Morality, Infanticide & The "Culture War"

What does morality look like when it has become unmoored from the Judeo Christian ethic? Here is one example:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life.’

This should not be shocking. Historically, infanticide was an accepted practice in many cultures and, indeed, was part of several pagan religions. most notably the cult of Moloch. It was only with the growth of Judaism and, ultimately, Christianity that the practice fell out of favor in the West.

But the socialist left has long been intent on destroying the Judeo Christian underpinnings of our society. When that happens, it is the few people in power who decide what is to be deemed moral and immoral, what is to be deemed acceptable and what is to be deemed punishable, Never in history has any wholly secular moral code claimed the sanctity of individual human life as its defining characteristic. As Lenin said in a speech in 1920, after declaring that socialists should have no "belief in God," and that they should reject morality based on Christian traditions, he opined that "morality is entirely subordinated" to the interests of the state.

It is the man-made morality of the socialist left that resulted in the slaughter of over 100 million people in the 20th century. In the far left's secular view of the life, there is no soul, nor is there any threat of punishment or reward after life on earth. Thus individual life has no intrinsic worth and its value is defined in purely pragmatic and relativistic terms. Maintaining the power of the state and attempting to meet utopian ideals takes precedence over individual life. Call it the culture wars or whatever you like, but the dominant theme of our lifetime is the struggle between those who would keep our nation based in the Judeo Christian tradition and those who would substitute government as our nation's moral arbiter. The left has been engaged in this war through the Courts for over the last half century, and now, with Obama in power, they are forcing it through our nation's regulations.

Make no mistake, this culture war is at the heart of the HHS mandate being foisted on America by Obama. It is a mandate that has nothing to do with the availability of contraception to women - its already available at minimal to, in some cases, no cost - and everything to do with, at once, harming religion and, simultaneously, furthering the secular left's amoral views of sex. The genesis of the HHS mandate is from the same leftist wellspring that gives us an argument for infanticide.

Because the left's war on religion in America has been so protracted and incremental, not many people realize the fundamental changes being wrought to the character of our nation, nor, unfortunately, do many people know where these changes logically lead. Far too many people yawn at the "culture war," having no idea just what is really at stake. It is a battle for the heart and, ironically enough, the "soul" of our nation.

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