth chapter of Galatians puts things like envy, jealousy and selfish ambition on the same level of wrongdoing as adultery, drunkenness and homicide. Seems to me the entire human race probably has no room for self-righteousness in that passage.

And, secondly, my heart went out to her for all she’s been through at the hands of males. And how she has come through that mill with grit, intelligence and humor. Yeah, her mother is a piece of work too, but I’ll stick to one screwed-up gender for the purposes of this column.

Since Jane’s body is allergic to condoms, and she was only on the pill for about four years (articles about the pill’s potential health hazards scared her off it), what’s done is done. The experiences, she says, have made her the person she is today.

She is pro-choice and has three children. Her two youngest kids are doing very well in grade school, so much so that their teacher asked Jane what her “magic formula” was for raising terrific children.

She says she does not regret the abortions. “I was stuck, and I wasn’t going to be stuck.” But she says she has “remorse for the lives that were never brought to be. Viewing my three and how wonderful they are, there could have been five additional bright souls in this world.”

Yet if you dig beneath the surface, you find that the issues in Jane’s life were not always of her own making. In many ways, her life is emblematic of the problems with all too many males. And abortion is only one of those issues that have plagued us since the beginning of human history.

Jane’s mom had three marriages. Jane’s biological father split when she was young, eventually settling somewhere out west. Jane grew up in the big city, where her first stepfather, Art, molested her for a year, from the age of 5 to 6. When Jane finally got up the courage to tell her mother 10 years later, mom claimed Jane was a promiscuous liar who should be on the pill. Even though Jane was still a virgin at the time. And was an honor-roll student despite the turmoil at home.

Art also beat her mother but never struck the kids. Jane remembers climbing on his back to pull his hair to try to get him to stop the violence. Even at that young age, she says, when he summoned her to the bedroom for unspeakable things, she told herself that “if I do this for him, he won’t beat her.”

“I did go through counseling at 15,” Jane continued, “which my mother refused to go to. Well, she said she’d go – and then she ditched me.” Their relationship has not gotten much better since then.

A couple years later, she haltingly told four friends about the sexual abuse as they rode to school on a public bus.

“Five out of five girls on that bus had the same experience,” she said through tears. “Stepfather, uncle, father. I will never forget that day. Five out of five? It’s more prevalent in this country than people think.”

Sadly, the statistics show Jane’s story is all too common. Children 17 and younger are the victims of about 70 percent of all sexual assaults. The statistics also say that 25 percent of girls are sexually abused before they turn 18 (Jane’s anecdote about her bus ride suggests it might be higher). And in 30 to 40 percent of the cases, the perpetrator is a family member.

More evidence, I think, of the carnage men leave behind. It’s a wonder women want to have anything to do with us. For me, at least, it reaffirms my faith as a follower of Jesus that we do need a Messiah to save us from ourselves – and each other. And, of course, sometimes the ones we need to be saved from are people with distorted faith.

One could argue that was the case for Jane in 5th grade, when nuns at her Catholic school showed her and her female classmates photos of aborted babies. She was simply sickened and didn’t know what to make of it all. She remained a virgin until her senior year in high school. Her first act of intercourse resulted in pregnancy, but not abortion.

She was planning to terminate the pregnancy, but says she was put off by the fact that the clinic also provided neonatal care for women planning to deliver. And besides sitting next to women with swollen abdomens in the waiting room, her mind was changed when a clinic nurse, exasperated by her hesitancy, told Jane, “Oh, honey, we’ve had 10-year-olds go through this.”

Two years later, she had another pregnancy with her next boyfriend. Jesse wanted her to have the baby. She said no. “He was a vagabond,” Jane said. “He was just a free-spirited guy who liked fun, somebody I knew I’d never have a life with.” That was the first abortion.

A year later, at 22, “I was dating a guy [Dave] in a purely sexual relationship,” she said. She got pregnant. “And I used abortion as a form of birth control.”

