Concordia TheoBLOGical Seminary

Recently, I posted about Sen. Barack Obama’s answer, or non answer as it were, to Rick Warren’s question on when human rights begin, whether at conception or later? James Kushiner, at Mere Comments, the blog of Touchstone magazine, recently wrote about the state of children in Britain. What he reports is discouraging, especially since those same statistics are not all that different for the US.

What I found most helpful is his conclusion. He writes:

And when children are devalued in the womb, they are devalued after birth. Why is that? Because of something that mothers know (and fathers perhaps to a lesser extent?): There is no bright line separating the child in the womb 6 months or 6 days before birth and the child 6 days after birth, but it is one long continuity of being. You can’t isolate the disrespect for the small person at 3 months in utero from that at 6 months or the child at the time of his birth. The toxin of permission to kill must spread because there are no natural barriers to it. It bleeds into every thing else. Why else would a supposedly sane politician oppose something like the Born Alive Infant Protection Act? If it looks like infanticide, just maybe it is?

We have a duty as citizens in the Left-hand Kingdom, as citizens of the state, to ensure that the moral ethos codified in our laws and statutes uphold what we as citizens of the Right-hand Kingdom, as citizens of the church hold to be true and good because, as Kushiner alludes, what is codified in our laws and statutes is the best picture of what we as a people in this country, and any country for that matter, believe to be true and good. And this is true not only for issues on life, but also how we understand and define marriage, family, religion, liberty, and happiness (perhaps long ago rooted not in today’s rank individualism but rather in Aristotle’s eudaimonia).