What a society talks about — and what it fails to — both speak volumes about it. And lately, the news has been replete with stories about the Obamas’ new canine acquisition, a Portuguese water dog the first family has fittingly named Bo. Yet while the little curly-haired purebred is creating a tempest in a teapot — because Barack Obama said during the campaign that he intended to get a “rescued” dog, such as one from a shelter — few talk about a type of rescue to which Obama won’t even pay lip service.
Of course, it certainly is fashionable to lament the plight of abandoned animals, and for sure, no humane person wants to see any of God’s creatures suffer needlessly. Yet, shouldn’t this sublime compassion extend to His children as well? I speak of abortion.
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On the very day the Obamas got their dog, more than 4,000 babies died in America’s abortion mills. In fact, Planned Parenthood reveals in its Annual Report 2007-2008 (pdf) that its “clinics” performed 305,310 abortions in 2007. It also divulges that to help it perform this work, it received $349.6 million of taxpayer money in the form of government grants and contracts for the year ending June 30, 2008. In other words, many of the abortionists who have authored the deaths of more than 50 million babies since the Roe v. Wade court ruling have been partially financed with our money.
It perhaps should also be pointed out, since race-related statistics are all the rage today, that the daily abortion-related death toll includes approximately 1,500 black babies. This raises some questions: is this the kind of change for which the civil-rights movement fought? And what would the face of that movement, Martin Luther King, say about the one whom many would call a fruit of that movement and today’s face of change, Barack Obama? What would he say about Obama’s tolerance of infanticide (his opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act — BAIPA), his rescinding of the partial-birth abortion ban, and his devotion of taxpayer money to fetal-stem-cell research? Note here that King once pointed out in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that “The early church brought an end to such things as INFANTICIDE.” So what would King say about the later “church,” part of which was complicit in electing today’s most prominent face of abortion? (Having said this, unlike most, I don’t take it as a given that King wouldn’t today be a creature of the age.)
Whatever King would say, we know what those who have donned his mantle say — and fail to say. People such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and former congressman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America Major Owens (who once passionately — and incorrectly — proclaimed that 200 million Africans were thrown overboard by trans-Atlantic slave traders) certainly wouldn’t shrink from talking about the 10-12 million Africans who were brought to the Americas in bondage. Yet they are conspicuously silent about the holocaust of the approximately 14 million blacks legally murdered since the inception of Roe v. Wade. Congressman Charlie Rangel and New York City Councilman Charles Barron will bitterly talk about the 3,446 blacks lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, but there is nary a mention of how abortionists kill that number about every 2.3 days. And Hollywood director John Singleton had the supposedly wise father character (played by Laurence Fishburne) in his film Boyz n the Hood give an impromptu street sermon about how the presence of gun and liquor stores in South Central Los Angeles was the result of a white conspiracy to visit genocide upon blacks, yet this perspicacious patriarch never mentioned that nigh on 80 percent of Planned Parenthood abortuaries are located in minority neighborhoods. Ironic, too, is that another character in the movie, “Doughboy,” lamented the lack of news coverage of inner-city violence and said, “Either they don’t know, don’t show, or just don’t care about what’s going on in the hood.” Well, I suppose Singleton proves that art sometimes imitates itself.
Of course, the location of liquor and gun stores (note: I’ve never noticed a preponderance of such things in black neighborhoods; gun shops seem to be found in the country, while liquor stores seem to be everywhere save devout LDS towns) is determined by the market. And I would be guilty of the same kind of propaganda as Singleton if I didn’t say that this is a factor in Planned Parenthood’s targeting of black communities. Yet, whatever the case, I can’t imagine that such a situation wouldn’t please the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger.
This is because Sanger, like the German Nazis, pursued eugenics, a science involving the selective breeding of humans. In fact, it was all the rage in the early 1900s, and there was probably no more devoted a eugenicist than Sanger. In the exercise of her passion, this woman, who once gave a speech to the Ku Klux Klan, instituted a program aimed at black America in 1939.
It was called “The Negro Project.” Sanger promoted a line of “health clinics” in black neighborhoods to limit the procreation of undesirable classes such as “negroes.” In 1932, Sanger even proposed that Congress set up a “Population Congress” to institute a “stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
Writer Tanya L. Green explains in “The NEGRO PROJECT: Margaret Sanger’s EUGENIC Plan for Black Americans”:
The aim of the program was to restrict — many believe exterminate — the black population. Under the pretense of “better health” and “family planning,” Sanger cleverly implemented her plan. What’s more shocking is Sanger’s beguilement of black America’s créme de la créme — those prominent, well educated and well-to-do — into executing her scheme. Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.
Yet, will this ever be highlighted by the prominent black figures I mentioned? Will we ever hear it from the man for whom they all, no doubt, voted, Barack Obama? Will he ever speak of rescuing babies the way he does about rescuing dogs? It is, of course, a rhetorical question. After all, this is a man who opposed the aforementioned BAIPA while an Illinois senator and who had said as a presidential candidate that he wouldn’t want his daughters “‘punished’ with a baby.”
Getting back to how we value people and animals, it is godly to view man’s four-legged best friend as a blessing. It is virtuous to be kind to God’s creation. Thus, by all means, if you want a pet and can rescue one, do so. But our tears should be proportionate to the severity of the tragedy, not the sentimentalism of the times. After all, sentimentalism divorced from truth is no virtue. It is in fact a vice of the kind represented by Adolf Hitler, who cried when his canary died.
G.K. Chesterton once said (I’m paraphrasing), “The day will come when it will be more offensive to smoke a cigar than to perform an abortion.” Given that the passion for rescuing dogs is matched by that for rending babies from wombs, I think we can say that day has certainly arrived.