At 23, she was still with Dave and got pregnant again. It was only then that she learned Dave already had a child with a former lover. Worse, he told Jane he planned to renew those relationships. “They kind of came out of the woodwork into our lives. And he was sure that he wanted to reconnect with her and this child,” said Jane, weeping. “That was abortion number three.”

If Dave sounds like a loser, he probably was. “He had some issues,” Jane admitted. “I would get (emotionally) attached to the men.”

The only stable man she’d seen in her life up that point was Chris, her mom’s third husband. Perhaps too much damage had already been done by her biological father and Art the pedophile. But Chris was “a saving grace,” Jane said. “He was easygoing, gentle and kind-hearted. He brought a lot of balance to the family.”

Jane and her stepdad would go to sporting events together, but there was some angst there as well. Even when they were doing father-child activities, he was distracted. It seems Jane’s sister Beverly hated Chris, so he tried harder and harder to win Bev’s approval. “I was always hurt by that. ‘Why is he fighting for her attention? I’m right here.’ “

So, she stayed with Dave, even after two abortions with him. “And then,” Jane said, “it started to get to be a volatile relationship. Physically.”

National statistics show that Jane isn’t alone in that either. Every year, about 4.8 million women are beaten or raped by their male partners. And we haven’t even talked about stalkers in these paragraphs.

If Jane’s relationships were a mess, her parenting was not, as alluded to earlier. Her son was gifted, so she worked long and hard to send him to a private school while she lived at home with her crazy mom, functional stepdad and reclusive sister. She also put herself through community college and bought a car. Then she made the break from Dave and moved out of her mother’s home to a town she only knew as a name on a map. A better job and, she hoped, a better life awaited.

But she didn’t know anybody out in the ‘burbs. She managed a retail store. One day, she met Russ in the shop. She was lonely. It was the week of her birthday and she felt isolated. She slept with him and began a relationship, but didn’t see it as a long-term fix because Russ was an alcoholic. She got pregnant. And ended it. Number 4.

Some hope would come when she met Steve, who would later become her husband. But he had no more interest in preventing pregnancy than her previous boyfriends. They were living together. By then, Jane was in a job that required travel and paid her $80,000 a year. She got pregnant, but this time she was ready for another child in her life.

Unfortunately, Steve wasn’t. “I just can’t do this,” he told Jane. “I can’t have this baby.”

Jane felt stuck. She was 27, with a 9-year-old son, living in Steve’s home, relying on him for shelter and emotional support. “This is the one time I didn’t want to do it,” she said, the tears spilling again. “But I did.”

Within a year, she was pregnant again and expressed her anger to Steve about his reluctance to become a father. She won this round. She had a second son. Steve told her she should become a stay-at-home mom.

“I never thought I could have that opportunity,” Jane said. “It sounded pretty good.”

Steve proposed to her during her pregnancy. Her intuition told her not to marry him. But she did. She got pregnant again on their honeymoon, which resulted in her third child. But the sex disappeared from the marriage, and so did the money.

“He put me on an allowance,” she said.

Emotional abuse followed, and Jane braced herself for worse. “I was waiting for him to hit me,” she said. One day, at lunch, her doorbell rang. The woman at the door had a summons.

“Who could be suing me?” she wondered.

It was Steve, suing for divorce. He didn’t have the guts to tell her to her face. She was devastated.

“I never wanted to be a woman of divorce, like my mother,” Jane said. A year later, she found out Steve was gay. He didn’t have the guts to tell her that either. Although they have become friends in the years since, and Steve, she says, has been a good father to their children (they share custody), Jane has bounced through several relationships since then. She recently broke off an 18-month relationship with a terrific, gentle older man because it just wasn’t right for her.

“I always thought you were looking for a father figure,” a relative told her.

The relative was right, Jane says. But now, for the first time in her life, “I’m OK with being alone,” she said. Comfortable, even.

An aunt took the breakup hard because she liked the boyfriend.

“She just wants me to be happy,” Jane said. “But I think the women in our family think it takes a man to do that. And it’s the first time in my life I feel like a grownup.”

Jane doesn’t blame the men for the abortions. They all supported her in the decision, even went to the clinic with her, where they sat amid other couples, as well as women abandoned by their less-than-equal partners. Those women were accompanied by female friends or relatives.

Not all get the kind of support Jane has experienced from her partners, even if Jane’s men were utterly passive about preventing pregnancy. Too many males won’t lower themselves to worry about a little thing like birth control, like a friend of mine who would walk out the door if the woman he picked up at a bar pulled a Trojan out of her purse. Others walk away when the woman gets pregnant. Others insist she have an abortion even if she doesn’t want one.

If you want cut abortions in half, don’t waste your breath picketing abortion clinics or, on the other side, passing out the pill to middle-school girls without their parents’ consent. Get males to become men. That’s a tall order, but we owe it to the women who put up with so much from us.

Pseudonyms have been used in this article to protect identities.

The myth of the ‘liberal’ media

As seen in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-kampert/the-myth-of-the-liberal-m_b_137959.html

 

‘THE MYTH OF THE ‘LIBERAL’ MEDIA:

A PRIMER FOR PEOPLE OF FAITH

 

By Patrick Kampert

 

At my son’s basketball practice last week, one of the other dads told me he’d just retired from the police force after more than a quarter-century on the job.

 

For part of that time, “I was the one who put you into a body bag,” he said. Asked why he gave up the badge, one of his reasons was simply, “It gets to you after a while.”

 

My brother-in-law is a cop too. He told us about a case he handled once where a policeman-gone-bad killed his girlfriend and tried to clean up all the blood in the bathtub. But during the investigation, the technicians sprayed the bathtub with Luminol, a chemical that reveals, for a short time, evidence like blood proteins.

 

“It lit up like a Christmas tree,” my brother-in-law said.

 

I think about that line a lot – and not just around the holidays. Because, to a lesser extent, journalists deal with the same challenge of not becoming jaded by the garbage they are constantly exposed to.

 

Even those of us who are not crime reporters are vulnerable. We read most of what our colleagues write, not to mention 100 stories from the wire services and 50 more during our research when we’re expected to become instant experts on a subject so we can explain it to the public the next day.

 

I have sometimes become uncomfortable with Christian friends who are burning with indignation about some social issue or current event. With more extensive background information, and the gut assessments of human behavior that years of observation bring, journalists sometimes have a different perspective. I used to say I saw things in shades of gray, but that’s not quite right. I see many sides to life and many sides to people. I see life through a multifaceted prism and am not as dogmatic or knee-jerk in my reactions as some people I know.

 

Seeing the world in polarized, black-and-white images is an easy trap to fall into. Keeps life tidy. No wrestling with dilemmas that take a lot of time and evaluation in a culture where time is as scarce as compassion. But prisms are our friends. Let me give you another example.

 

When I covered the Terri Schiavo case for the Chicago Tribune, it would have been easy to automatically, even unconsciously, side with the parents. The Schindlers were very vocal, very warm and friendly. Their St. Petersburg walkup is unbelievably modest, almost dingy, with its green carpeting and kitchen appliances that saw better days 20 years ago. The condo was a shrine to their daughter and numerous Catholic saints they petitioned to help her.

 

By contrast, Michael Schiavo would never talk to anyone except CNN’s Larry King on occasion. He was tall and menacing, had a short fuse and insisted the case was a private matter between Terri and him. He left most of the public statements to his lawyer, George Felos, a shrewd, right-to-die attorney who reminded me of Zen enthusiast and basketball coach Phil Jackson with his confidence and his embrace of Eastern religion. In talking with him, I couldn’t help but notice that there was no love lost between Michael Schiavo and him.

