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Monday, December 08, 2008
John Andrews :: Townhall.com Columnist
Anti-Slavery Then, Pro-Life Now
by John Andrews
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With unemployment at 10.2%, what will happen by the end of Obama's first term?



What many call a concern for social issues, I call a passion for protection of the human person. With Democrats on a winning streak, some Republicans are asking why that passion is so strong in our party. Does it even belong in American politics? Thinking the question through, you’ll see that it does and it always has.

Imagine you’re an Irish cop living in a Chicago slum. In the neighborhood you meet Barry and Shelley, a black couple who help the poor. You’re impressed with their efforts to bring the community better jobs, doctors, and schools. But one day you are ordered to raid their home and arrest them.

Barry and Shelley are not criminals. They have harmed no one. But the year is 1858, and a man from Mississippi named Davis claims to own them as property. Federal law requires Illinois to enforce his claim. The black man “has no rights which the white man is bound to respect,” according to a US Supreme Court ruling in 1857.

You see your friends hauled away in chains. A month later you learn that Davis has sold the man into Alabama and taken the wife as his concubine. Their young daughters were put to work as field hands. The older one, rebellious and defiant, dies after a whipping. Mississippi brings no charges.

After witnessing this, if a new political party called for changing the law so it would safeguard the life and liberty of all persons equally, wouldn’t you vote for them? If the same party insisted on strong marriage laws to protect women and children, wouldn’t you support that too?

I have just described the origins of the Republican Party in this country 150 years ago, during the crisis over human slavery in the South and plural marriage in Utah. Both injustices were condemned in the earliest GOP platforms on which Abraham Lincoln and his fellow partisans appealed to Americans’ moral conscience. A passion for protection of the human person is bred in our party’s DNA.

Bring the scenario forward to 1978. You’re an Italian nurse in Denver, mother of a pregnant 17-year-old. The whole family, even the expected child’s father, wants to see it born and either raised or offered for adoption. But your daughter wants the baby aborted. Continued...
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About The Author
John Andrews is an Independence Institute fellow and former President of the Colorado Senate

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(45 comments so Far)
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Reply # 1
Date: Dec 11, 2008 - 10:56 PM EST
One last time

Mother of 4 Location: NC
Reply # 45
Date: Dec 11, 2008 - 7:14 PM EST
Subject: Jim,

You: no matter how sleazy and predatory the father was. The more sleazy and more predatory the less excuse she has for agreeing to have sex with him.

Me: There again, you blame the lady for associating with a “sleazy and predatory” man, but you say nothing about him being “sleazy and predatory.”

You: There are many life-affirming options available to a woman who finds herself in a crisis pregnancy.

Me: None of which are nearby when she needs it most. You talk about what was, I talk about what is.

You: Yet you are right back to your ridiculous assertion that its better for a baby to be tortured to death by an abortionist than to be given up for adoption into a loving home.

Me: I have never heard a definition of the word Torture that would fit your description.

You: There is NO WORSE ALTERNATIVE to being murdered by torture at the behest of the person who should have loved you enough to die in your stead.

Me: I just can not imagine a caring human being who would say that a living woman, maybe the mother of other children, is worth less than a fetus that would be born in questionable circumstances, at best. Next in that life could be hate, starving, eaten by bugs, and on and on.

For you to suggest that a fetus is worth more than a living lady is unspeakable. I know you love to hear that I told the doctor that until my Sweetie was as safe as could be under the circumstances, there was no baby. And I would have killed him if he had done otherwise.

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Reply # 2
Date: Dec 11, 2008 - 7:14 PM EST
Jim,
If the woman was not raped (and if she was raped I have addressed the rape fallacy elsewhere), she didn't have to get in bed no matter how sleazy and predatory the father was. The more sleazy and more predatory the less excuse she has for agreeing to have sex with him.

There are many life-affirming options available to a woman who finds herself in a crisis pregnancy.

Yet you are right back to your ridiculous assertion that its better for a baby to be tortured to death by an abortionist than to be given up for adoption into a loving home.

There is NO WORSE ALTERNATIVE to being murdered by torture at the behest of the person who should have loved you enough to die in your stead.
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