FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Kony for President!

Rant Number 481 13 March 2012

Yes, Joseph Kony, the warlord criminal of Uganda, for US President. And for President of France. Also for Britain’s Prime Minister, for Germany’s Chancellor...und so weiter.

‘You are joking, Frank! That man is a murderer!’ an outraged Facebook young fellow reprehended me. I know that, of course, dear Franz. But Kony is in good company. And not the biggest murderer, by any means...

The viral video, Stop Kony 2012, is impressive. It begins with a baby coming to life out of his mother’s womb – the miracle of life, awesome! Then it moves on to a cute, blond, Aryan-looking kid, the video-maker own child. Dad gets suitably didactic. By question and answer technique, he elicits, Socrates-like, from his little lad the condemnation of ghastly Kony. Who would disagree? Shots of appalling mutilations, murder, child abduction...ye gods! The video goes for the jugular. It shocks and enrages you to realise such horrors are happening. Visceral stuff. Video gets you where you should be got, namely to loathe and execrate the dreadful Kony. And to move you to do something to stop him. Fine. What’s the beef, then?

Murder is murder. Child-killing is child-killing. As I said, the video opens with shots of a baby being born. A baby who will grow to be like one of the Ugandan kids abducted or slaughtered by Kony. That baby, however, is lucky. He has been allowed to be born. 60 millions of American babies – sixty millions! – since 1973 have not been so lucky. They have been aborted, ‘terminated’ before they were permitted to be born.

Yes, abortion is controversial. The priest did an MA in Christian Ethics once. He went through the arguments. Pro and Con. Plenty of scope for reasoning, dialectical argumentation, civilised debate, very British, cool, detached, unemotional – God forbid it should not be, we are not savages like Ugandan Kony, are we? – and yet, meanwhile, unborn babies were aborted. Don’t like the word ‘killing’? Have it your way. Semantics – what’s in a word? (A lot of course...) ‘Terminated’? Disposed of? Unchosen? It comes down to the same things: they were not allowed to be born. Unlike the baby in the video: lucky him his mum was otherwise inclined...

Many babies were not so allowed by legislators. In Britain, since 1968, more than six million unborn babies were aborted. The British Parliament decided that abortion should be legalised. Over six millions abortion followed.

‘But legislators did not force any mums to abort! It is not like Kony at all!’ I hear you screaming. It is a matter of choice. A choice not to allow the unborn to be born. Fair enough. All kosher then? Everybody’s happy?

The Kony video shows glimpses of various abominations against African children. Had it begun with realistic shots of bits of the unborn baby being sucked out of the womb, I wonder what the reaction would have been. Rage? Indifference? Disgust at the bad taste? A mobilisation of the people against the legislators? Who knows?

Yes, the lawmakers do come into this. Laws have consequences. If a law results in six million unborn children being ‘terminated’, the MPs, the Governments, the PM cannot simply act Pilate-like, wash their hands of it, shrug their shoulders and pretend it had nothing to do with them. Of course, they do that but...what’s so bad about Kony, then?

‘No parity! He kills the living, not the unborn!’ Well, yes, he can’t kill the dead, that is for sure. He kidnaps kids and gets them to kill others. Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy do not slaughter live children...I only hope the world’s rulers don’t follow contemporary ethical debate. Now ‘ethicists’ argue whether there really is such a huge moral difference between born and unborn. Dr Francesca Minerva, an Italian Oxford-trained academic, has just co-written a paper discussing whether it might not be permissible to kill newborn babies, too. The lady, named after the goddess of wisdom, shows herself ‘wise’ indeed. It was ‘a pure academic discussion’, she was not ‘encouraging it’. Good to know. Let us discuss it...until the legislators warm to the idea. How many millions soon to join the list, eh?

Kony kills directly, the legislators don’t? They just let it happen? Someone else chooses to abort? But in ethics some omissions, depending on the gravity, can be as morally hideous as actions. If I have the power to save innocent children from death, and do nothing about it, will you not blame me? If someone could have saved millions of Jews from extermination and did nothing about it, would you say he was blameless? Now, consider how many lives our rulers could save by stopping the slaughter of the innocent...

Something’s funny about our wonderful liberal age. It is fashionable, even acceptable for academics and moralists to debate the possibility of atrocious deeds. Not just babies, at the other end of life, too. Baroness Warnock, a distinguished Oxford philosopher, apparently contended that the elderly with dementia waste NHS resources. They might have a ‘duty’ to die. Bit odd. The demented are not rational so, how could they decide to die? Someone will have to. The ‘rational’ relatives? Huh! Where there is a will, there is a way. And resources are indeed scarce. The legislators will soon comply, I bet you.

Kony is a murderer, sure. (He does not look photogenic either, which does not help his case on video.) He fights and kills, he and his child killers do that. What if the child soldiers actually enjoyed killing, by the way? A perverse suggestion? If you think so, you have never been a child or taught in a school. Go and read Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It will sober you up.

Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy et al. All rulers of democratic nations which have legalised abortion, with the consequences highlighted above. Expect soon more legalised ‘terminations’, of young and old alike. Are the sharp-suited Western rulers so morally different from hunted, bush-dwelling Mr Kony? Right-thinking people will be indignant at the suggestion. But the priest feels bolshie about this thing. Joseph Kony, come over! Get yourself elected and rule. Child-slaughter will then be placed where it morally deserves to be: at the top.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli