I am not sure that I am going to publish this. I am not sure if I can say what is on my heart without sounding like I am blaming the victims, or blaming people who committed one sin for the acts of people who committed another sin. I am pretty sure I will change the title from “Tragedies and God” to something else if I manage to get this to come out the way it sounded in my head when I was first inspired to write this.
     I was inspired to write this when I read yet another blog post discussing the meaning of the Dr. Gosnell case. I suppose I should first give people a little background on Dr. Gosnell. Dr. Gosnell was a doctor who performed abortions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In particular, he performed primarily late term abortions on women who were members of minority groups. There were numerous complaints about him over the years submitted to many different authorities. Yet none of those authorities did anything about him until one of his employees caught the attention of the Drug Enforcement Agency for illegal dispensing of prescription narcotics. This led the DEA to launch a raid on Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, where what they found horrified them. They passed on what they found to a grand jury. In the end, the grand jury indicted Dr. Gosnell for the murder of one woman and seven babies.
     The grand jury that delivered the indictments started their report with the following paragraph: “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in
which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”
     Every time I read that last sentence I want to cry, no, I don’t want to cry, I start to cry. What makes me cry is the knowledge that grand jury’s previous sentence understates it; many people not only knew something was going on here, they knew that something very wrong was going on here. But for various reasons they chose to look the other way. These were the same sorts of people (and perhaps in some cases the same people) who not only looked the other way, but worked to cover up the actions of Jerry Sandusky.
     In both cases, people in positions of authority knew that someone was taking advantage of and bringing harm to some of the most vulnerable in our society. Jerry Sandusky and Dr. Gosnell preyed on those whom God repeatedly warned in the Old Testament that He would come to the defense of, the widow and the fatherless. While those these two men preyed upon may not have technically been widows or fatherless, God does not withhold His judgment based on technicalities. How a society which allows such people to prosper, if only for a time, can expect to escape judgment is beyond me. And indeed we have not escaped judgment. For the same mindset that allows people to turn a blind eye to Jerry Sandusky and Dr. Gosnell leads to the school shootings at Columbine and Sandy Hook.
     I did not phrase that last sentence quite right, the cultural roots that lead not only to someone doing the things that Jerry Sandusky and Dr. Gosnell did but to others turning a blind eye to it and covering it up are the same cultural roots that lead someone to cavalierly shoot as many children and other innocent people as possible before law enforcement arrives. All of these things come from a sense that the only accountability is that which might be visited on one by one’s fellow man.
     I ran out of time at this point and was going to come back and write more later, but the inspiration left me. I think this is too important to leave unpublished, so I am going to publish this as it is. Perhaps God will inspire me to come back to this subject and post more on it later.