What a difference a week makes. Just seven days after the nation commemorated the man who personified the American struggle to win respect for the lives and dignity of all men before the law, the man who has perhaps benefited more manifestly than any other from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts stood at a podium to refute his legacy.
That wasn’t the president’s stated intention, of course. Nor was that how his words were reported in the media coverage of his remarks on the 39th anniversary of the catastrophic Roe v. Wade decision.
What was reported, rather, is that our president has a dream. One substantially at odds with the dream that fired Dr. King’s imagination and eloquence so memorably on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial nearly 50 years ago.
Dr. King’s dream – of peace and understanding, justice and freedom and mutual good will – was of a nation where his children would be judged, he said, “not … by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” What he could not have dreamed of was a nation where his children’s right to live would be judged not by their viability and potential, but by whether their mother found it suitably convenient and self-serving to carry them to term.
That is the dream our president professes to embrace, on behalf of the women of America.
“And as we remember this historic anniversary,” he said, “we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”
In other words, babies themselves are no longer the fulfillment of dreams – they just get in the way of them.
Indeed, “fulfill their dreams” is rather a poetic way to justify what happens when a doctor suctions a living child out of its mother’s womb, or piths it like a frog in a high school biology class. It’s pretty poetic even for what happens when an unwilling mother pops a pill that will chemically dissolve that new life still forming within her. Hard to believe that’s what our Founding Fathers had in mind when fighting a revolution, or forging a Constitution, but our president declares that such was their noble intention.
“We must remember,” he said, “that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right.”
His commitment notwithstanding, it’s as impossible now as it was 39 years ago to find anything in our Constitution that affirms – explicitly or implicitly – a right to privacy that trumps a right to life. No other private citizen, under no other circumstance, is given the constitutional “right to choose” when they will cancel out the existence of another. The idea is antithetical not only to America’s legal and moral traditions, but to a code for human behavior laid out by a considerably higher Authority several thousand years before our nation came along.
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to the president that the only way his vision of ensuring the “rights, freedoms, and opportunities” of our daughters can be accomplished is by significantly reducing the number of daughters. The “dream” will be, as it has been, paid for in blood. And what, ultimately, has all that bloodshed accomplished?
The right, freedom, and opportunity, in most cases, for our daughters to have indiscriminate sexual intercourse without responsibility. And their right, freedom, and opportunity to kill any child unfortunate enough to impede that no-fault hedonism.
In affirming Roe v. Wade, the president is celebrating the legal magnet that continues to distort our nation’s moral compass … not just throwing us off our collective course, but corrupting our collective soul and poisoning our collective conscience.
We owe our daughters and our sons something more than that – a country in which they enjoy the right not just to live, but to encourage the lives of others. To recognize, celebrate, and defend the sanctity of every human being … not just at lunch counters and on buses and in classrooms and voting booths, but in the sacred hollows of a mother’s womb.
With that understanding comes the most critical of all knowledge: the knowing of right from wrong. With these as the content of their character, our children will have enough – more than enough – to build their dreams on.
LifeNews Note: Alan Sears is a former federal prosecutor who held various posts in the departments of Justice and Interior during the Reagan Administration. He is president and CEO of the Alliance Defense Fund (www.telladf.org), a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.
