To the Rulers of Alaska

To the Governor of Alaska and to the members of the Alaska Legislature,

I write from Juneau as a Christian man who holds no office and seeks none. This letter asks nothing of you. It sets on the record what God requires of the offices you hold, so that no one who bears the sword in this state can say afterward that no one told him. I leave Alaska tomorrow, and that is why the letter comes now. God told Ezekiel what a watchman owes. “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet and the people are not warned, and a sword comes and takes a person from them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require from the watchman’s hand” (Ezekiel 33:6 LSB). A man who sees the sword and leaves the wall in silence answers for the blood. This is the trumpet.

The fault begins with men, and I am one of them

I will not indict you before I confess. The disorder this state protects by law was established in Alaska’s churches before any court protected it, and it was established by men. God gave men the charge to hold His order in their houses and congregations. We let it go. We let women teach and rule where God forbade it, we redefined submission until it meant nothing, we removed every visible sign of the order and replaced it with silence, and we called the silence peace. Nehemiah confessed the sins of a people before he asked anything of a king: “I and my father’s house have sinned” (Nehemiah 1:6 LSB). I belong to the churches that did this, and I confess it as theirs and mine.

I confess my own part as well. I held headship in my house and I did not lay it down. The watch is a different duty from the rule, and a man can keep the rule and still fail the watch. I trusted where I should have guarded, and I called that trust liberty. The enemy walked through the gate I left open, and the cost came to my own door. I say that first so that what follows cannot be mistaken for a man shouting at the state about a sin he has not confessed before God.

Abortion came to Alaska as the fruit of a settled conviction that a person owns himself, and that conviction was ratified in the pews before any court protected it. The men who should have held the created order surrendered it. Women filled the ground men left empty. An ideology then consecrated the arrangement and gave it a name. The state inherited a disorder the churches had already made.

What you are

Your office is not your own. Scripture defines it, and the definition does not wait on your belief. “For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist have been appointed by God” (Romans 13:1 LSB). Paul writes of the ruler, “for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword in vain, for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil” (Romans 13:4 LSB). The word behind “minister” is diakonos (deacon, servant). Twice in one verse Paul calls the magistrate God’s deacon. He wrote it under Nero. The unbelief of the man holding the sword changed nothing about whose sword it was.

Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar the same. The decree was given “In order that the living may know That the Most High is the powerful ruler over the kingdom of mankind And gives it to whom He wishes And sets up over it the lowliest of men” (Daniel 4:17 LSB). You hold your seat because God gave it. You will answer to Him for what you did with it. Paul told the philosophers of Athens that the day of that answer is already fixed: “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now commanding men that everyone everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He determined, having furnished proof to all by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31 LSB).

The second Psalm addresses rulers directly.

So now, O kings, show insight; Take warning, O judges of the earth. Serve Yahweh with fear And rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He become angry, and you perish in the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

Psalm 2:10-12 LSB

The Son in that Psalm is named five verses earlier, “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You” (Psalm 2:7 LSB), and the apostles applied the Psalm to Jesus Christ by name (Acts 4:25-27 and Acts 13:33). The command to kiss the Son is addressed to kings and judges as kings and judges. It stands over the ones who do not believe it. It is the standing order of your office.

The order you were given

God made the man first and made the woman for him. “Then Yahweh God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him’” (Genesis 2:18 LSB). Paul rests the ordering of authority between men and women first on that act of creation: “For it was Adam who was first formed, and then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13 LSB). He adds the deception in the fall as a second ground (1 Timothy 2:14).

The fall bent that order into a contest. God told the woman, “Your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16 LSB). The word for desire appears again one chapter later, where sin’s “desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7 LSB). The word can name plain longing, as it does in the Song of Songs (7:10), and the parallel with Cain in the next chapter is what gives it its edge here. Read together, the two verses describe a desire to master, and a struggle over who rules. That is the argument I make from the text, and I make it openly: feminism is that struggle made into a doctrine. It teaches that the order of creation is oppression and that the woman’s freedom lies in casting it off. That is the serpent’s proposal in Eden restated, and it is what Alaska’s laws now assume.

But mark who God addressed first. The woman “gave also to her husband with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6 LSB). Adam was there. When God came, “Yahweh God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” (Genesis 3:9 LSB). The sentence on the man begins, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife” (Genesis 3:17 LSB). God called the head to account first, and Paul names Adam as the one through whom sin entered the world (Romans 5:12). That order of accountability stands in every house, every church, and every legislature since. When men will not carry the authority God gave them, someone else takes it up.

