Well, here we go again. Another disgruntled gunman has gone onto a college campus and killed numerous students in what many people will call a "senseless" act of violence.
Senseless? Yes. But not difficult to understand in light of our nation's ongoing refusal to take a principled stand with regard to the intrinsic value of human life.
As horrendous as these campus slayings have been, they are numerically insignificant in comparison with the number of abortions which have taken place here in the United States subsequent to Roe v. Wade in 1973. An issue of the Chicago Tribune's free RedEye publication recently reported that the number of legal abortions was roughly 50 million. That number boggles my mind. Compared with that number, the number of people killed by Hitler during WWII was relatively small.
The young students at schools such as Columbine High School and Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University have never known a world in which human life was treated by the legal system, from conception until natural death, as if it was intrinsically precious. We should not be surprised, therefore, when such people exhibit behavior which demonstrates a callous disregard for the right to life. Our entire culture has become a culture of death.
What can we do to turn things around? Well, first of all, we ought to seek to be individuals who seek in every way to affirm the value of human life, whether that means refusing to take the (relatively) easy way out when faced with "problem pregnancies" of our own or helping others who have become pregnant as the result of bad choices. It also means affirming the value of human life in other ways, such as feeding the hungry, offering emergency housing to people in need of such housing, paying employees a just wage so that they need not choose between abortion and starvation, and so forth. Without personal integrity, political action is useless.
Nevertheless, politics are sometimes necessary as well.
It ought to be pretty clear that voting for candidates who claim to be pro-life isn't necessarily the same thing as voting for candidates who actually act with integrity on their convictions. But is that any excuse for voting for candidates who openly espouse the killing of unborn children, using such euphemistic terms as "choice" to disguise the horror of what actually happens in abortion clinics? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding "NO"!
In the final analysis, I'm not responsible for what politicians do after making their promises (which, let's face it, are often false and hollow). But I am responsible for voting in accordance with the principles in which I believe. And while I acknowledge that the abortion issue is not the only important issue facing this country, I still believe passionately that it is the most important issue we currently face. When someone can present me with persuasive evidence to the effect that the other issues facing our nation involve the deliberate destruction of more than a million human beings every year, then I may rethink that position; but I haven't seen such evidence yet.
Without the right to life, all other rights lose their meaning. What good is it for you to have the right to free speech or to freedom of religion or to freedom of assembly, if I am free to murder you? You can't exercise any of your other human rights if you're dead!!!
Obviously, the right to life is the cornerstone upon which all other inalienable human rights are built. Therefore, politicians who claim to care about human rights, while simultaneously advocating pro-abortion policies which undermine the most fundamental of all human rights, are utterly lacking in credibility. When it comes to solving the problem of campus violence (which is ultimately a manifestation of our culture's lack of respect for the intrinsic value of human life), such politicians aren't part of the solution. They're a major part of the problem.
UPDATE:
Be sure to read my most recent post on this same subject, since it offers what I consider to be some fairly objective evidence that my thesis is valid.
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