To the editor:

Sandy Crawford is a member of the Missouri state legislature, a Sunday School teacher and self proclaimed theologian. During a legislative debate last year regarding a proposal to create rape and incest exemptions to the state’s abortion laws, she stated that while being raped can be “mentally taxing,” women impregnated by their rapists should be compelled to give birth since doing so is God’s will. “God is perfect…God does not make mistakes. And for some reason He allows that to happen. Bad things happen.”

Should victimized women and girls take comfort in the knowledge that being raped and impregnated is a perfect God’s plan for them? As Baptist minister Brian Kaylor notes: “To ascribe evil deeds to God is to make God evil.”

It follows from Crawford’s theology that punishing rapists would be unjust as these men are as much a part of God’s plan as the females they brutalize and impregnate.

And why is a perfect, mistake-free God disproportionately punishing Americans? For example, the 2021 U.S. homicide rate (the number of homicides per 100,000 population) was almost 30 times higher than in Japan.

During the presidential campaign J.D. Vance stated that school shootings are “a fact of life” in this country. He’s correct — same question. Why has a perfect God mandated that between 2009 and 2018 there would be 288 school shootings in this country while France, Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom had a combined total of five in that same period?

Perhaps Crawford will organize a school lecture tour with Robert Regan, the Michigan Republican who tells his daughters that “if rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.”

George J. Bryjak

Bloomingdale