Babies And Bibles

Statement

Just two days ago Barack Obama took the presidential oath of office, placing his left hand upon the same Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his first inaugural.

Today, as we mark the 36th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the tableau the world witnessed on the west front of the Capitol reveals much about the crossroads at which the country stands when it comes to protecting the most innocent among us.

A great deal of progress has been made to protect innocent human life in the thirty-six years since the Supreme Court said that the Constitution forbids laws protecting unborn life. From federal legislation such as the Partial Birth Abortion Act and the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, to state-level initiatives such as mandatory sonograms and parental notification requirements, public opinion reflects the collective desire of an overwhelming majority of Americans to promote a culture of life, or at the very least, in the words of President Obama on the campaign trail, to make abortion rare.

A stated desire to make abortion rare is also a subconscious recognition that abortion is a wrong thing because it kills a child. Why else should abortion be rare?

But such a sentiment directly contradicts what our new President also promised on the campaign trail-- that his first act as President would be to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). Even more radical than Roe v. Wade itself, FOCA would repeal every state and federal law passed since 1973 that sought to make abortion rarer. FOCA would mandate abortion on demand to any person at any time for any reason or for no reason.

Can a president who views the question of when babies get human rights to be "above his pay grade" live up to the standard of presidential leadership set by Abraham Lincoln, in whose mantle Obama has sought to clothe himself these last several weeks?

If President Obama wants to live up to the Lincoln standard, we should clearly recall the Lincoln standard, in this, the 200th anniversary year of his birth.

A former one term Congressman from Illinois, Lincoln reengaged in political life in the 1850s as a response to the Supreme Court 's 1857 decision in Dred Scott, which held that the Constitution forbade any laws to protect African-American slaves.

Again and again in his campaign speeches denouncing Dred Scott, Lincoln came back to the Founding Fathers and their belief in the equal, inherent rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, regardless of skin color. Lincoln believed the authors of America's Declaration of Independence got it right. He said:

"....In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began...."

Lincoln realized that despite the shifting tides of public opinion, the convention of partisan politics, and even the Dred Scott ruling, the question by which history would judge him was whether he had protected the inherent rights of liberty and human dignity , including recognizing Imago Dei - the image of a child of God -- in all of his fellow human beings , including slaves.

History indeed judged President Lincoln and found him faithful to the truth that our Founding Fathers enshrined in the Declaration, that all human beings are created equal. Today, how President Obama addresses the issue of abortion may well be the defining event of our generation, as slavery was to Lincoln's.

It rests in Mr. Obama's heart to decide whether our first African-American president will go down in history as one who found the courage to "look up again to the Declaration of Independence" and sparked a national epiphany that renewed our Founding Fathers noble battle to recognize and protect all innocent human life, including the unborn. Or will history remember President Obama as one who instead led the effort to sanction the continued destruction of the innocent unborn as the most radically pro-abortion president in our nation's history?

Perhaps the most bitter irony of this choice before President Obama is that it is African-American children who suffer the cruelty of abortion more than any other group of Americans. Approximately 50% of unborn African-American children in America are aborted before they are born. According to the 2000 census, African Americans comprise 12.3 percent of the U.S. population, but black women had 36.3 percent of the abortions that same year, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control. Every day, approximately 1400 African-American children are aborted; between 13 and 14 million black children have died by abortion on demand since Roe vs. Wade, a death toll perpetrated against the African-American community greater even than that of the scourge of slavery.

Such a mind-numbing reality probably occurred to very few of us as we watched the inauguration of our first African-American President more than 150 years after Dred Scott. However, a great and historic question relentlessly remains before America and all Americans. Are we still committed to the principle that "all men are created equal"; and will the nation that rejected the scourge of thousands of years of human slavery in the world also reject a bankrupt declaration by a 7-2 majority of Supreme Court justices that said the Constitution of the United States of America forbids laws protecting the lives of innocent unborn children of God? There is no doubt as to what Abraham Lincoln's answer would have been.

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