Armenian genocide, 1915 [public domain / Pinterest]
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(9-10-08 and 2-22-14: after the five asterisks)
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One always hears this charge about pro-lifers being “one-issue” voters, as if this is a negative, undesirable, immediately discounting, disqualifying thing.
The fact is, that there are many individual issues — not just support for legal childkilling — that are “deal-breakers” in terms of voting for a candidate, and rightfully so. Abortion is often not considered to be one of these, but the moral logic is thoroughly flawed.
Consider some analogies: how about a candidate who has wonderful opinions on many or all issues except one small detail: he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan?
Would that not be a deal-breaker? Would one then be fully justified to not vote for him based on that one consideration alone, no matter what else he or she says? I say that it is self-evident that it is justified to think in such a fashion.
Abortion is an issue like that; indeed far worse than that. The wanton destruction of some 4000+ human beings a day by this abominable practice, and the upholding of it by politicians and judges, who are primarily responsible for its existence in the first place, legally-speaking, is altogether relevant, because we the voters who put such men and women in office and on judicial benches also directly bear responsibility for the holocaust. It’s the old thing about evil prevailing when good men do nothing. If a person can’t even see the intrinsic value of any human life, and the duty of government to protect that, why should we trust he or she to uphold any other lesser right?
How about another candidate who seems pretty neat except that he is an anti-Semite and believes in the worldwide Jewish banking conspiracy; that all Jews are filthy “Christ-killers” and so forth? Is that a deal-breaker? I think so. If that isn’t, then what if he took the additional step of favoring the Final Solution and killing of Jews (as a literal Neo-Nazi)? That’s certainly a deal-breaker, no? I can’t imagine an American voting for a guy whose policies about Jews resembles Adolf Hitler.
Perhaps one might reply that my analogies are extreme? Not at all; not in the least; quite the contrary, in fact! Six million Jews were “legally” murdered by Hitler’s policies. We passed that figure by 1977 with legal abortion in the US. We’re now up to more than 50 million legal abortions.
One wants to distinguish abortion from races or ethnic groups being singled out, as if it were more morally defensible? That won’t fly either, because we know that some children are aborted for reasons as monstrous as their being the “wrong” sex. Or they are killed for reasons like financial difficulty, as if that is more important in the scheme of things than an eternal soul and the life of a human being.
Hitler also had groups like the handicapped and retarded and mentally ill and Catholics and Communists and Slavs and Gypsies murdered; in fact, this was the precursor to the Final Solution. We’re not far from that mentality at all (lest we look down our nose at Hitler and the Nazis and think we are so morally superior). We now have states that have legalized assisted suicide. We murdered Terri Schiavo against her parents’ and many friends’ wishes. We murder children simply because they are diagnosed with Downs Syndrome. Recently, while reading about VP candidate Sarah Palin, who decided to bear such a child, I learned (though I haven’t confirmed how accurate this is) that nine out of ten women who get this information, decide to kill their child.
So we’re not that different at all from Hitler. He murdered Jews because he believed the usual ridiculous conspiracy theories about them. passed down for hundreds of years in European anti-Semitic myths, fables, and old wives’ tales. We murder children because they have a genetic deficiency and are not as “intelligent” as the rest of us, or because they are inconvenient or a financial burden or embarrassing or the wrong sex, or will disrupt our social standing as upright Christians (because folks would know we are sexually active and that would wreck our “good Christian” image), and so are best disposed of.
Until recently, partial-birth infanticide was perfectly legal, right up to term. Babies were partially delivered and then scissors were inserted into their skulls to remove their brains; then their skulls were crushed. Then five men on the Supreme Court declared that this should be illegal. Thankfully, they figured out (legally) what was patently obvious to any person with the most rudimentary humane and compassionate sensibility.
Which is morally worse? I think a solid moral argument could be made that our mentality and “morality” with legal abortion is even worse than Hitler and the Nazis. At least they didn’t maintain the pretense of being Christians in good standing, whereas we do.
