From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
I’ve seen you defending nonsensical, panicked 911 calls on black people or gun-jittery, gun-wielding white people—suggesting some unrecorded threat or justifiable fear that makes it reasonable.
I’ve seen you jubilant at the prospect of millions of people losing healthcare: the sick and the already vulnerable, sexual assault victims, the mentally ill, women—simply because the name Obama is attached to such care.
I’ve noticed your conspicuous silence about families still separated at the border, about hundreds of people shut out of polling sites in Kentucky, bout legislative assaults on women’s autonomy over their own bodies, about the disproportionate effect of this pandemic on people of color, about a president’s supremacists tweets.
Honestly friend, it doesn’t seem that all lives really do matter to you.
It feels like your support for life is far more selective than that.
It seems like what matters to you—are straight, white, American, Republican, Christian lives; preferably those who live in your neighborhoods or attend your churches or seem the most like you. Everyone else seems like a threat or a problem or an afterthought.
All lives don’t seem to include immigrant lives, Latino lives, LGBTQ lives, Muslim lives, poor lives, Democrat lives, Atheist lives, women’s lives—and no, not black lives either.
And I want to be wrong about you.