 

Yet the court that so consistently ruled against the Schindlers was run, ironically, by a conservative Christian judge. He received more than his share of threats from people of his own faith. The legal aspect that doomed the Schindlers was a procedural mistake by one of their early lawyers who allowed Felos to get an independent guardian for Terri dumped from the case without replacing him.

 

And the court record made it clear that, in the early days of the case, Terri’s parents visited her perhaps once a month — the feud between Terri’s father and husband is really at the crux of the case, and the most tragic figure in the saga was Terri’s mom, caught in the middle. Terri’s siblings didn’t visit much at all in the early days. Maybe Michael scared them away, maybe not.

 

Years later, when the media hordes descended and the camera’s red light went on, the guest register suddenly became much more active. But from the beginning, her husband was there almost every day, a nursing home’s “nightmare” – yes, that’s the word used in the court records — because of his demands for superlative care for Terri.

 

And at the very end, it was nauseating to see the way controversial “Christian” activist Randall Terry used the case to drum up donations to his own cause while, not to be outdone, representatives for the Schindlers’ priests trumpeted the clergy’s availability to reporters for high-profile interviews and touted their forthcoming national speaking tour. But in our sound-bite world, a lot of people missed those nuances.

 

Now, please understand that I’m not interested in making a political statement. I merely point out these things to say that people of faith too often make snap judgments. And they were out in droves down in Tampa Bay. But too often, the truth is in the details. You can miss a lot if you’re not careful.

 

Are the majority of journalists liberals in their private lives? In my experience, yes. Do their biases, conservative, liberal or somewhere in between, come out in their journalism? Usually, no. All of us strive not to let that happen and, by and large, we’re successful.

 

Is there a left-wing or an anti-Christian bias in the media? Not at all. Forget for a moment the Fox News Channels and MSNBCs of the world. I’m talking about dyed-in-the-wool journalists who strive for a balanced, fair presentation of the facts, not loudmouths more concerned with ratings points than impartiality.

 

You really should check out our e-mail inboxes and the “comment” sections on media websites sometime. The letters with the most darts typically come from people who dare to call themselves Christians, the ones who are supposed to have the love of Christ coursing through their souls. Instead, too many of these people are self-righteous Pharisees who eagerly relish the job of attack dog, with or without the lipstick that Sarah Palin alluded to.

 

Yet the Bible clearly states that, if we want to judge somebody, we should start with ourselves and our fellow believers (1 Peter 4:17). And if you’re truly a Christian, it should also make you quake with humility that “judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13). Are we showing mercy to those we disagree with? Doesn’t look like it.

 

Journalists see the hypocritical behavior and hatred of the bad apples of the Christian church. When we’re not hearing from the poison pens of the self-righteous club, we’re the ones who have to go to the police station to pick up the mug shot of the youth-group leader who sexually abused the 14-year-old girl under his care. We’re the ones who have to circumvent the bureaucracy of the archdiocese for the truth about the priest who fondled an 8-year-old boy.

 

We see the worst that a sin-soaked human nature has to offer. When you see that every day over the course of a career, you start growing a shell like an enormous turtle. You get cynical. You lose a sense of wonder, and the possibility of human goodness disappears as quickly as the evidence technicians cart off the jailed pastor’s computer that’s caked in child pornography. Journalists don’t need threats; we need people of faith to pray for us as we deal, like a cop or a lawyer or a therapist, with a fallen world’s fallout.

 

Yet I see too many Christians not using the minds God gave them, content to march in lockstep with whatever their leaders are telling them. They seem more interested in politics than prayer, more keen on Republicanism than revival. They view themselves as the new chosen people because they are Americans, conveniently ignoring the fact, as others have noted before me, that this country was born through the genocide of one race and built through the enslavement of another. The New Testament clearly admonishes us that we evangelicals are aliens and strangers on this planet. But too many of us are sinking roots in the wrong, weed-choked soil. If you want to call someone to repent, we should be first in line.  

