Preston Gillham - Author

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When I Prepare My Taxes

In four or five weeks, after I’ve prepared dinner and cleaned the kitchen, I will pour a bourbon and return to my desk to sort through my income tax materials. Receipts, 1099s, W-2s, investments, charitable gift receipts, and the like I will categorize, total, group, and bundle for delivery to our accountant, Mike.

Dianne and I work about sixty or seventy hours each week. We’ve not taken a vacation in several years. It’s hard work making a living.

For our labors, Dianne and I will pay thousands of dollars in income tax. Just as you will when you file your income tax return.

As promised, and by Executive Order, President Biden mandated that the United States spend a portion of Dianne’s and my tax dollars—and yours—paying for abortions and funding those who perform abortions. Not only this, so fundamental and essential is this extermination of embryonic life that a portion of your tax dollars and ours will also fund foreign abortions.

Part by part. Bit by bit. Drop by drop. Bone, sinew, and organs are torn and sucked apart until dismembered, collected, and either sold or thrown in a dumpster for medical waste.

In four or five weeks, after I’ve eaten my dinner, I will collect my taxes and stare at each number. A percentage of every dollar I’ve labored to earn, and saved by not taking a vacation, will pay for this essential fundamental of “women’s health care.”

Fountain at Stanford

What sort of fool do the purveyors of abortion think me to be? Health care! I will spare you the profane reply coursing through the corridors of my mind.

Using the power of his pen, President Biden brought to bear the force of the United States of America’s rule of law. If I disobey his edict, I will be punished by my government for breaking the law.

When I stare at my tax dollars, I am bound by law to fund the termination of a beating heart. And it’s not enough to abort America’s next generation. By law I must fund abortion both domestic and foreign.

What is behind this dedicated, rabid drive to legally destroy our progeny? So committed are we to this right that women don pussy hats and march on the Capitol demanding equality and the right to commit infanticide. Anyone who disagrees is deplorable, a bigoted misogynist.  

The rant is that it is a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body—but this right is dependent upon the destruction of the forming human in her womb. This right must dismiss the beating heart as a mass or a lump of tissue. Science won’t support that opinion any day of the week. The lump has its own DNA, fingerprints, heartbeat, spinal column and other markers signifying the life in her womb is the next generation fearfully and wonderfully made.

So committed are we to kill our offspring at any point that the United States Senate would not pass a law requiring that a child born alive during a botched abortion be cared for. Said backwards, our representatives in DC could not summon the intestinal fortitude or moral clarity to protect an infant who is born alive while an abortion provider botched their attempt to kill the child. Thanks to the seared consciences of the Senate, a live human infant, lying naked, outside the womb, on an exam table, is not protected by law. Pardon me, but why do we need a law telling us to comfort a traumatized newborn? Some of these children are drowned, some have their spinal cords severed, some are thrown away with medical waste while still alive.

I’m paying for that. You are as well. It’s healthcare, they say. It’s a fundamental right. Every tax-paying American, from you, to me, to the sixteen-year old working at McDonalds participates. By law.

Someone might counter and say they think border control, or an armed military, or the use of fossil fuels is unethical, maybe even immoral.

It’s a deeply flawed argument, such a non sequitur one must wonder if it isn’t a shame-induced denial. The people on each side of the border are there of their own choosing. Wars are started by choices.

A baby in the womb is not there of its choosing. Tearing it apart is the ultimate act of bullying, might-is-right barbarism. Even a female dog knows not to do this to her offspring.

President Biden declares he is personally against abortion, but won’t buck a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. It sounds noble and respectful of women—until you realize he is saying not only will he not prevent her committing infanticide, he will endorse it, and use his powers to make us all pay for the torturous murder. This is the epitome of cowardice—to uncap his presidential pen and sign an order making us all complicit in advancing a robust embrace of killing the most vulnerable among us. By forcing me to pay for his egregiousness, he abuses his power. And it is reprehensible that Congress cannot summon the moral fiber and ethical clarity to defend a newborn lying helplessly outside its mother’s womb from what is soon to be a premeditated murder.

What troubles me, as I stare at my taxes and drink my bourbon, is that by law I’m forced to participate in this atrocity.

If I short my taxes, the IRS software will flag my return. An audit will ensue and then the IRS will punish me for my failure to pay for infanticide. I wonder what would happen if the 70-75% of Americans who oppose abortion conspired to all short our taxes until this atrocity is called what it is, infanticide, the killing of our own children, and outlaw it as barbaric?!

In four or five weeks, after I’ve cleaned up the kitchen, and drunk my bourbon, I will place my gathered materials before me on my desk and cry unintelligible sounds before God-my-maker. What is there to say? To do? My heart will confess my sin, forced though it is, as my soul wretches in shame at what I’m required to do.

I’ve wondered how the Jews felt who were forced by the Nazi’s to assist in the torture, maiming, and extermination of their fellow Jews. I’ve wondered how the souls of the Uighur women who are forced to strip and bind their female friends in advance of rape and torture by the Chinese devoted to their genocide manage the aftermath of their actions as they hear the women they bound screaming in torment.

It’s a hard question.

It’s a question I will have to contemplate as I prepare my tax numbers in four or five weeks.

Someday, judgement will come, and God will make all of this right. Some things are so egregious that God knows we do not possess the ability to execute vengeance properly. Thus, He says, “Vengeance is mine.” It’s one of the most foreboding, terrifying Scriptures in the Bible. God is love, but God is also wrath and justice.

I’m certain there is forgiveness—even for this sin—otherwise, the finished work of Christ would be incomplete. He either made provision for all sins or none. But propitiation for sin does not erase the consequence of sin.

It is estimated that we Americans have killed 62,000,000 of our own children. Who knows how many foreign children we have paid to exterminate? With the President’s Executive Order, we rush faster to the killing fields flush with cash gathered through taxation.

Jesus said, “Let the little children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

They are there, all of them, in heaven, with Jesus—those torn asunder under the masquerade of women’s rights, choice, and healthcare.

One day, I too shall be there. In heaven.

Perhaps before God wipes away every tear, I will have the opportunity to drop to my knees and say, “I’m so very sorry. I was complicit. I was forced to pay for the trauma and suffering brought upon you. Please forgive me.”