If You Don't Care About The Ukrainian People, You're Not Pro-Life

You say that you're pro-life, friend.

You let me know in hashtags and bumper stickers and t-shirts and memes and march photos and sermons and high-horse sanctimony.

You treasure and revere and defend life, so you say.

You loudly testify that you honor life’s value, its originality, its sanctity.

I have some news for you:

Ukrainian people are lives, you know.

They're actual living, breathing, sentient human beings.

They are real stories: of learning to walk and first days of school and running in the yard and having a dog and falling in love and playing instruments and exploring passions and getting married and growing old.

The people of Ukraine are parents and children and best friends and first grade teachers and favorite aunts; lives of made of loving, laughing, singing, learning, growing—all the things you believe life here is made of, all the life you say you can't abide the disruption of, all the life you tell me you're for,

Ukrainian children are lives, and those lives are ending prematurely, violently, senselessly right now.

As you read these very words, crowds are scattering, people are screaming, ammunition is invading bodies, human beings are falling to the ground, and hearts are ceasing to beat—and those parents, children, best friends, first grade teachers, and favorite aunts are dying.

Genocide is happening in real time, and the sickest irony is that the people who seem the least concerned about the bloodshed, the most willing to ignore it, the most able to feel nothing—are professed pro-life Christians like you.

They're the ones rationalizing the carnage, the ones castigating those of us protesting, the ones raising a strident middle finger to we who are outraged, the ones sanctioning death with words and with silence and with social media tirades.

I gotta hand it to you, that's a profound dissonance to maintain. It's a marvel to watch you work in such duplicity.

We all have stories we like to tell ourselves; narratives about who we are and what we care about. We spend our entire lives carefully creating our desired storylines, and we will do almost anything to make sure they are true, even if we have lie to everyone, including ourselves.

You're lying to all of us, and I don't believe you.

Ukrainian people are being murdered, due in large part to our President’s recklessness, his allegiance to Vladimir Putin, and his willingness to serve his own interests and distract from his criminality at any cost—all with the unwavering support of white Christians who claim to be single issue voters, rallying around the cause of defending life.

If you're supporting this President and siding with a murderous dictator and opposing Ukraine and defiant in your callousness in the face of this senseless brutality—you're not pro-life.

You should delete your hashtags and tear off your bumper stickers and throw away your t-shirts and quit going to marches and stop your sermons and dismount your high horse and cease your sanctimony.

Most of all, you should take "God" out of your mouth and stop stay saying your faith compels you to defend life. At best, your burden is for white American embryos—and even that's debatable.

Jesus said that we could judge people by their lives; we could evaluate the outward, measurable "fruit" of their lives. Your head-turning, excuse-making, and shoulder shrugging right now is putrid, rancid fruit that bears no resemblance to Jesus.

I don't give a damn what you call yourself.
I don't care what you put in your social media bio.
I don't care what scripture passages you share.
I don't care about your Instagram images of fetuses.
I don't care about the story you tell me about what matters to you.
I have no interest in the labels you attach to yourself or the ones you use to attack me.

My eyes are clear and open now.

I see the blood running into the ground and the children lying in rubble and the parents carrying their lifeless children, and families of our allies tossed into the garbage by a leader who is oblivious to decency—and I hear your silence, I see your inaction, I notice your consent.

If you're fine with people dying (regardless of where they're from and how they dress and who they worship) not only are you not pro-life, and not only are you missing Jesus—but you're a lousy human being. You lack a working empathy that allows you to be moved by someone else's suffering unless you feel you'd win something politically. Maybe, if we slapped a big red baseball cap on the Ukrainian people, you'd magically find your compassion again.

So, you may be pro-Trump, or pro-America, or pro-white, or pro-Republican—but humanity doesn't seem to be a pressing issue for you, so you should probably rewrite the story you're trying to sell. The current one is clumsy fiction.

Ukrainians are dying right now.
They have a right to life.
They have a right to love and laugh and sing and learn and grow.

If you were truly pro-life, it would make you sick to your stomach that they aren't—and that the man whose signal you boost and whose rallies you attend and whose hats you wear and whose allegiance you pledge is a primary reason.

But I suppose that wouldn't "make America great," it would just allow Ukrainians to live.

I see what you're really for.