Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  “Well … thank you. It doesn’t undo the damage, but it does make me feel better. To be honest, a correction or retraction would make me feel a lot better than your apology, but I’m not unrealistic. I know you won’t do that.”

  Mahoney paused, as if there was a faint hope Jake might say he would. Jake didn’t even consider it. It was too late, it would make him look too bad, and Winston would never go for it anyway. Mahoney was right and Jake knew it. His apology was sincere, but it did nothing to correct any damage.

  “It’s like the old saying, Tool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ I want to trust you, Mr. Woods, but after what happened last time, I’d be a fool to. If I sound like I’m a little gun shy, remember you’re not the only one I’ve had this experience with.”

  “Well, I can see where you’re coming from, Mr. Mahoney. I understand your decision not to do the interview, but I think you may be surprised when you see the column.”

  “Really? Well, we’ll see.”

  “Anyway, let me ask you this. Do you have some material on Planned Parenthood, birth control education, school clinics, condom distribution in schools, that sort of thing? I’ve got files full of stuff from the other point of view. Do you have anything you can fax me in the next hour?”

  There was a pause, as if Carl Mahoney wasn’t sure if this was some kind of trick. “Well … okay. Give me fifteen minutes and I could get together lots of pertinent stuff, government studies, independent research, all kinds of data.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m looking for. I appreciate your help. I owe you for this, and again I’m sorry about last time.”

  “Okay, well, thank you. I’ll fax this stuff over pronto. What’s your fax number?”

  Jake gave him the number and seconds later was staring at the screen, pondering the indictment Mahoney had laid on him. He was surprised he hadn’t been more defensive. Mahoney was wrong thinking he’d done anything deliberate. But he needed to take the accusation seriously. He looked at the letter from the woman, pinned up on his wall, the mother he’d unfairly accused in the column about her criminal son. What was it Mahoney had said? “Whether you intended it or not, the harm stands.” And, “You move on to the next column, but we have to pick up the pieces.”

  Jake had a queasy feeling, like maybe after this column, he’d be the one picking up the pieces.

  Ten minutes later he walked to the common fax machine in his area. A call just came in, and the waxy white sheets were slowly emerging. Good, it was from Mahoney. He started reading the first few pages, without tearing them away from the machine. He looked through the research and statistics and started marking pertinent items with his pen. Yeah, this is exactly what I’m looking for. He could fill in the asterisks with hard data now. But lots of people weren’t going to like it.

  After another hour of pounding the keys, editing and rewriting, Jake finally had a column, eight hundred words. He’d had to cut it in half and decided to remove the hard data after all and save it for another column, assuming he’d still be working here. He just summarized the main facts and appealed to the reader’s common sense. He sat back to read it start to finish, trying to put himself in the place of his readers:

  What I’m about to say will be controversial. That’s an enlightening commentary on our times, since what I’m saying also happens to be indisputably true.

  Here it is: The true biological cause of teen pregnancies is not the absence of birth control. You’d never know this from the literature and television programs and columns on the subject, but it’s true nonetheless.

  Teen pregnancy isn’t caused by the absence of anything. It’s caused by the presence of something—teenage sexual activity.

  Here’s something equally controversial: The true biological cause of the spread of AIDS is not the lack of condoms or sterile needles. It’s not the lack of anything, except the lack of training, determination and self-discipline to abstain from sex and drugs.

  In other words, it’s not what we’re not doing that’s gotten us in trouble. It’s what we are doing.

  Planned Parenthood has had a profound influence on the young people of America for two decades now, bringing birth control training into our school classrooms. Guess what’s happened in that same twenty-year period. The rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases has skyrocketed. Why? Well, one clue is this statement from a recent president of Planned Parenthood: “We are not going to be an organization promoting celibacy or chastity.”

  It appears some things are worse than disease and death. For certain adults, teenagers abstaining from sex seems to be one of them.

  By its massive distribution of birth control and its efforts to make premarital sex seem normal and exciting, Planned Parenthood and the mainstream media have promoted the illusion of “safe sex.” They’ve obscured all the traditional reasons for teenagers not to have sex. Consequently, the number of teenagers having sex has risen dramatically.

  This has resulted not only in increased unwanted pregnancies and STDs, but in emotional scars in children not mature enough to handle the psychological dynamics and responsibilities of sexual intimacy. Planned Parenthood, and many school nurses and health teachers who take their cues from the recognized sexperts, believe it’s naive to expect to teach fifteen-year-olds to abstain from sex. Which is no different than saying teenagers can’t be taught to abstain from drugs.

  Instead of recognizing the basic flaw in its approach, Planned Parenthood points to the rise in teen pregnancy and STDs as proof for the strategic importance of its further efforts with teenagers. But their efforts can’t succeed without curtailing the root of all teen pregnancy, which is, once again, teen sexual activity.

