Just as many in our country’s history were “conditioned” to find slavery acceptable, we, today, are being conditioned– increasingly coerced–into accepting abortion as the “cultural norm.”
Southern slaveholders would even co-opt Bible passages to justify slavery. Read the Rev. E. W. Warren’s small volume Southern Slavery and the Bible, published in 1864 as “a scriptural refutation of the principal arguments upon which the abolitionists relied . . . a vindication of southern slavery from the Old and New Testaments.”
Little’s changed . . .
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor relates in a May 12, 2017 article that appeared in Evolution News & Science Today, “Dr. Willie Parker is an abortionist in Alabama, and in his new book, Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, he defends abortion from his Christian perspective (he’s an Evangelical). Parker’s argument is this: there is no question that a baby in the womb is alive (he calls it “the pregnancy”); but it is not life that warrants protection, but persons. And the mother is a person, whereas, according to Parker, the baby is not. So the mother’s suffering with an unwanted pregnancy takes precedence over the life of “the pregnancy” (the baby), because the baby is not a person, has no rights, and cannot suffer.”
In an article titled, “American Slavery and the Rise of Profitable Racism,” retrieved from James Madison’s Montpelier website:
“Morality did nag at the consciences of some white Americans— the Enlightenment philosophies of natural rights and growing religious convictions were a nuisance for those profiting from the institution of slavery. The contradiction couldn’t be denied: philosophies that recognized the rights of the individual were juxtaposed against the fact that America had become a place where an entire subset of people were commoditized and dehumanized.
“The answer was pretty simple: clarify who gets to be a person and who doesn’t.”
How we defiantly strive in our arrogance to justify evil. The rationalizations for taking the life of an infant human being– without defense or recourse– are no different–hear me on this–no different than the rationalization for slavery in that sordid period of our country’s history.
Samuel Wood’s words regarding the ravages of slavery ring true on this issue of abortion, “. . . all the worst passions of the human mind, rage with unbridled license. Benevolence recoils at the dreadful perspective, and can scarce collect composure to disclose the bloody catalogue.”
One individual wrote, in response to the Empire State’s recent legislation governing abortion, “This is ‘murder by convenience.’ Civilized society is built on the basic tenet of respecting the sanctity of life. Once removed, civility can no longer be claimed. Uncivil societies never survive.”
During a commencement address before the literary societies of Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854, Frederick Douglass addressed “a matter of living importance” . . . “the manhood of the negro.”
He quotes “a respectable public journal (Richmond Examiner), published in Richmond, Virginia, which based its whole defense of the slave system upon a denial of the negro’s manhood:
“. . . here is the essence of slavery–that we do declare the negro destitute of these powers. We bind him by law to the condition of the laboring peasant for ever, without his consent, and we bind his posterity after him. Now, the true question is, have we a right to do this? If we have not, all discussions about his comfortable situation, and the actual condition of free laborers elsewhere, are quite beside the point. If the negro has the same right to his liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness that the white man has, then we commit the greatest wrong and robbery to hold him a slave–an act at which the sentiment of justice must revolt in every heart–and negro slavery is an institution which that sentiment must sooner or later blot from the face of the earth.” –Richmond Examiner
“After stating the question thus, the Examiner boldly asserts that the negro has no such right–because he is not a man!”
Commencement speaker Douglass continued, “Pride and selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify them–and when men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.
“By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman. A wholesale method of accomplishing this result, is to overthrow the instinctive consciousness of the common brotherhood of man . . . and a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution. The debate in Congress on the Nebraska Bill during the past winter, will show how slaveholders have availed themselves of this doctrine in support of slaveholding.
“They have staked out the ground beforehand . . . they have aimed to construct a theory in support of a foregone conclusion [the “baby in the womb . . . is not life that warrants protection”].”
Abraham Lincoln’s three-hour Peoria speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois on October 16, 1854, presented thorough moral, legal and economic arguments against slavery, and set the stage for Lincoln’s political future. “Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon [the god of material wealth]; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.”— Abraham Lincoln
“Every man is a creature of the age
in which he lives and few are able
to raise themselves above the ideas
of the time. He who can lead you to
believe an absurdity can lead you to
commit an atrocity.”
~Voltaire
Leave a Reply