Abortion IS Tainting Obama's Legacy

Tainted victory

By John Mallon

It is a great moment indeed in the history of our country that at long last an African-American has been elected President of the United States. We are still within living memory of fire hoses being turned on black people for nothing more than demanding the equality promised in the Constitution. All who were horrified by these events occurring in the 1960s and before, and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and his tragic assassination have a right to tears of joy at this moment.

But there is a problem; a problem that taints what should otherwise be a great moment for all Americans who feel pain and shame over the legacy of slavery and subsequent discrimination that remained for a century after emancipation.

What happened in the sixties was that the weight of the "racial hypocrisy" that had been the status quo up to that time became evident and undeniable. One could no longer speak about "all men are created equal" without thinking of the violent treatment of black people and racial discrimination.

So, forty-five years to the day after Dr. King's watershed "I have a Dream" speech a black man mounted a glittering stage to accept his party's nomination to run for president of the United States. He was duly elected and sworn in on the day after the holiday created in Dr. King's honor. This was a great milestone in American history. Nevertheless it is a tainted victory.

So how is it tainted? How is this joy blunted?

People of today rightly look back at American slavery and the Nazi Holocaust with shame with honest bewilderment asking, "How could they do it? What were they thinking?" But I am old enough to remember people using the "N word" and scoffing at or ridiculing anyone who took exception to it. I can also remember a time when slurs were uttered about Jewish people and if you didn't laugh you were considered a wet blanket. For those who didn't live through those times, it is hard to imagine anyone getting away with these attitudes, but that's the way it was. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to project the sensibilities of today onto the past, expecting that people would behave the way we think they should today.

Unfortunately, though, it seems every generation has a category of people it is "acceptable" to look down upon by diminishing their humanity. Blacks were judged to be only two-thirds human. Jews were portrayed as subhuman. How ridiculous and shameful this looks to us today. But the same phenomenon exists in our midst today: Unborn children are denied their full status as human beings with an unalienable right to live.

Abortion supporters get upset at comparisons of today's abortion situation to slavery and the Holocaust. Admittedly, the analogy isn't perfect. But to understand, imagine the following: In the vast and tedious bureaucracy of Hell, a department of genocide. The devil can't hurt God but he can hurt what God loves: People. Recall that Jesus said the devil was a murderer and a liar from the beginning. The devil and his minions want to steal the human race from God and get them under their dominion.

Imagine a committee in this department to perfect and render acceptable the practice of genocide. They recognize that slavery and the Nazi holocaust were too cruel and ugly so they have been working on refining genocide in such a way to make is seem "acceptable" and marketable. They finally hit upon a way to frame it as a "human right" tying it to the emancipation of women. No more lynchings or breaking into people's homes and dragging them away.

Replace the filth of the death camps with a sterile medical procedure room. If you are against it you are against women, just as you were a traitor to the Fatherland if you were against the "final solution." So you have a neat sterile, socially acceptable killing field, and the results are the same: tens of millions of dead, this time not limited by race or creed: an equal opportunity genocide.

The analogy is not perfect because in abortion the overt hatred of prejudice is not present; no one "hates" unborn babies in the sense that blacks and Jews were, but in a sense that only make it more insidious and pernicious. The unborn are not so much actively persecuted as they are dismissed. (Hatred and prejudice are saved for their defenders.)

There is, ostensibly, a failure to see the continuity of the inhumanity linking slavery and the Holocaust with abortion. The common thread is death, and in the latter two, genocide: Six million Jews, 50 million unborn children. The combined death toll of World Wars I and II was 70 million. We are just 20 million short.

How did this happen?

Spurred on by civil right movement of the sixties, other groups came forward demanding "liberation," based not on ethnicity but ideology and various concerns, some of them involving genuine injustices that needed to be addressed. The women's movement and a bit later on, the "gay rights" movement came to the fore.

The women's movement made a tragic mistake by confusing "liberation" with being more like men, including men at their worst. This ideology insisted that to achieve equality womanhood needed to be freed from the shackles of biology and be truncated from one of its most beautiful elements: the ability to conceive and bear children.

This faculty, a fundamental aspect of womanhood, was viewed as an obstacle to women's advancement. But human nature does not change; it can only be disciplined by striving for virtue. Contraception and legal abortion only made it easier to exploit women and gave women the illusion that this was equality. With the opportunity for ostensibly consequence free sex, virtue went out the window for both sexes. But women suffered more. Rather than "liberation" a whole new host of obstacles ensued.

"Sexual Freedom" and abortion tragically became the sine qua non of women's liberation and proponents were quick to piggyback their movement on the back of the civil rights movement making common cause, but ideology, especially sexual ideology, is not synonymous with ethnicity and does not have inherent rights.

Therefore this false notion of liberation was built on the oppression, or rather, the suppression of the rights of another class of people: unborn children. As black people before them, who were deemed three-fifths human, by a bad Supreme Court decision, the unborn, via Roe v. Wade were given the legal status of non-persons. They were out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and anyone who argued for their rights was shouted down as an "oppressor" of women.

It has long been a truism of Western thought that true liberation is never gained by destroying the rights of another. And this is precisely what has happened, through the attempt to achieve liberation for women by extinguishing the rights and lives of the children of those women. Unborn children are members of society who greatly enrich society and our society is immeasurably poorer for their legally sanctioned deaths.

So, this mountaintop moment of a black man's nomination for president is greatly diminished when the platform on which he stands includes the denial of the right to life of the most innocent and defenseless members of society: the child in the womb.

The blind spot that denied rights to black people by people who saw no conflict between the words of our founding documents and the oppression of black people is at work in rhetoric that speaks of the promise of America that a child could achieve whatever he put his or her mind to.

Nothing threatens the promise of America more than abortion.

Yet, on August 28, 2008, in his speech accepting his party's nomination in Colorado, Mr. Obama said:
"That's the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper."

Unless you are in the womb, that is.
"You know, Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don't have that chance."

Yet some children were not allowed to be born. They had no chance.
"And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have the exact same opportunities as your sons.

"That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night and a promise that you make to yours, a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west, a promise that led workers to picket lines and women to reach for the ballot."

The unborn have no chance, no promises; they will never cast a ballot.

The blindness Mr. Obama demonstrates here is as stark as that which ignored the Constitution as fire hoses were turned on African Americans seeking their rights in the 1960s.

It is a tragic irony that this victory for one historically oppressed people should result in stepped-up oppression of another group wrongly considered less than human: the unborn. Mr. Obama's promises to clear the way for increased destruction for unborn people make his indeed a tainted victory.

© John Mallon