  Imagine if Planned Parenthood were put in charge of children’s traffic safety. They would devote their efforts to teaching children the art of dodging cars rather than teaching them to stay off the freeway in the first place. They would argue with great conviction that the cause of children being run over on the freeway is they’ve not been trained to jump aside quickly enough when an eighteen-wheeler bears down on them. They’d point to the tragedy of increasing teen freeway fatalities, claiming it’s naive to think teenagers can stay off the road. Then they’d demand more tax money and classroom time to teach our children how to juke and jive their way around the freeway.

  Since we’ve accepted the Planned Parenthood strategy, why stop here? Let’s put them in charge of preventing wife abuse. Then they can set up programs to distribute boxing gloves to every husband in America.

  Well, young people, here’s the message that’s been so buried and obscured by the foolishness of your elders, myself included:

  You can fail to use condoms 100% of the time, and still have a 0% chance of getting pregnant or contracting STDs. All you have to do is abstain from sex. This is not impossible. People in many cultures throughout recorded history have done it for a good part of their lives. I even managed to do it for the first twenty years of my life. Now I wish I would have waited until I was twenty-six, when I got married. In this age of enlightenment and achievement and self-determination, surely you can abstain from sex with the same kind of discipline you exercise in athletics, doing homework, saying no to drugs, and getting out of bed when the alarm goes off.

  Of course, many adults are convinced you cannot do this. They think of you as mindless animals whose lives must be driven by hormones and desires, not by reason and moral values and self-discipline. I know. I used to think that way. Recent events have helped me see how wrong I was.

  My suggestion is simple, kids. Don’t listen to us. Listen to what you know is true. There are many good reasons for waiting until marriage to have sex. Staying alive is only one of them.

  Jake looked at the clock. 11:25. Winston would love to have his column so early. But there was no way he would let Winston see this until 11:50, when it was too late to make substantive changes. He couldn’t get up and wander or Winston would see he wasn’t at his desk and co
me over and check on him. He’d have to sit there, pretending he was still at work.

  For the next twenty-five minutes Jake stared at his screen and thought about a lot of things. Carly and his experience at the school. Janet and the mistakes they started making twenty-eight years ago, and the profound effects it had on them since, many of which he was only now realizing. His talks with Leonard and Clarence and his concerns about journalism. Carl Mahoney’s words were freshest in his mind. They pointed out things not just in his profession but in himself that he found disturbing. The wait until 11:50 felt like an eternity. After releasing the column, he sat quietly, thinking about nothing and everything.

  At 11:55, Winston stepped out his office and yelled, “Woods!”

  As he walked the gauntlet, someone mumbled, “Wow. I’ll have to read your column, Jake. Must be a real winner!”

  Winston’s voice boomed before Jake could shut the door behind him. “What’s going on, Woods?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t get smart with me. What do you think you’re doing?” Winston waved at his terminal, possessed by Jake’s column.

  “I’m writing a column. That’s what I’m paid for.”

  “Come on. This is an attack piece on a respected organization. And it makes the schools sound like they’re morons. Reading this you’d think everybody out there but the conservatives are trying to kill our children or something.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction, Winston?”

  “Overreaction? You want overreaction? I’m trying to save you from two hundred phone calls and a deluge of mail, some of which will be retractions of their previous letters that wished you to get well soon.”

  “I can handle the backlash.”

  Winston sighed. “Look, Jake, you must have something else we can run instead? Buy us time so we can talk about it tomorrow?”

  “Sorry. That’s all I’ve got.” Jake had a dozen half-baked pieces Winston would have preferred, but he wasn’t about to offer them. “It’s just an opinion piece, Winston. This is a newspaper, as in there isn’t just one position we can take, right? Can’t we have some different opinions once in a while?”

  Winston bristled at the implication of censorship. “Look, Woods, you know that’s not the issue. George Will could write this and I wouldn’t think twice about it. But not you. It sounds like somebody got to you or something. Like you’ve been … I don’t know, unduly influenced. Or maybe this is a grudge column, like somebody at Planned Parenthood called you a name and this is your way of getting back. It doesn’t sound authentic, especially not after those two columns on media bias. You sound like a preacher. It’s like somebody took an old Pat Buchanan column and put your name on it.”

  “Really? So, I’m as much a stereotypical liberal as they are conservatives, huh?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “So if a conservative columnist—I know this is hard to imagine since we’ve carried so very few of them—submitted a piece supporting Planned Parenthood, you’d say ’Let’s not print it, it sounds suspect, like somebody got to him.’ Is that what you’d say?”

  Winston rolled his eyes. “I don’t have time for this. Okay, Woods, it’s your reputation. See if I care what happens. Get out of here. Go talk to a defense attorney, or someone who knows damage control. Cop a temporary insanity plea. Tell them you hit your head in the accident and your brains haven’t settled yet, or some of them oozed out your ear!”

  Winston waved his arm toward the door with the sense of a king who’d offered a subject a pardon, which he’d refused.

  “Yes, sir. Thanks for your usual gentleness and understanding.”

  Jake closed the door to Winston’s curses, which escaped through the crack into the array of cubicles.

  Jake wandered back to his desk, avoiding eye contact with what he knew were a lot of questioning stares and feisty smiles. He realized that as soon as his column was released to layout, a bunch of eager eyes would be reading it on their terminals. As he got back to his desk, his phone was ringing.

