February 3, 2016 (UnmaskingChoice) — When I was seven years old, I slipped into my sister’s room and carefully pulled down from her shelf her brand new series of books: Anne of Green Gables. I took the first book and, quiet like a mouse, returned with it to my bedroom. Crisp, clean pages greeted me, filled with words telling the story of the lonely orphan girl that won the hearts of everyone around her through her vivid imagination and vivacious spunk. But it wasn’t just any story. The words pulled me in, and over the next few hours, I too, fell in love with the red-headed orphan girl from Canada: Anne with an “e.”
Over the years, I have read and re-read this book over and over again. As a child, I sat with Anne at the station, garbed in a very ugly dress of yellowish-grey wincey, thinking that if no one came, we could climb into that wild cherry tree and sleep there for the night, all white with bloom in the moonshine. As a young teen, I felt the anger rise up in me when Gilbert Blythe called Anne, my Anne, “carrots.” I studied with her, and as we came out second in the written examinations, I avowed with her secretly that next time, we would beat Gilbert Blythe and come out first. And as we grew up together, I began to think that maybe, just maybe Gilbert Blythe was a kindred spirit after all, worthy of forgiveness.
I took this book on adventures with me. I lent it to friends in my travels, aghast when they had not read the wonderful story of the red-hair, pigtail braided orphan girl whom I loved most fervently. She was a kindred spirit, and those who loved her were kindred spirits as well. When, on one beautiful September day, my fiancée got down on one knee with a rare, illustrated Anne of Green Gables children’s book and a diamond ring, I realized that somehow I had found and was marrying my very own Gilbert Blythe.
And that is why I was so upset to read on the news that an abortion rights group in Prince Edward Island is using the image of a young girl with two red braids running down her shoulder, the iconic image of our Anne as the face of their #AccessNow campaign, demanding that abortion be brought to the island. A war on orphans.
I tuned in to hear an interviewer on the CBC ask: “Some are saying that this is maybe not the right image to be using, what do you think of that?” to which the strident abortion activist responded: “Well, they forgot to read the book! In fact, Anne Shirley’s parents apparently wanted her, [but] they died of a fever. So they’ve kinda got their facts a little wrong, and it is a fictional character, and in fact she was a spirited, feisty person, and I bet she would have been leading the charge.”
Wait a minute, I thought to myself. Are you serious? Did I really just hear them say that Anne of Green Gables would support abortion? Did I just hear some so-called feminist insinuate that Anne would have been pro-abortion because her parents wanted her, unlike so many other orphans she would have known?
What an absolutely bizarre notion. But then again, a UBC literature professor actually said a few years ago that Anne and her bosom friend Diana were lesbians.
Why do secular progressives always want to destroy the whimsical with the crude and sexual?
Anne Shirley was intelligent. Anne Shirley was a hard worker. Anne Shirley made mistakes, but, as she said, “I never make the same mistake twice.” She was a lonely girl with a big imagination, and was determined to make friends, true “kindred spirits,” as she called them. She overcame a lot of hard circumstances by facing her troubles head on, not avoiding them. Even though at times her life ‘was a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,’ she still found cause to declare: “’Dear old world… you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.’” Anne was determined and hardworking, committed and loving. She left school to care for her family and Gilbert, though she loved her teaching, and in her lifetime, she raised six children, each of whom she loved dearly.
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Within her beloved series on Anne, Montgomery weaves very Christian, very pro-family themes. Initially, Marilla had intended to teach Anne the childish classic, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” But, “it suddenly occurred to her that simple little prayer, sacred to the white-robed childhood lisping at motherly knees, was entirely unsuited to this freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing about God’s love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love.” After Anne’s first attempt at praying, Marilla declared to Matthew that Anne Shirley was “next door to a perfect heathen,” and she promptly had Anne learn the Lord’s Prayer. Anne attended the Sunday school picnics, and became very close friends with the minister’s wife, Mrs. Allen. Marilla Cuthbert, one of the series most developed characters, raised Anne with a firm, loving, Christian hand. In all that she did, she made sure to add an emphasized lesson, all tied to the Biblical upbringing of one’s children.
Spirited, fiery women are the ones who would push for abortion, or so the interviewee on CBC claimed. What about the rest of us? It is arrogant and bigoted to claim that the only women who are spirited are those who champion for continual cultural degradation, and champion for abortion rights. I work with many spirited, fiery women, all of them committed to ending the killing of pre-born children in our lifetime. I dare say there are more women fighting against abortion in Canada than for it. As Anne herself would say, “We ought always to try influence others for good.”
“There’s a book of Revelation in every one’s life, as there is in the Bible,” Montgomery writes in Anne of the Island. And so it is. When I look at Montgomery’s writings, her life, and the very Christian themes that she wove through all eight books in the Anne series, I have no doubt that Montgomery would be horrified to see her beloved Anne as the face of the #AccessNow campaign. And I have no doubt that Anne would not be pushing for abortion, but on the frontlines with us, imagining a world without abortion, where all kids were loved like Matthew and Marilla loved her. Why?
Because, as she said, “When you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worthwhile.”
Reprinted with permission CCBR.