The blood

God forms the child. “For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13 LSB). Among the seven things He hates are “hands that shed innocent blood” (Proverbs 6:17 LSB). His law for the whole of mankind, given to Noah before any nation existed, is this: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man” (Genesis 9:6 LSB). Moses adds what that blood does to the ground a magistrate governs.

So you shall not pollute the land in which you are; for blood pollutes the land, and no propitiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it.

Numbers 35:33 LSB

Some will answer that Exodus 21:22 treats the death of an unborn child as a matter for a fine. Read it. If men strike a woman “so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined,” and “if there is any further injury, then you shall pay life for life” (Exodus 21:22-23 LSB). The fine covers the case where the child comes early and no injury follows. Where the child dies, the law says life for life. The unborn child is a life under the same law as every other.

That law knows no exemption for the one who bears the child. “You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not fear man, for the judgment is God’s” (Deuteronomy 1:17 LSB). Justice for shed blood falls on every hand that sheds it. A statute that punishes the physician and shields the mother, or shields both, is partiality in judgment, and Scripture calls partiality injustice (Leviticus 19:15). What the statute must say belongs to your office. That it must answer for blood, from every hand, is settled already.

Alaska repealed its own law against abortion in 1970, three years before Roe. In 1972 the people amended the constitution to recognize a right of privacy, and in 1997 the Alaska Supreme Court read abortion into that clause in Valley Hospital Association v. Mat-Su Coalition for Choice. Since then the court has struck a parental notification law (2016), struck limits on Medicaid payment for abortion (2019), and a superior court has struck the requirement that only a physician perform one (2024), a ruling the state appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court, which heard argument in October 2025. No statute of this state names a point in a pregnancy after which a child may not be killed. The state pays for the killing through Medicaid. When the elders of Israel found innocent blood in their territory they broke the neck of a heifer, washed their hands over it, and swore before God, “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it” (Deuteronomy 21:7 LSB), and they asked Yahweh to forgive His people (Deuteronomy 21:8). You cannot take that oath. Your treasury signs the check.

The court is not the higher magistrate

For nearly thirty years, whenever the court has spoken, the legislature has yielded. A lesser magistrate who yields the sword to an unjust decree of a higher one has abandoned his own office. The Hebrew midwives received Pharaoh’s order and refused it: “But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken to them, but let the boys live” (Exodus 1:17 LSB). Peter and the apostles answered the council, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29 LSB). The pastors of Magdeburg confessed the same in 1550 when the emperor commanded them to abandon the Reformation: the lower magistrate is bound by God to resist the higher when the higher commands sin. The court holds the judicial power the constitution gives it. Your offices hold their own, and your duty before God did not pass to the court when it ruled. A governor and a legislature who treat a court’s reading of a privacy clause as the end of the matter, while the state pays for the shedding of innocent blood, have done what Adam did. They stood beside the tree and let another voice govern. The amendment path exists, and SJR 4, proposed in 2021, died in committee. The interposition of your offices exists, and it has not been tried. The blood keeps coming.

Repent and believe

Isaiah addressed the rulers of Jerusalem as the rulers of Sodom (Isaiah 1:10), and he told them why God would not hear their prayers: “Your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15 LSB). In the same chapter God commanded them to wash themselves, to cease doing evil, to seek justice and defend the orphan (1:16-17), and He made them an offer: “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says Yahweh, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool” (Isaiah 1:18 LSB).

That offer stands for you. “It is a trustworthy saying and deserving full acceptance: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15 LSB). The men who called for His crucifixion heard Peter declare that God had made Him Lord and Christ, and Peter told them to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins (Acts 2:36-38).

A ruler’s sin is public, and his repentance must be public. It means confessing before God that the protection of bloodshed in this state is sin, ceasing to pay for it, and using the office to end it by statute, by amendment, and by refusing to treat a court’s reading of a privacy clause as the end of the matter. Faith means resting on Christ alone for forgiveness, because no reform of law washes away the blood already shed. The Son you are commanded to kiss bore the wrath of God for every sinner who takes refuge in Him.

What a ruler is for

David’s last words set the standard God holds you to: “He who rules over men as a righteous one, Who rules in the fear of God, Is as the light of the morning when the sun rises, A morning without clouds” (2 Samuel 23:3-4 LSB). That is the office. Every one of you holds it by that standard, whatever your platform said, because the standard was fixed before Alaska existed.

I have no power over you and I want none. I have set the Word of God before the offices of this state and dated it. From this day the rulers of Alaska have been told what the sword is for, whose sword it is, what the created order is, which sex abandoned it first, what innocent blood does to a land, and what the Son requires of the kings and judges of the earth. His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him.

Ken Duffy Juneau, Alaska