What litmus test could you offer that would apply to all places and all times as a way for a person to look around themselves with completely clear eyes, piercing through even the thickest fog of self-delusion and widespread cultural acceptance, and see that they are surrounded by grave evil? Is there any simple way for a person to immediately undergo an earth-rocking paradigm shift in which they look up and realize that the world around them is not what they thought it was?
One thing that stands out in all these examples is that the victims of the widespread evil were categorized as something less than human. In fact, though the exact level and degree of evil that took place may vary, one thing that unites all of these practices as worthy of a place in the Human Depravity Hall of Fame is not only that innocent people were killed or enslaved, but that their humanity was taken away by the societies around them. The Nazis classified their victims as sub-human, less worthy of life than the better members of the race; wives were burned with their husbands because they were seen as nothing more than property; in the 90's in Rwanda the media fueled the genocide by assuring citizens over and over again that Tutsis were not fully human, referring to them as insects rather than people; the Romans accepted it as a matter of fact that baby girls inherently had fewer rights to live than baby boys; and in early America enslaved men, women and children were accepted by both government and society at large to be barely above livestock in their dignity and worth.
So here is the advice I would offer to my children, and to my children's children:
Every decade or so, take a look around the society in which you live, and ask yourself if there is any group of human beings who are seen as something less than human. A big tipoff is if dehumanizing words -- terms other than "man," "woman," "child," "baby," or "person" -- are used to describe any category of people.
And if you ever see that going on, you might be in the midst of something gravely evil.
That a fetus is a human being is an obvious truth.
It's provable by science.
It's provable by logic.
Killing a fetus is also demonstrably wrong.
But the opponents of fetal rights refuse to consider it. It's all "religious dogmatism". That's their excuse for not examining the facts about the unborn child.
They play semantics. They try to make the fetus other than a human being. Or they try to make this kind of human being something other than a person.
As if there were different categories of human beings-- some being more equal than others.
The pro-life cause is based on simplicity. Simple language. Simple logic. Simple truth.
The pro-abortion movement needs "nuance" to make its case. I know, it makes them appear so intellectually sophisticated to be able to contend with "ambiguities" and "uncertainties" and to say that since we can't resolve these ambiguities and uncertainies,we might as well "respect everyone's opinion"-- as if you could respect the opinion that equal human beings should be killed.
They use the simplicity of the pro-life position to make its supporters look like simpletons.
But sometimes the truth is obvious and simple.
Killing innocent human beings is wrong. It's that plain.
Unfortunately, some people still haven't learned history's lesson yet.