Why Sarah Palin doesn’t speak for me

AS FEATURED IN THE HUFFINGTON POST

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-kampert/why-sarah-palin-doesnt-sp_b_135668.html

By Patrick Kampert

There are several reasons why I’ve never bothered with a fish symbol on my car. Yes, I think they’re tacky. They also do a disservice to persecuted Christians of centuries past who used them as a means of covert identification.

But the biggest reason I don’t have a fish is that my driving is less than ideal. What if I accidentally cut off another car that’s in my blind spot? Worse, what if I’m angry and impatient about an unrelated matter and it shows up in my driving? I’m not setting a real good example out there and don’t want to drag down God’s good name.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin, and her all-too-self-assured assertions that she is the embodiment of the average, faith-filled American. I don’t know what’s more reckless — her statements attempting to link Barack Obama with terrorists or John McCain’s hasty, uninformed selection of her in the first place.

The scary thing about Palin is her willingness to say just about anything — and the outside chance that she might actually believe the verbiage she’s spewing. Scarier still is that she does it as a so-called Christian with no sense of shame.

I say these things as a so-called follower of Christ myself, one who’s grown increasingly concerned with the notion that Sarah Palin somehow speaks for “Main Street” and speaks for Christians everywhere.

She doesn’t speak for me. And she doesn’t speak for many people of evangelical faith that I know. What is clear is that she is a politician first, second and third, and a person of faith when it suits her agenda.

A person of faith doesn’t spend tens of thousands of tax dollars decorating her office. A person of faith certainly doesn’t use the power of an entire state in a personal vendetta against their former brother-in-law. And a person of faith doesn’t drag their pregnant teenage daughter into an overwhelming national spotlight by choosing a political race over family at such a vulnerable time. And as the parents of a special-needs child ourselves, my wife and I are skeptical about her ability to devote the necessary time to her baby son’s situation regardless of how many nannies she could afford on a vice president’s salary.

I don’t expect perfection from people of faith. Most of us have enough skeletons in our closets to stage a chorus line of “Dem Bones” at any given moment. But in my years as a journalist, most of the hate mail I’ve received has come from allegedly evangelical Christians, whose venom and vitriol usually has had a lot more to do with politics than piety.

They wanted to solve the world’s problems by controlling its governments, especially the one in Washington. And God help anyone who got in their way.

By the time I waded through their verbal assaults, I wasn’t convinced their faith was all that authentic or, ironically, that it could withstand the fire and brimstone of the judgment they were sure was going to rain down on their adversaries.

I am also troubled by Palin’s inexperience in governing as much as her quest to wear her faith as a self-righteous badge, just as I am troubled by Obama’s relative newbie status and his ties to Tony Rezko and the Chicago Machine. Just as I am bothered by his mouthy former pastor, the one who lives in a mansion his church built for him. (The Son of Man, Jesus noted, had nowhere to lay his head.) And I wonder, too, about McCain’s dreadful military record, his ties to special interests and his age.

Beyond Palin, one has to question if most Christians even know what “conservatism” means any more. It certainly has nothing to do with an out-of-control national debt. The idea that government governs best when it governs least has been tossed aside by an executive branch that treats the legislature and the judiciary like a czar treats his peasants, that goes to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, that is arrogantly disdainful of the world community, that in recent weeks expanded the treasury’s powers beyond anything we’ve ever seen.

All these changes were wreaked on us by a man, it should be noted, who made similar claims to faith. But these deeds deserve no praise.

Jesus himself never had much use for politics. He paid his tax with a coin found in a smelly fish’s mouth. Some of his closest friends were hoping he was heading into Jerusalem during his final week to lead a political insurrection, not a revolution of the heart. He had the chance to pursue earthly power but wasn’t impressed and turned away. Too bad some of his self-proclaimed modern followers have less self-control.