  “Jake Woods.”

  “Winston.” The voice wasn’t quite as gruff as forty seconds ago.

  “Miss me already, Winston? Want me to come back so you can yell at me some more:

  “No need. I can yell at you over the phone.” Winston’s tone suddenly got as soft as Jake had ever heard it. “Seriously, Jake. I’m going to print this thing, but let me take out the references to Planned Parenthood. Let’s just refer to this as a philosophy some people believe. No need to offend a certain group. Okay?”

  “Not okay, Winston. Planned Parenthood is an identifiable group, well known as a major organization promoting this philosophy. I’d be playing games not mentioning them. Whenever I’ve talked about them positively I mention them by name, and there’s never been a problem. I think we’ve got to mention them by name now too. Otherwise it’s just too vague and general. If I had a beef with the Catholic Church or the Christian Coalition or one of the local right-wing groups, we’d call them by name, wouldn’t we? We always do. We’d say it was a mistake not to. Thanks for trying to run interference for me, but I’m a big boy, Winston.”

  “Suit yourself.” The phone slammed. Somehow Jake wondered if the force of the slam was a fitting commentary on the column.

  Zyor led Finney into a great hall, with displays of writings, ancient books and modern, scrolls and parchments and letters, the old ones written in ornate hand, the new ones crisply typed. It was heaven’s Hall of Writings. This sacred place held what was written in the dark world that would be forever enshrined in the Kingdom of Light.

  A monk walked up to the podium, and Zyor whispered to Jake the name by which he might recognize him from earth. “Francis Xavier.” Finney did not recognize the name but listened intently.

  One of Zyor’s kind handed the monk a parchment he’d written the original on. He looked at it fondly for a moment, as if he’d never imagined the scrawlings of that one ordinary day would be heard by anyone but himself and his God. He looked away from the writing, set his eyes directly on the throne of the Lamb, toward which the podium pointed. He gazed over the heads of the immediate audience to a greater Audience beyond. Without looking back down, he spoke the words as one speaks to his beloved.

  Oh, God, I love thee.

  Not that my poor love might win me entrance to thy heaven above,

  nor yet that strangers to thy love must know

  the bitterness of everlasting woe.

  But, Jesus, thou art mine and I am thine,

  clasped to thy bosom by thy arms divine,

  who on the cruel cross for me hast borne

  the pain, the tears and man’s unpitying scorn.

  No thought can fathom and no tongue express

  thy grief, thy toil, thy anguish measureless.

  Thy death, O lamb of God, the undefiled,

  and all for me, thy wayward sinful child.

  Not for the hope of glory or reward,

  but even as thou hast loved me, Lord,

  I love Thee, and wilt love Thee and adore,

  who art my King, my God, forevermore.

  Person after person stood to read, with periods of rest between, allowing all to contemplate the message and experience the communion elicited in the writing. There were letters written by parents to children, and children to parents. Letters to husbands, wives, friends, pastors. Letters to the editor. Articles and columns written by journalists. Each was followed by thoughtful applause and earnest noddings. Some, like Finney, had never heard these readings before; others perhaps had heard them often, but on hearing them again felt as much or more joy as the first time.

  Finney sensed the program was leading to its climax. The others had been praised by Elyon for their writings before, though they never tired of his praise. But here came a little boy. Finney knew somehow it was his first time doing a reading in this great hall. He was, like Finney, a newcomer. He had in his hand a paper he’d written for his third-grade cla
ss. He held the wide-ruled notebook page he’d first written it on, but it had a different look, as if it had been transformed into the parchment of heaven that would never deteriorate.

  A moderator, an angel, held up his hand and explained this had been a school assignment where the teacher had asked the students to write about someone they loved. They turned in the assignment and later would read it to the class. But suddenly, as if there were a large screen video projection in midair, everyone was seeing the teacher, not angry but with a worried look, examining Jeffrey’s paper and explaining to him, “Jeffrey, remember I said it had to be a real person, not someone imaginary.”

  Jeffrey, the Jeffrey in the projection of what actually happened on earth, looked surprised. “Jesus is a real person.”

  The teacher kindly explained there would be other assignments where the class could write about Santa Claus or Spider Man or any character they wanted, and perhaps he should save Jesus for them. Jeffrey explained he wanted to write about Jesus now because Jesus really was his best friend. What followed was a conversation Jeffrey had never seen, now broadcast in heaven. The teacher was talking to the principal, and they were saying something about the separation of church and state, and how the ACLU got upset about such things, and how it could get them in trouble. The principal concluded, ’Give him credit for the assignment. Just don’t let him read it to the class.’ The next day, other students gave their readings, but before Jeffrey was called on, they were out of time and had to move on to mathematics. The image vanished, and the focus returned to the Hall of Writings.

  The moderator said, “Now, at last, we are all eager to listen to Jeffrey read his essay.”

  The boy cleared his throat, then proudly projected his voice. “‘Someone I love,’ by Jeffrey Montgomery.” He flashed the incomparable smile of a child about to recite an original composition.