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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Religion, the Constitution, & Judicial Activism

James Buckley, brother of William F. Buckley, has given an incredibly informative speech on the history of religion in America, our Constitution's provisions relating to religion, and the incredibly destructive decisions of activist courts to modify the Constitution according to their whim.
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The history of Western Civilization is, by and large, the history of religion. And indeed, Obama's claims to the contrary, the United States has been, since its inception, a Christian nation with room for all other religions. Judeo-Christian morality animated our nation from its earliest days and it is crystal clear that those who drafted the First Amendment firmly believed in a role for religion in all aspects of public life. The words "a wall between Church and State" do not appear in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, nor is there any evidence that our Founders ever pondered such a radical secularization of our government. Those words were read into the Constitution by judicial activists nearly half a century ago.

Our First Amendment essentially outlawed religious discrimination or the establishment of a state sponsored Church. But, as to non-demoninational promotion of religion generally, our Constitution is silent and, indeed, any study of American life at the time of the founding will find religion firmly ensconced in our public sector.

I could wax long on this - and the incredibly misguided and activist decision to remove religion from public life - but James Buckley, brother of William F,, captures my thoughts perfectly in a must-read speech reproduced at Plum Bob Blog. It is a long speech, but very much well worth the read. Here are some excerpts:

. . . I think it useful, at this point, to note that the idea that religion is a purely private matter is of recent vintage. For most of our history, the First Amendment’s provision prohibiting the “establishment of religion” was understood to do no more than forbid the federal government’s preferential treatment of a particular faith. But while the First Amendment’s purpose was to protect religion and the freedom of conscience from governmental interference, as Thomas Cooley noted in his 1871 treatise on Con­sti­tu­tional Limitations, the Framers considered it entirely appropriate for government “to foster religious worship and religious instruction, as conservators of the public morals and values, if not indispensable, assistants to the preservation of the public order.” As that perceptive observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it, “while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.”

And so it is not surprising that the Congress that adopted the First Amendment also reenacted the provision of the Northwest Ordinance which declares that “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged;” and early Congresses proceeded to make grants of land to serve religious purposes and to fund sectarian education among the Indians.

In sum, as understood by those who wrote it, the First Amendment did not forbid the government from being biased in favor of religion as such so long as it championed none. Nor did it require that the state be insulated from religious principles and influences. The men at Philadelphia who outlawed religious tests for public service surely had the practical common sense to know, if some contemporary ideologues do not, that in those roles in which public servants are expected to bring their personal judgments to bear, the views of religious individuals will inevitably reflect their religious beliefs. It is, quite simply, fatuous to suppose that a public official can check the religious components of his convictions at the door before entering the council chambers of government.

. . . Three particularly sensitive lines of cases come to mind; namely, those in which, by narrow margins, the Supreme Court has virtually banished religion from public life, extended First Amendment protection to the most explicit pornography, and proclaimed what amounts to an unrestricted right to abortion. When, in 1957, the Court outlawed the recitation of voluntary non-denominational prayers in public schools, it ended a practice that had been part of the American experience since the outset of public education and which an overwhelming majority of American parents wished to have continued; and the net effect of its subsequent Establishment Clause decisions has been to exclude religion from almost every aspect of public life and to encourage the belief that religion is irrelevant to the public welfare. More than that, in Yale professor Stephen Carter’s words, it has led to “a discomfort and a disdain for religion in our public life that sometimes curdles into intolerance.”

. . . Whatever its cause, the undeniable fact is that we have witnessed an astonishing sea change in American practices and attitudes over the past forty years or so. Such words as “sin” and “honor” and “virtue” sound quaint as we discard moral precepts and codes of behavior that had been rooted in our society since the founding of the Republic. Moreover, we have shown a dismaying tendency to recast God in Man’s image. If enough people engage in conduct that society once condemned, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.

As a result, since the 1960s, we have witnessed an erosion of moral standards and self-discipline that have given us among the civilized world’s highest incidences of crime, abortion, pornography, drug abuse, and illegitimacy, as well as some corporate scandals of Olympian proportions. To cite just one striking statistic, in 1960, one out of twenty births in the United States was illegitimate; today, the figure is one out of three; and over the same period, we have also managed to create what Professor Carter has called a “culture of disbelief.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that there should have been a reaction to this culture of disbelief and to the loss of moral moorings that many attribute to it. . . .

Do read the entire speech. It is well worth your time.

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Interesting News From Around the Web - 12-18-07

The U.S. is providing intelligence to Turkey on the location of PKK targets in northern Iraq and Turkey is following that up with targeted strikes. This has Iraq’s Kurds screaming like stuck pigs, but it seems the only reasonable solution to what could otherwise prove a very destabilizing issue.

Our House of Representatives is still refusing to fund the war in Iraq. The President needs to refuse their proffered Budget until they do so. The House Democratic Leadership varies between insane (Pelosi), dementia (Murtha), and adolescence (Obey). They are the not so funny 3 Stooges who are determined to declare defeat in Iraq, irrespective of the national security consequences and wholly irrespective of the reality of our success in Iraq. They are al Qaeda in Iraq’s last best hope for victory.

$7.4 billion has been pledged for aid to "Palestine" at an international conference. The amount actually exceeds what the Palestinian government of Fatah was seeing in aid. It is not clear from the news story how much, if any, of these funds will be provided to Hamas. If there is a single dollar that goes to them, the U.S. should halt its portion of the funding. As to the rest, funding the Palestinians has been a black whole of corruption to this point. I wonder if the donors will start requiring accountability?

The Economist takes a look at Indonesia’s program for deradicalizing jihadists. And WaPo looks at a similar program in Saudi Arabia for recent guests of Guantanamo. And then there is a very successful program being run by our military for detainees in Iraq.

Right Truth has more on the infiltration of our CIA by people related to Hezbollah and the potential damage that could be severe.

Q&O looks at the insanity of our entitlement programs and the gap between what is promised and what our income streams look like. My own thought, we need an NIE that tells us this is no problem and that we can safely ignore it. And take a look at this.

Done with Mirrors has an interesting post on Glenn Greenwald and his mildly biased criticism from on high of Michael Totten.

Bastard. Since I blogged this when it occurred, I need to also blog it now. The conservative student at Princeton who claimed to have been beaten for his exercise of free speech has now admitted to having made it all up. See here.

A really good post the other day from Dr. Sanity: "When religion is rooted in human freedom, as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, then it is able to enhance human life and give meaning and purpose to that life. When it is perverted and used for secular political ends--by either the political left or right who want to impose or mandate some social policy or another on others, then it inevitably leads to oppression and cheapens or devalues human life. Even on his best day, a "good" communist, socialist, fascist etc. will never be any better than a really "bad" Christian."

And from TNOY, it’s a Muslim Rage Boy Christmas Caroling . . . .



Do visit their site. Its one of the best humor sites on the web.

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