Mackenzie Presbyterian University and Its Pro-Abortion Professor

Abortion legalization in Brazil was discussed in a Senate hearing on August 6, 2015. Among the debaters were pro-abortion feminists. The big surprise was that the Senate introduced one of them as “Márcia Tiburi, professor at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University.” Mackenzie is the highest Calvinist educational institution in Brazil.

Tiburi’s pro-abortion discourse, recorded by TV Senado (the official TV of the Brazilian Senate), began by saying that whenever she travels throughout Brazil in her pro-abortion activism she takes the name Mackenzie with her, stressing that she is not the only pro-abortion activist at Mackenzie. To watch the video in Portuguese, use this link: https://youtu.be/DLxm7U0OEes

In the hearing, the Mackenzie professor said, “To vociferate against abortion is just a biopolitical way to control women’s lives… and above all to recruit adherents for authoritarian causes… What is achieved by it and who wins by achieving it? Antiabortion priests promote a speech by which ignorant masses are convinced. In a nation of illiterate individuals, including women, and of excessive corruption in moral terms, votes, tithes and general consumption are infallible. Therefore, abortion legalization is a fundamental part of a socially responsible democratic process.”

According to her curriculum, she is directly connected to Mackenzie since 2008. Her specialty is to teach philosophy and ethics. But the words that she vociferated against the unborn life at the Senate demonstrate just the opposite: a total lack of ethics. Any philosophy that despises the most innocent life despises ethics itself.

Tiburi, who in her pro-abortion feminist activism has been praised even by the Communist Party of Brazil, has been exposing her lack of ethics since before 2008. Before becoming a Mackenzie professor, she defended abortion in the official website of the Communist Party of Brazil. If the contractor (Mackenzie—Presbyterian Church of Brazil) had been careful to make a basic investigation, it would have easily found, even by a simple Google search, that it was contracting not a mere and innocent professor, but a radical activist thirsty for the legal shedding of innocent blood.

How, in these 7 years of Tiburi at Mackenzie, there was no problem and scandal? The hired individual is directly connected to the pro-abortion movement. The contractor is directly connected to the Presbyterian Church of Brazil (PCB).

Tiburi’s sheer presence as professor at a Protestant university is a sign of victory for pro-abortion militants and defeat for evangelicals, who should evangelize, not contract, propagandists of baby-killing.

When Tiburi chose the designation at the Senate of “Mackenzie professor,” she fatally compromised the institution, which, because it is openly confessional (Mackenzie PRESBYTERIAN University), chose to contract a professor who is a pro-abortion feminist militant. The case is not that she deserves to be fired from Mackenzie. She never deserved to be contracted.

The hired individual is not to blame. The contractor, which has poorly chose its job applicants, is to blame.

If a Pentecostal televangelist had committed the error of hiring a pro-abortion feminist activist for one of its confessional institutions, the self-appointed Calvinist apologists (“defenders of faith” and of “Sola Theologia”) would certainly beating them with their Calvinist sticks and damning them to hell.

In Mackenzie’s case and its pro-abortion professor, all the Calvinist apologists are in deathly silence, as if they were under monastic oaths never to expose anything of the Presbyterian university. In this scandal, no pro-abortion feminist, or her contractor, is going to be “burned” at the fire of the Holy Calvinist Inquisition. If the case were about some Pentecostal minister, he would already have become ashes at the condemnation stake.
Nevertheless, Mackenzie issued in the same day an official release saying:

Clarification Release

August 6, 2015 Chancellery Rectory

On August 6, 2015, the Mackenzie Presbyterian University president issued a release read at the Senate Human Rights Committee by Representative Leonardo Quintão to the attendees of the debate whose subject dealt with abortion. Below, the full text:

Dear Rep. Leonardo Quintão

Mackenzie Presbyterian University, based on its principles and values, rejects any attempt on life and affirms that the views expressed by its professors are products of free speech inherent to the human being and the intellectual life. Therefore, it reaffirms the stance of its supporting institution, the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, which rejects both abortion legalization, except for therapeutic abortion, when there is no other way to save the life of a pregnant woman, and the use of abortifacient contraceptives.

Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto
Mackenzie Presbyterian University President

Evidently, Mackenzie is not to blame for the insane views of its professors. But cannot a Protestant-professing institution make a selection and hire only morally fit professors and according to basic Christian and moral principles? Is there so big shortage of competent Calvinist applicants for jobs in the Calvinist institution that was necessary to hire an advocate of baby-killing? Why did not Mackenzie choose a pro-family Calvinist? Is there, in the whole PCB, no Calvinist able, in the place of the pro-abortion feminist, to teach philosophy and ethics at Mackenzie?

And now does Mackenzie want to dissociate itself from the hired activist by invoking, in a cynically democratic nod, a defense of an alleged “product of free speech”?

In this point, I am shocked! Is defense of abortion “free speech”? What about the defense of the Holocaust? What about the defense of Nazism? What about the defense of the Inquisition, which slaughtered Jews and Protestants?

Is lack of ethics “free speech”?

What about if instead of the pro-abortion professor, Mackenzie had a Julio Severo who, in his life outside Mackenzie, voiced views against the cessationist heresy, the Marxist Theology of Integral Mission and Freemasonry? Would Mackenzie then defend the stances of Julio Severo as “products of free speech”?

Mackenzie president’s release made it clear that the Presbyterian Church of Brazil “rejects abortion legalization, except for therapeutic abortion.” He had to quote the Presbyterian Church of Brazil (PCB), because the Mackenzie Presbyterian University is subordinate to PCB — thereby making, in a sense, pro-abortion Tiburi strangely connected to PCB.

Yet, why does not PCB also reject the so called therapeutic abortion? Dr. Brian Clowes, in his massive work “The Facts of Life,” says,

Therapeutic abortion: The current medical literature equates “legal abortion” with “therapeutic abortion.” The definition of the word “therapeutic,” however, mean “treatment of disease.” The use of the term “therapeutic” is another pro-abortion attempt to sanitize a repulsive act, and it also implies that pregnancy is a disease — an assertion many pro-abortionists have made directly.

Dr. Roy Heffernan of Tufts University Medical School has said that “Anyone who performs a therapeutic abortion is either ignorant of modern medical methods or unwilling to take the time and effort to apply them.”

If Mackenzie is really filled with activists with the same mindset as Márcia Tiburi, as she alleged at the Senate herself, I am going to receive a deluge of boos and complaints. And perhaps even lawsuits. I can hardly wait the headlines: “Pro-Abortion Professors at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University Sue Pro-Lifer Julio Severo!”

Be it as it may, no Christian-professing institution is forced to hire feminist militants whose lack of ethics leads them to advocate the legal slaughter of the unborn. If they do it, they have to take the consequences of a bad Christian testimony.

Portuguese version of this article: O Mackenzie e sua professora abortista