“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
But the sin of slavery was written into America’s Constitution, leading to “a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
As we commemorate the anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter on Tuesday, April 12, our national attention wanders silently back 150 years to the second-bloodiest outbreak of collective insanity in our nation’s history, a conflict that nearly tore it apart.
It happened because some Americans were willing to fight to the death for the “right” to deprive others of their freedom. They were non-persons, it was said — the Supreme Court agreed in a 7-2 decision — and their owner could freely and legally exercise the right to keep or even kill them. The opposition was merely seeking to “impose their own morality.”
The cost to redeem America’s original sin still appalls us, and well it should: just over half a million lives, mostly young ones.
As we watch the anniversaries of the days seared into our national memory slowly reel by over the next four years, with ghastly names like Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Bull Run and The Wilderness, will we learn the lessons of the Civil War?
Will we learn what Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1862? “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”
Will we agree with his 1864 letter to A.G. Hodges? “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Because if we do, then may the bitter remembrance of Harpers Ferry and Cold Harbor and Savannah and Fredericksburg and Vicksburg and Appomattox chasten our hearts to realize that we still shed our brothers’ blood. Our nation lives today in the most abhorrent collective insanity ever to grip a civilized nation. Systematically trampling the rights of others — blacks or Jews — is mind-bogglingly evil, and yet we have created legal fictions to justify immolating nearly 50 million of our own sons and daughters — non-persons with no legal rights — to the idols of “rights” and “choice” on the grisly altars of our abortionists’ tables since 1973. That’s eight times the Holocaust and practically 100 times the Civil War.
This, of course, is a laughing matter, at least for Jon Stewart on the March 9 episode of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, satirizing former Sen. Rick Santorum’s public comparison of abortion to slavery. “If politicians are so concerned about what’s killing black people, how about curing diabetes or sickle cell? Or ban something that kills us on the inside: Tyler Perry’s House of Payne,” one actor suggested to Stewart.
Here’s why. In 2007, the most recent full data available from the Centers for Disease Control, 12,459 African-Americans died of diabetes and 970 died of various forms of anemia in America. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reports that 363,000 children of black mothers were aborted here in 2008. That’s nearly 30 times the death rate from diabetes and 375 times the death rate from anemia. Why that should provoke in-studio hilarity is beyond us.
Even more disturbing: The Atlantic senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is black, wrote in criticism of Santorum that the slavery-abortion analogy breaks down because slaves were not “denied the right to exist.” We’re pleased to concede his point. He then went on to say that slavery can’t be reduced to “the simple act of slave-holding,” since it fueled America’s economic growth in the early 19th century: “In terms economic, cultural and political, slavery made America possible.” (So might makes right?) The truly jaw-dropping conclusion he draws is that Santorum — and implicitly us — is “dishonest” and racist.
But if we give freedom to the unborn, we assure freedom to the free. If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong. And no one really desires to have been aborted. Lincoln was right.
And perhaps he will be right again. Well did he prophesy to the Republican Convention in 1858 that “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.” It happened once. By God’s grace, may it happen again.
We’re sick of writing editorials about abortion. Someday the day will dawn when America is finally cured of this collective insanity too, but until it does, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Edward Pentin: Images of Rome's 2013 March for Life
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I think people are waking up to this, but I also think the other side (like our own) is becoming more steadfast in their beliefs. The scary prospect is that the end of slavery took a very bloody civil war. I can’t think the transition to a country where this “choice” is taken away will be one without much of the same.
A reflection on Moral Philosophy : Leadership, we hear a great deal today about ” Equality “. We have declared in the supreme document of our Ametican history that all men are politically equal,but even the Declartion of Obdependence cannot create social,mental,or moral equality. Men are not born equal,nor do they die equal. The attempt to produce an absolute equality in Russia has brought forth an equality of hunger,cold, disease,pain and death. Society must be saved from the top down. The body must be saved by the saint. America must be saved by an aristocracy . The greatest need of a democracy is a well - bred aristocracy . That was a great prayer, so often repeated by Lyman Beecher : ” God grant that our principal men shall be men of principle” Thomas Carlyle exclaims : ” Fond your man and all else will follow”
Peace to all. !
Just to be sure, it’s rational freedom ok…not material freedom
He then went on to say that slavery can’t be reduced to “the simple act of slave-holding,” since it fueled America’s economic growth in the early 19th century: “In terms economic, cultural and political, slavery made America possible.” (So might makes right?)
Coates is factually right. Slavery, being all over the Constitution as it was, was indeed economic, and can’t be reduced to “the simple act of slaveholding.” It was an important economic engine of the 17th-19th centuries, not just in what would become the United States, but also in the Americas, and it did indeed made the United States possible. But it is incorrect to conclude as you have done that it follows, therefore, that anyone who acknowledges as such is saying that “might makes right.” For the very reason that slavery fueling the making of America did raise some disturbing issues for some colonists and certainly Americans of the 18th century, in an era where Enlightenment ideals also extended to the freedom of commerce. Issues about political economy (Americans of the time did not assume that economics were completely amoral as we are wont to do now), about the nature of the new republic and whether republican virtue was even possible. Questions about the pernicious influence of luxury sometimes revolved around the slave trade, given that all of the rum and sugar for tasty treats in the Atlantic World came from slave labor in the West Indies. Quakers like John Woolman and Benjamin Lay protested through non-consumption. Others wondered about the effects of slavery on the morality of the slaveholder as well (I believe Ben Franklin was one who made such queries, if memory serves me correctly). In the 1780s-1790s, there was a lot of confidence in the North that slavery would somehow just “die out.” But that changed with Westward expansion and the expansion of the internal slave trade. It wasn’t so much that Coates is saying that slavery was good, but that it was everywhere. America’s relationship with slavery is complex, and should be treated as such. As for the question of whether or not slavery is wrong, and if it is, why don’t we just say so, again, some people at the time did say so. So the question is, what stopped many Europeans and Americans from listening? Commerce, trade, and an incipient market capitalism—livelihoods to be made, both North and South, in the colonies, and in the metropoles, and moneys for self-defense.
That said, it would also be incorrect for anyone to conclude from that factual basis that slavery is therefore not sinful, and that it follows that abortion is not sinful. One can realize that slavery did very much make the United States (and here, I use “make” as something neither wholly good or wholly bad, but a complex mixture of both). But that that making came with a lot of misgivings from the Founding through to the Civil War, and at every step of the way.
We might say that those questions of morality and profit, as well as the way in which we understand freedom (and how those three things are related) are still with us, though probably reconfigured in different ways. Which does bring us to abortion: it’s not just that it’s a business, as Abby Johnson has pointed out in her exposition of Planned Parenthood. But because of our contraception mentality, we see sex as intrinsic to personal freedom, else we’re “repressed” (or that the Catholic Church is “oppressing us”). Contraception has helped make an America that allows more women to enter the workplace and to rise in careers. But as with slavery, and the America it helped make, difficult questions arise: this is also an America that has an oddly dichotomous view of children—as “something” to be controlled, and as a burden, and when “wanted,” they are over-indulged and over-scheduled, and people treat them as extensions of themselves. Furthermore, how friendly is this America to women, ultimately, when contraception and abortion are cheaper alternatives to offering working environments, health care, and benefits to mothers—in other words, allowing them to better fit careers into motherhood, instead of trying to shoehorn motherhood into a career? And of course, what happens to the family when children are not the result of sex, but of “unprotected sex”?
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