Unalienable Right...to Life--A Bedrock Value

I don’t have many conversation pieces, but my favorite is sitting on my cluttered dining room table being used as a hat rack. I once displayed it prominently in my science classroom. It is a statue of a monkey sitting on a stack of books, including one by Darwin, and scratching his head.

Many things that happen today make me scratch my head, even though I actually read the books, listen to the reporters, and watch events unfold with a measure of understanding, beyond the need for food and other biological imperatives. For example, how does the death of a horse become thelead story on nearly every news outlet? Granted it was a valuable horse, and perhaps its owners truly loved it and not just the millions it might have earned, winning races and siring future offspring. Still, how many humans died that day, people loved by their families and able to give far greater, if less tangible value? How many unborn or just born children have died in anonymity, at the hands of doctors who should have protected their lives? How many humans lost their lives to aggression, abuse, crime, and war? How does any horse’s death, however tragic, warrant more attention that all those children, women, and men?

Whatever opinions you have about the wars in the Mideast like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, a far more important campaign must be conducted here and ultimately abroad. Ideas like evolution, in particular, have furtively invaded our culture and beliefs, not unlike the way illegal immigrants continue to overrun our borders. Beyond President Trump, few leaders are willing to work to reverse or even slow either penetration; in fact, many of them have already surrendered while others are themselves invaders or collaborators. Democrats especially are committed to killing babies even after birth, if the mother chooses—infanticide, not abortion; and Democrats also virtually scream there is no emergency at the border despite massive drug smuggling, horrible sex trafficking of women and even children, dangerous gang infiltrations, on top of millions of illegal aliens coming and staying without regard to our immigration laws.

One of the bedrock concepts of Western civilization is respect for life, human life. A regard for life raised slaves, peasants, and poor people to full status as humans. In the process, it equalized rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, adult and child. Orphanages, hospitals, and schools, first private and then public, gradually delivered housing, medicine, and education to everyone. I would argue that Christian ideas were inseparably linked to these developments because Christ and the Bible teach that God loves all His creatures, especially those He created in His own image. “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,” declared our forefathers in the Declaration of Independence.

When and why, then, have we turned away from this bedrock truth, the “unalienable right to life?” Apart from the natural human inclination to sin and selfishness, evolution opened the door to removing God from the picture and, ironically, to a nearly Eastern religious sense that all life is the same. On the one side, life is nothing more than a cosmic accident, insignificant in the vastness of the universe, and each organism so transient as to have little enduring value. On the other hand, every plant and animal is part of a vast living presence in which each is equally precious; bugs and bacteria, horses and humans, cats and cacti, snail darters and slime molds, chickens and children are the same.

Progressive, evolutionary thinking is drummed into every public school student throughout their educational experience. Alternatives, such as Intelligent Design, are scorned as unscientific, not in true scientific openness but in an attitude that seeks to advance a pervasive agenda that touches many of today’s critical issues. From that perspective, the unborn, undeveloped fetus is merely proto-life, a potential human, and therefore expendable to the selfish choices of the woman with an unplanned pregnancy and to the agenda of pro-abortion feminists and social engineers. Similarly, since a blob of fetal tissue isn’t a person, in their view, we certainly may use it to find cures for the sick, especially those who are famous and rich. Of the other hand, the elderly, handicapped, and chronically ill, whose “quality of life” is limited or virtually nil, may end their lives when they choose, or we may decide to end it, “for their own good,” just like Barbaro or the perfectly healthy pets destroyed by PETA. If human life isn’t unique, if men, women, children, the unborn, the handicapped, and the aged are no different than the life of the lowest animal, then humans are no better than other living things, and every living thing is equally entitled to life, just as pet owners, animal rights activists, vegans, and vegetarians insist.

Furthermore, justice must yield to the preservation of the life of criminals. Evolution has no laws or “unalienable rights,” so murderers have just as much right to live as the unborn, more in fact since criminals are “fully human”. Why else would those against capital punishment insist that pro-lifers aren’t really “pro-life.” To those who have accepted evolutionary thinking, the life of a serial killer is as worthy of protection as the life of an unborn child. Anti-war thinking follows the same progressive logic in saying all cultures have equal value: primitive life is as good as modern life, cannibals are equal to Christians, and aboriginal tribes are just as valid as urban country clubs. I wouldn’t want to live in the jungle, and neither would most who try to keep others in primitive conditions, yet the idea that every culture is equivalent and valuable seeks to “protect” primitives from civilization, even as it advance the agendas of alternative lifestyles—gay rights, bisexuality, transgenderism, and hedonism.

