Loving our enemies in Lansing

It was a beautiful day to protest Planned Parenthood.

Alright, it was actually a fairly windy and chilly weekday, but for February in Lansing, Mich., it really wasn’t bad. The pro-lifers holding picket signs in shifts had no doubt seen much worse. However, it was going to be an intense day for other reasons, as I explained to each small group of folks who came to take their stand for the unborn. I pointed to the rowdy little crowd of counter-protesters a few yards away, holding signs with slogans like “Go Homo” and “Bigots Begone.” They were here because they knew that my new friend, Prisha Mosley, was coming to hold her own kind of protest, about one of Planned Parenthood’s other “services”: cross-sex hormones. Prisha is not a conservative Christian herself, I explained, but on this particular weekday, she wanted to stand in the same spot with us.

Prisha is a Michigander like me, but she’s currently suing medical professionals in her home state of North Carolina for rushing her into hormone therapy and surgery that she now deeply regrets. As a vulnerable, mentally ill teenager, she believed them when they said changing her sex would make everything better. It only made things worse. However, the day after our protest, she made a viral announcement that it didn’t make her infertile, and she is expecting a child with her boyfriend. Shyly, she shared this information with a couple of our pro-life friends, who were instantly supportive.

While Prisha was clearly exhausted and in pain, our opponents showed no signs of fatigue, fortifying themselves with pizza and cookies. They even brought a little speaker to play upbeat music. One young man occasionally taunted us through a bullhorn. I caught the eye of one fellow holding a “God is Trans” sign. He gave me a dirty look and a middle finger as I clicked a picture.

Eventually, someone came over to start interrogating (and filming) Prisha. He was very obviously male, but he wore a skirt and had enlarged breasts from taking female hormones. I recorded some of their very long back-and-forth and later broke it down in two threads on X (Twitter). Prisha was admirably calm through the whole exchange, but one moment in particular stood out, when a second gender-confused man in his 30s pressed her hard with his own story of depression and “transition.” In a voice trembling with angry emotion, he insisted that after years of suicidal thoughts, hormone therapy “saved my (expletive deleted) life.” And if people wanted to “hate me for being trans,” he didn’t care.

What happened next was humbling to watch. Before answering another question, Prisha stopped to address this man directly. “This isn’t a hate thing for me,” she said. “Whether you believe it or not, personally I just want to say that I don’t hate you. So take that as you will.” At this, an aggressive young woman wearing dark glasses and a “Protect Trans Kids” shirt gave a smirk and shrugged. 

This pattern played itself out all day long. Consistently, it was calm, peace, and compassion on one side, aggressive mockery and bullying on the other. At one point, I engaged a Catholic man and woman who stood praying the rosary together. In a short video I took, as the man is cheerfully telling me about all the good work 40 Days for Life has done to assist women in crisis pregnancies, the LGBT activists swarm us and start mugging for the camera. At the end, I toss a question on one of their signs back at them: “Why are you so obsessed with us?” 

I knew the answer, of course. They’re obsessed with us because, whether everyone will admit it or not, this is war. A war between children of light on one side and children of darkness on the other. That was why even though we were ridiculously outnumbered, even though half of us didn’t even know how to make good signs, even though every passing car was honking support for them, they just couldn’t leave us alone. 

And yet, as the activists occasionally zipped across the busy street, Prisha told me one gentle pro-life woman said quietly, “I’m nervous about them, running into the street like that.” She said this because being a child of light doesn’t just mean recognizing children of darkness. It means loving them. It might mean saying “No” when they ask for things that will hurt them. Or, if they’re too far away to listen to you, it might just mean hoping they don’t hurt themselves any more than they already have. That doesn’t mean denying that they are still our enemies. If they weren’t, then “Love your enemies” wouldn’t mean anything. I watched in awe last Thursday as that love was demonstrated not only by my brothers and sisters in Christ, but also by Prisha, our not yet Christian sister. 

At one point, she turned to me and said, “These guys [the pro-lifers] actually seem to have inner peace, in a way that's, like, really tangible.” 

“It’s the peace of Christ,” I told her.