Supporting the dignity of every life

Posted on June 23, 2015 By Bill Samuel

When I was five years old, my parents felt a call to go to the Deep South. So, without any job to go to, our family of six packed important belongings into an old truck, and our caravan of the truck and our car headed from South Dakota to Georgia. We stayed temporarily at Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian community outside Americus, Georgia.

After a short time, we found an old farm four miles outside Plains to which we moved. My parents put up a sign saying Brotherhood Acres. This did not initially cause any issues, but eventually people realized “they mean everybody” in the words reported to us of a local resident. That’s when we began to have problems like the local Ku Klux Klan threatening to burn us out.

Consistent Life takes a similar approach to the one my parents were taking. We aren’t selective as to whose lives are worthy of dignity and protection. All lives are. So we oppose the direct, deliberate taking of human life through such sometimes socially approved means as war, abortion, the death penalty and euthanasia. We also oppose the systemic structures of violence such as racism and poverty.

It takes a variety of people to bring about the changes needed in society to protect the value and dignity of each human life. So we are a network of groups and individuals with a range of religious affiliations or none, different political identifications and different emphases. Some concentrate their work on just one or two aspects of protection of life, and some work more across the board. We have supporters who focus on educational efforts towards the end of protection of human life, those who focus on nonviolent direct action and those who focus on within-the-system approaches such as lobbying. We seek not to have our differences divide us, but to view each more as other parts of the framework of building respect for all life.

We are starting this blog to provide an avenue to share reflections which are longer than what we can publish in our weekly e-letter, Peace & Life Connections. There will be various contributors to this blog, sharing their own reflections. Blog posts are not official statements of Consistent Life, and sometimes may contain views that do not represent an organizational consensus.

Bill Samuel has served as President of Consistent Life since 2005.

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For more blog posts on personal journeys, see:

Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons (Karen Swallow Prior)

Coming to Peace and Living a Consistent Life After Military Service

Off the Fence and Taking My Stand on Abortion (Mary Liepold)

Sharon Long: My Personal Pro-life Journey

On Being a Consistent Chimera (Rob Arner)