So I ask those who use the “one-issue” canard: if you would vote for a pro-abortion politician, on what grounds would you not vote for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis? What is the huge moral difference? You’d vote for a person who would uphold and maintain the murder of some one and a half million preborn children a year, but not for a man who caused roughly the same number of murders in about four years time? In fact, Hitler was more pro-life than pro-death Democrats and Republicans, because he was opposed to the abortion of Germans. Hitler the politician was evil but Democratic candidates who sanction murder of helpless, innocent children are not when they take that stand? On what grounds?
We can overlook that “small flaw” based on their positions on other issues? I don’t think so. It is moral and intellectual suicide to do so, and the death of Christian culture.
Any number of similar issues are also deal-breakers: how about a candidate who favors sex between adults and infant children? Or one who sees nothing wrong with rape or wife-beating? Or one who wants to kill everyone over 80? Or one who wants to kick all Native Americans / Indians out of the country (Jews have often been kicked out of nations, such as in Spain and England), or to kill all American Indians (as some generals in the late 19th century actually favored)? Or one who wants to re-institute slavery or deny the vote to women or black people, or bring back child labor?
These are all deal-breakers, and in my opinion, abortion is a bigger deal-breaker than any of them, by far: more than all of them put together, because of the monstrous evil involved. It’s the defining moral issue of our time, just as slavery and the “Indian problem” and civil rights were in their time. It’s no morally better than the ancient Carthaginians sacrificing their babies regularly to Moloch in big ovens.
If any issue qualifies as “one issue” that disqualifies a candidate, it is societally sanctioned murder of innocents. And if anyone challenges you, my fellow pro-lifers reading this, as some sort of troglodyte “one-issue voter”, immediately ask them if they would vote for Hitler, or Stalin (who starved ten million Ukrainians, among other delightful activities), or Mao (responsible for about 60 million deaths), or Pol Pot, and then challenge them to make the moral distinction between those Holocausts and the abortion Holocaust. They cannot, I assure anyone. It’s impossible to do from Christian ethical principles. Christians don’t vote for Herod, do they?
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Of course, abortion is not the only thing to be concerned about; just by far (exponentially) the most pressing and important thing at the present time. When human beings are being tortured and slaughtered left and right and we are up to our necks in blood, and go about our business as if everything is normal, there is no time for philosophical niceties and analyses.
The murder has to be stopped first. “First things first” is not the same as saying, “this is all I care about, and nothing else.” When the Nazi Holocaust and Hitler’s other murderous sprees were going on, we had to stop it. The world basically stopped till that crucial, all-important task was accomplished. Western / Christian Civilization was at stake.
And so it is now. The world has now “legally” butchered 10-15 times more human beings than Hitler ever did: even far more than Hitler’s, Mao’s, and Stalin’s atrocities put together.
Society has to de-value or depersonalize the preborn child.
We don’t see them being dismembered and slaughtered; having their brains sucked out by merciless monsters (abortion “doctors”).
Because we don’t see these outrages, somehow they are regarded as less bad than they are. No crying mothers (as in Syria), no piles of dead bodies, as with the Nazis or the Armenan genocide, or Pol Pot, or Rwanda, or 9-11. No dramatic Rape of Nanking, etc. Just daily slaughter, day after day, year after year, in abortion mills down the street, next to the 7-11 and the bank, while people continue to claim to be pro-life and vote for folks who are the moral equivalents of Hitler and Mao and Stalin.
I’m arguing that our position on this is not “single-issue” at all (not if that means this is supposedly all we care about). It’s simply moral sanity and elementary rationality under that moral outlook (the analogy being the whole civilized world’s reaction to Hitler in WWII).
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Meta Description: Various analogies are made to the politician holding a pro-abortion position, which renders him (as many other issues would) unworthy for office.
Meta Keywords: Abortion, Childkilling, fetal development, fetus, genocide, holocaust, infanticide, murder, personally opposed, personhood, preborn child, prenatal, pro-abortion, pro-choice, pro-life, pro-life democrats, slaughter, unborn child, voting for pro-aborts
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