REVEREND CREECH: Little Lives Matter

(Reverend Mark Creech is director of the Christian Action League of NC. He was a pastor for 20 years before taking this position, having served five different Southern Baptist churches in North Carolina and one Independent Baptist in upstate New York.)

It’s been approximately six months since Cannon Hinnant was gun downed in Wilson, North Carolina. The five-year-old boy, innocent as a lamb, was shot in the head at point-blank range by Darius Sessoms. Cannon was on his bike in Sessoms’ front yard at the time. The boy was taken to Wilson Medical Center, where he died of his injuries. No motive for the shooting was given.

The outrage at such senseless killing of innocent life became an international story, but something that never made the news is what happened afterward. This murderous act, incomprehensible in its moral gravity and with its many witnesses as to who did it, had its defenders.

National File reported about a Facebook group with more than 20,000 members who supported the alleged killer. The group’s opening statement, “Justice for Darius Sessoms,” said Sessoms did not commit the murder and that the accusations against him were “propaganda from the far-right Trump propaganda machine.” They argued that because Sessoms was black and Hinnant was a white child, the whole thing was meant to make black people look bad.

“One internet sleuth managed to infiltrate the group – that was reportedly started as a troll, but attracted various Black Lives Matter supporters – and nab screenshots of member’s posts,” reported National File.

One of the many, who commented on the page, called Sessoms “a political prisoner” and a victim of unjust persecution. Other comments portrayed Sessoms as a victim of systemic racism.

Still, one person, most insensitively, said, “I’d feel worse about his death if he didn’t have such a stupid name. A ‘cannon’ that gets shot?” As if somehow the child’s name was partly to blame, inviting someone to shoot him.

National File also said that a fake Wilson Police Department press release was posted on Facebook, which changed the “narrative surrounding the horrific crime.”

It goes to show you, anything, no matter how heinous, will, almost always, have its defenders – even the wanton killing of a blameless, powerless, priceless child. There are many ways to dodge the guilt – diminish, distract, and dissuade from the truth.

When carefully contemplating the matter, aren’t the defenders of abortion doing the same? Let’s be honest with ourselves, in principle, what’s the difference between putting a gun to the head of a five-year-old child and tearing apart a child, limb from limb, while in the mother’s womb? It’s still just as odious.

Randy Alcorn, a champion for the pro-life cause, has written:

“Two years before abortion was legalized in America, a pro-choice advocate instructed nurses in a prominent journal, ‘Through public conditioning, use of language, concepts and laws, the idea of abortion can be separated from the idea of killing. The same year a symposium on abortion in Los Angeles offered this training: ‘If you say, ‘Suck out the baby,’ you may easily generate or increase trauma; say instead, ‘Empty the uterus,’ or ‘We will scrape the lining of the uterus,’ but never ‘We will scrape away the baby.’ Interestingly, Hitler’s command to take the Jews to their death in the camps was couched in the phrase ’empty the ghettos…’

“Using words that focus on what happens to the pregnancy and the uterus takes attention away from the crux of the abortion issue – the individual residing in the uterus. But no matter how many words we use and how we use them, ‘terminating a pregnancy’ is terminating a human life. The one may sound better than the other, but the realities are one and the same.

“We must cut through the semantic fog and always find our way back to the bottom-line realities.”

Diminish, distract and dissuade from the truth, but the fact remains abortion is just like putting a gun to the head of a child. Furthermore, attempting to defend it is also an unconscionable act. Both Christian theology and science agree that when sperm and egg are joined, a new dynamic occurs – a genetically distinct human being begins.

Our culture’s defense of this woeful practice has been so aggressive that now some justify the so-called right to terminate a pregnancy up to nine months or provide no assistance to a baby that survives a botched abortion, letting it die.

Who would believe that there is any justification for shooting a child at point-blank range? Only those on the fringe would defend or take away from what Cannon Hinnant’s muderer did. Yet more than half of Americans, figuratively speaking, seek to justify putting a gun to the head of an unborn baby.

In heaven, it’s a scandal and an outrage that a holy God will not indefinitely tolerate. His judgment is inevitable. The blood of over sixty-million cries out to him for justice, and they shall have it. Only those who repent of this wickedness and refuse to indulge or shield it, only those who cast themselves on the mercies of Christ, will be saved from God’s wrath.

Some say, Black Lives Matter. Others say Blue Lives Matter. Let me say it as demonstrably as it can be said, how can we argue any of these lives matter if we cannot credibly say that Little Lives Matter?

(Reverend Mark Creech is director of the Christian Action League of NC. He was a pastor for 20 years before taking this position, having served five different Southern Baptist churches in North Carolina and one Independent Baptist in upstate New York.)