A CHRISTIAN DECLARATION ON THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE

Excerpt from Chapter 4: ALWAYS ASK THIS QUESTION

Finally given an opportunity to provide some clarity to the muddled mess the Roe v. Wade decision had left in its wake, five justices of the Supreme Court attempted to articulate a more precise justification for the legality and morality of human fetus killing.  Their pitiful effort shows that even when given almost 20 years to come up with a better explanation for the gruesome practice, the brightest legal minds can’t offer anything beyond a self-defeating quagmire of personal preferences.

They wrote:

“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision.  Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.  At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Attempting to fully grasp the breathtaking ignorance of this proclamation is a daunting task.  What is the purpose of any law (or any court, for that matter) if it is not to maintain or preserve morality?  That’s what laws and court opinions do: declare something to be right and something to be wrong.  

Again, imagine consistently applying the Court’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey logic by saying to the slave, 

“We find slavery offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision.”  

Or perhaps, 

“We find child molesting offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision.”  

Such foolishness is to be expected of juvenile minds, but it is inexcusable coming from those who have in many ways become our black-robed oligarchs.

Moreover, in what amounts to a mammoth definition of liberty, the Supreme Court basically endorses societal anarchy by proclaiming that any concept of right or wrong is left up to the individual.  This is the bumper sticker mentality: “Don’t like abortion?  Don’t have one.”  

While this may satisfy the intellectual curiosity of those whose consciences have been seared by humanism and the prideful arrogance it inevitably breeds, it should terrify us that the highest court in the land has been reduced to such foolishness.  

Rather than diligent allegiance to the authority of Moral Law, they have deferred to the wisdom of what they read on the back window of the minivan while parked at a stoplight.  As before, simply apply any other moral issue to this ruling’s pseudo-wisdom and you see the problem: “Don’t like slavery?  Don’t own one.”  “Don’t like theft?  Don’t steal.”

This is the consequence of having a predetermined end that you know violates Moral Law, and yet trying to find any way to justify it.  It’s why Judge Robert Bork fittingly excoriated the five justices who signed their names to this insanity by writing:

“One would think that grown men and women, purporting to practice an intellectual profession, would themselves choose to die with dignity, right in the courtroom, before writing sentences like those.”

It’s also why columnist and professor Jeffrey Rosen, the legal affairs editor for the liberal The New Republic magazine wrote a decade after the Casey ruling in 2003:

“Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification…that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun's famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it.”

That inability to tie this gruesome practice of child sacrifice to any logical justification compels those who continue supporting it to willfully assume the role of fools.  Only by feigning complete obliviousness to the most basic questions can they escape the inexcusable cowardice that defines their refusal to defend the rights of inconvenient children.

Consider as an example of this weakness the asinine response U.S. President Barack Obama gave to minister Rick Warren during the 2008 presidential campaign.  At the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama and Warren had the following exchange...