It's really very simple: If the living product of a sexual union is a person, you can't make an exception for when it's OK to kill them. Even in horrible situations like rape, we need to remember that this person did not choose how to come into being. None of us did. Shall we take life away, because of the evil of someone else?
It seems astonishing to me that we spend so much time talking about 'reproductive rights' and not about that most fundamental right we all have: the right to life itself. What are we? Are we defined by what we are able to accomplish, or by an inherent dignity that no others can deny or destroy, and that misfortune and accident can only obscure, but never eliminate?
Tell me why a political party who presumably exists to promote economic fairness among those weakest among us: the racially marginalized, the disabled, the forgotten, has forgotten its first duty-- to defend the weakest among us. Who needs more help than a child?
Some people would have you believe that grown adults and people on the cusp of adulthood have reproductive freedom only when faced with the moral choice of whether to take the life of a child. But if freedom means anything, it is that liberty of self-determination. We are not determined beings, driven irrevocably to carry out biological imperatives over which we have no control. Even if we decline to imbue this with religious significance, we must understand that a human person has the power to create life itself. And only the foolish among us fail to recognize that the glory of that life is more than ordinary.
What those who oppose us are saying is that the State has the power to take away the very life it exists to defend, and to exonerate those who take it from others. But in truth, the State itself is bound to a higher law, given by the Giver of Life himself. If its officers decline to participate in unlawful taking of human life under the pretense of freedom, they aren't being extreme; they are merely recognizing reality too long obscured by uncritical political passion and lesser interests at odds with our highest duties.
I applaud the Republican Party's pro-life plank, because it should be the most obvious of things to stand for. The right to life. If a party doesn't get this right, who cares what it says about anything else?
It seems astonishing to me that we spend so much time talking about 'reproductive rights' and not about that most fundamental right we all have: the right to life itself. What are we? Are we defined by what we are able to accomplish, or by an inherent dignity that no others can deny or destroy, and that misfortune and accident can only obscure, but never eliminate?
Tell me why a political party who presumably exists to promote economic fairness among those weakest among us: the racially marginalized, the disabled, the forgotten, has forgotten its first duty-- to defend the weakest among us. Who needs more help than a child?
Some people would have you believe that grown adults and people on the cusp of adulthood have reproductive freedom only when faced with the moral choice of whether to take the life of a child. But if freedom means anything, it is that liberty of self-determination. We are not determined beings, driven irrevocably to carry out biological imperatives over which we have no control. Even if we decline to imbue this with religious significance, we must understand that a human person has the power to create life itself. And only the foolish among us fail to recognize that the glory of that life is more than ordinary.
What those who oppose us are saying is that the State has the power to take away the very life it exists to defend, and to exonerate those who take it from others. But in truth, the State itself is bound to a higher law, given by the Giver of Life himself. If its officers decline to participate in unlawful taking of human life under the pretense of freedom, they aren't being extreme; they are merely recognizing reality too long obscured by uncritical political passion and lesser interests at odds with our highest duties.
I applaud the Republican Party's pro-life plank, because it should be the most obvious of things to stand for. The right to life. If a party doesn't get this right, who cares what it says about anything else?
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