Exposing two evils: racism and abortion

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Last week’s March for Life in Washington, D.C., punctuated a period of breakthrough accomplishments for the pro-life movement. Abortions are now at their lowest rate since 1974, the year immediately after Roe v. Wade, and the federal government is working to roll back funding for agencies that provide abortions.

Work by the pro-life movement in recent years has exposed the gruesome realities of abortion, such as videos from the Center for Medical Progress showing researchers harvesting organs from aborted babies, or details of babies born alive and killed by abortionist Kermit Gosnell.

“It’s been hard to see,” John Stonestreet said. “It’s been hard to watch, just like racism, just like slavery, just like lynchings, just like the Holocaust, just like all kinds of other great, great evils we have seen in world history. Sometimes you have to just face it and not hide it. Hidden evil is allowed to flourish.”

As pro-lifers gathered for the March for Life, revelations came to light about another shocking evil in society, the lynching of Emmett Till.

Till was attacked by two white men in Sumner, Miss., in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at one of their wives. An all-white jury acquitted the two men of Till’s murder. Photographs of the 14-year-old’s beaten, barely recognizable body created a flashpoint in the young civil rights movement.

In a new book, Carolyn Bryant Donham, the wife of one of Till’s killers, admits she lied under oath at her husband and brother-in-law’s murder trial. She claimed Till threatened her earlier in the day, but that never happened.

“Even if Till had catcalled or touched Bryant, as originally accused, what those white men did to him was horrific, unjust, and evil,” Stonestreet said. “But the thought that Bryant made up the story to cover up their deeds seems to make it worse somehow, as if that is even possible.”

Stonestreet related a personal connection to the Till trial: His wife’s grandfather was one of the prosecuting attorneys.

“Decades later, having driven to Money, Miss., where Till was slain, she finds a still very much racially divided town, but no one willing to talk, much less admit the grave evil done in their town,” Stonestreet said. “That should be a lesson to all of us. We must speak out against whatever evil we see, whether it is done on ‘our’ side or ‘theirs.’ Certainly, this will be a challenge of conscience in these racially and politically divided years: Made up grievances to advance our cause have consequences, especially if the cause itself is unjust, but even if not. We can’t tolerate it.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the Jan. 27 edition of The World and Everything in It.