When Is a Person Not-a-Person?
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
This cartoon might seem to some a put-down of the pro-life position, about right to middle-of-the-roaders, and humorous to the many who just don't care. But the real question is about personhood: when does human life begin and end? Theoretically, a new human may begin at conception, but practically speaking, we don't know exactly when that takes place in real-life conditions. In a lab petri dish, it can be observed under a microscope that there seems to be a flash of energy at the moment of fertilization. But in day-to-day life, a woman can only find out she's pregnant after implantation occurs and her hormonal system responds to a pregnancy test. Many fertilized eggs never make it to implantation.
Similarly, we don't know precisely when life ends: Is it when the person stops breathing for several minutes? Is it when brain waves cease? Is it when the person's heart stops beating for a certain length of time, approximately five minutes? Medical experts say that after the heart stops for five minutes, irreversible brain damage occurs. But once, while undergoing routine minor surgery, my wife Cheryl's heart stopped beating for nine minutes! The doctors, however, were able to revive her with no brain damage ... while I was sitting in the waiting room, not knowing what was going on but felt the need to pray for her.
We also know that an unborn baby is capable of feeling pain at around the 20th week of gestation. Many people consider this to be the significant marker of human life; in fact, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act passed the U.S. House in 2017 but failed in the U.S. Senate this week. In a recent article in The Hill stated that 76% of Americans believe doctors should provide care for babies born alive during failed abortions, and 88% of Americans are in favor of some reasonable limits on abortion.
It doesn't require a belief in God to realize the scientific truth of these facts: the above cartoon is from the Agile Atheist blog: that writer firmly believes that a pain-capable 20-week unborn baby or someone older or disabled who still has brain waves is a fully human person. So if even atheists along with an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that human life should be preserved, why do U.S. senators and representatives not follow along? The answer is "big money." The backroom power brokers are those who determine which politicians get the financial support of major donors. So it takes just a few power brokers and big donors such as Planned "Barrenhood" that is giving pro-abortion lawmakers $45 million to block pro-life legislation. Then those pro-abortion lawmakers in turn vote $500 million back to Planned "Barrenhood" - that's the way the money-go-round works.
And who suffers? The unborn, the disabled, and the elderly - those who aren't very able or not at all able to speak up for themselves and be heard. These are the persons who've been determined by the rich and powerful elite to be "non-persons" or less-than-human. Since the beginning of human history, the more powerful have conquered and enslaved or killed "the others" - the tribes who spoke a different language ("barbarians" because they wore beards and couldn't speak Greek or Latin) or had different skin or hair or eye color. We tend to like people who are like us; conversely, we tend to dislike people who are unlike us. We naturally think that our tribe or culture or language or race is the superior one. And so, we tend to label "the others" who differ from us as less than "real people" to be enslaved or be slaughtered like animals in order to harvest their organs, or simply killed because they are inconvenient or interfere with our pursuit of pleasure and wealth.
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"We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - so says the U.S. Declaration of Independence - and these God-given rights are also protected in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. But a strange thing happened just over fifty years ago: in the name of protecting the lives and liberty of former slaves in the Southern states, civil rights legislation was passed to set straight that situation. To enforce those laws, various bureaucracies were established at the federal level in order to make those recalcitrant Southern white politicians and sheriffs comply. But those bureaucracies began to have a life of their own and sprouted multitudinous rules. Sooner or later, it was discovered that without voting on any new laws, those rules could be applied to other "oppressed minorities" such as women, illegal immigrants, people of non-majority religions, homosexuals, lesbians, and transgenders. This has become the new "civil rights constitution" that has displaced the real U.S. Constitution of 1789. A fascinating article, "The Roots of Our Partisan Divide," states -
"As civil rights laws have been extended by analogy into other areas of American life, the imputation of moral non-personhood has been aimed at a growing number of people who have committed no sin more grievous than believing the same things they did two years ago, and therefore standing in the way of the progressive juggernaut.
"The second characteristic of the new civil rights constitution is what we can call intersectionality. This is a sociological development. As long as civil rights law was limited to protecting the rights of Southern blacks, it was a stable system. It had the logic of history behind it, which both justified and focused its application. But if other groups could be given the privilege of advancing their causes by bureaucratic fiat and judicial decree, there was the possibility of a gradual building up of vast new coalitions, maybe even electoral majorities. This was made possible because almost anyone who was not a white heterosexual male could benefit from civil rights law in some way."
So we have created a new class of "morally superior" people called "people of color" who are now included together with the descendants of former African slaves: female Latina lesbian or transgender unmarried mothers along with the rest of the rainbow movement are entitled to special treatment because of supposed discrimination in the past four hundred years since America was settled largely by white Christian heterosexual "cisgender" male supremacists. Never mind that my first ancestor in the New World was a white slave and his descendants led the emancipation movement and the Union Armies that liberated those African slaves: I'm a white Christian heterosexual "cisgender" male, so therefore by definition, I'm a racist bigot and thus a "non-person-of-color" - that "morally inferior" class which deserves to be downgraded, vilified, and denied fair treatment by the law and civil authorities not for any crimes I've committed but because I'm of that class.
To compensate all of the new "people of color," a whole system of transfer payments have been created including welfare, food stamps, rent subsidies, and medical care. In 1950, the share of the federal budget for transfer payments was 20%; today, it's 80%. When the War on Poverty was started in 1967, 70% of those in households in the lowest-income 20% were working. Now it's 36%, about half. Why work, when you can vote for more transfer payments and live fairly decently without working? That is why so many people, especially the younger generation, but even many lower-income traditional-believing Christians, will vote for socialist policies of transfer payments.
Few of them realize that when you continue transferring more and more from the Christian heterosexual "cisgender non-persons," eventually you kill the geese that lay the golden eggs. But it seems that even fewer people realize the moral equation has been flipped on its head: Judeo-Christian morality that was not long ago considered the standard in the U.S. is now vilified as sexist, racist, bigoted, fascist, dysfunctional, and deplorable. The divinely "elect" have been displaced by the morally-superior "elite" and "persons of color" - the protected-class people.
"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! Woe to those who are mighty to drink wine, and champions at mixing strong drink; Who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice for the innocent! Therefore as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as the dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust; because they have rejected the law of the Lord of Hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel" (Isaiah 5:20-24). "
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!
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