Yet, beyond the obvious “life issues,” the loss of the bedrock value for human life also influences other critical issues. The debate about illegal immigration, for example, is remarkably disingenuous. I strongly suspect that the defenders for amnesty or guest worker programs care very little for the illegals in question, despite their rhetoric. To them, they are cheap labor, not unlike the peasants from before modern Western civilization; that is why little effort is given to fixing the problems in their native lands, where they already live as peasants, or to educating them here, despite the requirement for them to be enrolled in public schools. Bilingual laws and multicultural political-correctness, along with a near universal failure to teach or require English, guarantee that many immigrants, regardless of the legal status, will do “the dirty jobs no real American wants!” That attitude does not value immigrant lives; it despises them.

Another example is public education. Christians demanded that their children be taught to read the Bible, and virtually every American community tried to establish their own local school. Universal, basic education was a vital corollary of the practice of liberty and republican democracy. As women, children, and former slaves gained “unalienable rights,” they gained access to a free education. However, as the intellectual elite embraced progressive ideas of life, the idea of every life being the same robbed public education of common sense. A disregard for the humanity of children allowed them to become guinea pigs in the experiments of educators with novel ideas for teaching math and reading, and a whole generation of children grew up unable to read or do math. Despite public awareness and the understandable outcry, such experiments continue, American high school students now lag substantially behind students of many other countries. Not only do some advocate the killing of the unborn, and even the killing of the, if you will, “accidentally born” (infanticide), but they seem to favor the destruction of their minds, reasoning capabilities, and wills!

Another educational experiment also defies common sense but fits the notion that every life is the same. It seemed to begin with “mainstreaming” the mentally challenged, the seeing and hearing impaired, and anyone who once received separate specialized education, for obvious reasons. The preeminent value of “socialization,” that decreed that teenagers, especially, attend the same schools and classes as all others of the same age, trumped all other considerations. More subtly, it required the intellectually capable and gifted and those uninterested and not gifted for academic education follow the same educational plan, once called “college prep.” Vocational schools, originally promoted to offer alternative training for those more inclined to non-academic employment vocations, now offer little such training. Schools dilute the education of the gifted while they neglect realistic preparation for skilled trades. In the same classes, less academically inclined pupils are bored and create discipline problems because the material is too difficult and doesn’t interest them; brighter students lose interest and cause difficulties because the material is repetitive and unchallenging, especially since few teachers could possibly teach adequately in these circumstances (Many are simply incompetent, themselves products of the misdirected educational establishment). I suspect that racist and elitist attitudes easily infect teachers, stuck in classrooms where real teaching has become virtually impossible; thus the entire system has lost respect for the lives of poor, inner city, black, immigrant, and other intellectually challenged kids, ultimately joining the elite establishment educators who have little respect the lives of other people’s children.

Finally, in the current era of terrorism and aggression by radical Islamists, the progressive view is that all life and lifestyles are the same; at the same time all are worthless. Many in the media, government, and anti-conservative groups speak as if non-Western people, religion, and culture are equally worthy of respect. I would agree that every person is worthy of respect, but not necessarily their beliefs and attitudes. Ironically, Islam shares some of the basic values I have discussed here, believing as they do in a Creator and Sovereign God. Sadly, like many other religions and philosophies, Islam holds on to primitive ideas that Western civilization, guided by Christianity, gradually rejected. Many of the most radical have no regard for life; they teach suicide bombers to kill and die for their political and religiously-driven agenda, neither respecting the life of their victims nor their own life. The promise of a virgin-blessed afterlife is, at the least, pathetic and, at the worst, corrupt; I lean toward the corrupt, since the leaders, who direct their followers to kill others by killing themselves, seem not to practice what they preach!

In many Islamic countries, they rule by slavery, oppression of women, and religious bigotry. Of all the diverse religions that have controlled the lives of people on this earth, Islam is often the worst. It remains imperialistic in its aims, follows a strategy of “kill or convert,” and seems to prefer to keep people poor and primitive. Unique among modern religions, it converts by conquest and prevents conversion to anything else by threat of death. Although some Muslims manage to adapt their faith into a more tolerant form, radicals dominate Islam despite those who are more tolerant. The goal of would-be conquerors is to impose “sharia,” Islamic law intolerant in the extreme, upon everyone; where Christians, Jews, and others dwell, radical Muslims typically treat them as inferior, second-class citizens, who often lack basic rights.

