Human Rights in Peril

“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).

“For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. . . . My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them” (Psalm 139:13, 15-16).

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government . . .” —The United States Declaration of Independence

 

The German phrase “lebensunwertes leben,” coined by Nazis and repeated frequently during Hitler’s reign of terror, literally means “life unworthy of life.”

Every moral enormity perpetrated by the infamous Third Reich can be traced back to a single thought:  the idea that some humans are “unworthy” of the right to life.

Since 1973, the same logic Hitler employed to justify genocide in Nazi Germany has been used in America to justify the genocide of the pre-born and, as it turns out, the post-born as well.

Folks, ideas have consequences.  When you exchange the truth that human beings have intrinsic value because they are uniquely created in the image of God (imago Dei) for the catastrophic falsehood that some extrinsic feature or function or ability is required to qualify a person for human rights protections, you can then justify virtually any crime against humanity.  Of course, at that point, it will no longer be a crime, but somebody’s “right.”

In America, we exchanged the truth for a lie in 1973 when seven unelected judges arbitrarily determined that unborn children are unworthy of life.  In the four decades following that indefensible Supreme Court ruling, more than 51 million innocent human children have been brutally slain in the name of “liberty”; and the death toll of murdered babies continues to rise by thousands per day.

Over the years since Roe v. Wade, our nation has gradually descended down a slippery, but logical, slope.  Along the descent, we’ve opened the doors to euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research, partial-birth abortion, and outright infanticide.  In fact, in February 2012, the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article by two philosophers who proposed a serious argument in favor of legalizing the killing of newborn infants.  To support their chilling thesis, they cited the same reasons usually put forward by the pro-abortion crowd to justify the killing of children inside the womb (e.g., inconvenience; financial costs; social, emotional, and/or psychological burdens to the mother; a woman’s “right to choose,” etc.).  Their reasoning is not the least bit surprising either.  After all, if it is lawful to kill human beings up through 9 months of pregnancy, why not 1 minute after the baby is delivered?  1 hour?  1 day?  1 month?

As shocking as it sounds, Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer holds the horrific view that a newborn infant should not be classified as a person until 30 days after birth!  He makes this argument in a book titled Practical Ethics (1979), which is now, appallingly, a standard-issue textbook for graduate students worldwide.  Singer, who is currently Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, also contends that disabled infants may be killed at will.  (Parents, unless for some twisted reason you actually want your child’s conscience or soul to be eviscerated and likely damned to hell, just say no to an “Ivy League” education — and save gazillions of dollars in the process!)

When a society disregards the unique, intrinsic, God-endowed worth and dignity of every human life (which, by the way, begins at the moment of fertilization when a single-celled, genetically distinct, fully human zygote is formed — an incontrovertible biological fact that embryologists have long known for certain), then that society can and will, little by little, justify increasingly repugnant forms of murder.  Our cavalier use of innocent-sounding euphemisms such as “choice,” “reproductive freedom,” “termination of pregnancy,” “partial-birth abortion,” and very soon, “after-birth abortion” merely serves to anesthetize our consciences to acts of evil we once considered unthinkable.    

Clever little devils, aren’t we?

Please don’t mistake me for an alarmist, ladies and gentlemen.  The gravity of the situation is real, and the danger is present.  Greg Koukl, president of Stand to Reason, agrees:

The notion that humans are different in an absolutely glorious way from every other created thing is the idea that single-handedly guarantees our liberties and secures our safety.  This distinction is an inherent quality that cannot be effaced, a fixed reality of the “laws of nature” and a gift of “nature’s God.”  It is the one thing grounding our “unalienable” rights—privileges and prerogatives still in force even when denied or disregarded.  Yet this core conviction, the very foundation of human rights, is disappearing.  I called its passing the “death of humanness” (Solid Ground Newsletter, May/June 2012, p. 2, emphasis mine).

 

If you care about the plight of human rights, please read this:  “The Death of Humanness“

And please watch this:  180 Movie

Remember, when a society justifies eliminating human life at any age or level of development, the natural tendency is to expand that group gradually to include more and more people at later and later stages of human development and for different circumstances.  What we can infer from this is that, if any human life is deemed “disposable” by a society, regardless of the reason, then no human life is safe.  But this is exactly what we should expect to happen when depraved fools like us attempt to play God and arbitrarily decide among ourselves who is worthy of life and who is not.