I began by describing a favorite conversation piece. Then I described a virtual war that needed fighting as much as the war on terror. I have focused on a bedrock value, a respect for human life. Do we use a “conversation piece” to fight this war? Since I believe this campaign must be a “war of words,” we need different kinds of weapons. Elections and politicians are not the key for defeating abortion, immigration, and Islam, or any of the other controversial issues I have related to as our “unalienable right to life,” but I believe we, the people, must engage them and prevail.

We need to recognize that the “battle” is ours. We will triumph only by interacting with our neighbors and friends, families and co-workers, our children and their friends. Our “war of words” cannot be arguments, at least not in the TV or radio talk show sense. This war, unlike any other, requires love not aggression. Our words must be words of respect, insight, persuasion, and substance. We must know our enemy, which means we must both know and understand the people with whom we interact as well as the people they listen to and follow, and we must know and understand the ideas we seek to defeat.

As a Christian, I believe each of us has an individual responsibility to introduce people to the person and ideas of Christ and to train and mentor (the Bible’s word is disciple) people to become effective Christian believers, who not only believe but live as they should. Christians too often ignore this responsibility, either thinking that their donations pay professionals to do it or simply see themselves as too busy or too ill-equipped to do the job. I believe that the campaign I advocate is similar for conservative Americans, if not identical, as for Christians. I suggest that we act in kindness, patience, and truth to win people over to life, to respect for all humans of every age, culture, or circumstance, to a strong commitment to liberty, and ultimately to faith in the Giver of Life.

Many fear that America is moving toward a day when it may reject or even persecute Christians; already it limits religious freedom, while claiming to preserve it. Freedom of religion has become freedom from religion. Many conclude that we Christians are the victims of the oppressive acts of others, but I believe we are the victims of our own failure to interact with our neighbors, our people, and our culture. We have accepted the notion that religion is a private matter. We have dared to think that embarrassment or social stigma is the same as persecution, and we hide our faith. We have allowed the riches of this prosperous nation to shift our focus to this life instead of the next, often fighting to live longer rather than resting content in the eternal life we receive in Christ. As citizens, we take for granted our American heritage and its liberty; as Christians, we take for granted the freedom we have in Christ. We have allowed ourselves to disregard the price and nature of those freedoms so that we have become ill-equipped to defend or explain them to others, the next generation, or even our own. Our culture no longer values the contribution of the Christian faith or Christian ideas, primarily, because we fail to make our case, perhaps because we don’t understand their value ourselves.

Just as soldiers must train to fight, so we must train to engage in this campaign. I don’t think it has to be difficult, but we need to accept that we are in this engagement, that we have a job to do, and that we need to give this campaign our attention. Each of us should pay attention, vote, find and support candidates that represent our values, but that alone will never win this engagement, at least not until a comfortable majority understand the bedrock issues, such as right to life as I’ve explained it, and vote accordingly. For example, we will win the abortion battle when we have convinced most women not to have abortions. At that point, pro-abortion laws will become irrelevant, even though we could most likely change them and probably would.

Life, human life, is a gift from our Creator and an “unalienable right,” according to the Declaration of Independence. Sadly, progressive thinking, rooted in the idea of evolution, has altered the Western perception and value of life, leading to the development of a number of ideas, opposed to our traditional, historic values. Those changes threaten more than our culture but our way of life because they support our enemies and undermine our own resolve; the result could easily be the end of freedom and the United States as we know it. Can it be stopped? I believe it can, but it will require a commitment from people like you to engage our fellow citizens and win them back to “truth, justice, and the American way.”

P. S. I have not mentioned socialism in this essay. Those who are socialists and communists say they seek to create a heaven on earth, as they deny the genuine paradise God has for us who believe. Ironically, their plans, in every place they have been tried, have always come closer to creating hell. They insist that much that is wrong comes from capitalism, but their ideas when implemented never work and will never work. Why not? Some are misled idealists who deny sin and evil and, thus, make no provision to counter them. Others, often leaders, are the very personification of sin and evil, seeking their own advantage and increase at the expense, not merely of those they despise such as the wealthy but even their own followers. Finally, the cost of doing socialism is extravagant beyond belief, those who promise every imaginable benefit are either ignorant of how money and economics works or willing lie to win support, the engines of economic prosperity are destroyed vindictively, while workers and investors lose all motivation to work and produce. Governments can print money, but only labor can give that paper any real value. The result, every time, is abject poverty and not even enough food!

(Originally published on 2/7/07, revised 3/9/19)