By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. If you are not currently receiving NRL News Today in your inbox, you can sign up at www.nrlc.org/join_our_mailing_list.htm
Dave Andrusko
While an awful lot of Americans already cast their ballots before today, many more are in the process of making that faithful decision. At this last, last minute, what could be said that hasn’t already been said—and often?
Let me offer this which may sound trite but is just the opposite: more is caught than taught. We can tell our children or our friends or our colleagues about the importance of voting, but if we don’t take the time to trudge over to the school or firehouse, what message have we sent? The power of example—positive or negative–is hard to exaggerate.
Likewise, you and I can talk until we are blue in the face that abortion takes the life of an unborn child and so often emotionally maims the child’s mother. When someone who is genuinely undecided reflects on how so many of us have helped a pregnant teen to survive the pressures to abort, they will tell themselves that this is someone whose opinion is worth great consideration.
Pro-lifers, media myths to the contrary notwithstanding, are a varied lot. What we share in common, however, with every corpuscle in our bodies, is a belief that each and every life matters. This as much as anything else, I believe, separates those who sit by and those who are driven to try to stop the killing.
The Soviet madman Joseph Stalin is “credited” with the dripped-in-nihilism observation that “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The point? That barbarism on a small scale is like a stake through our heart. But a slaughter on the scale that claims millions of lives is so overwhelming, our minds cannot process the horror.
I had never seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” until last weekend when I stumbled across it on television. I am NOT comparing abortion to the Holocaust; that is a comparison that gets us nowhere.
What I am comparing is our collective response to the deaths of 55 million unborn babies to an unforgettable exchange between two of the men on trial as they confront the declaration that the Nazis killed “millions of people.”
One defendant scoffed: how could it be, he says dismissively. “How could it be possible? Tell them, how could it be possible?” But another defendant, in a matter of fact tone, calmly explains, like a good engineer, that you can kill 10,000 people in a half-hour at one site.
“It’s not the killing that’s the problem,” he says, as if pondering the moral equivalent of how many sheep can be shorn of wool in 30 minutes, “it’s disposing of the bodies. That’s the problem.”
E-v-e-r-y l-i-f-e matters. Each and every one of those 55 million babies suffered a fate that was mind-numbingly brutal, soul-chillingly cruel, and morally indefensible.
Any president who is blind to these truths does not deserve your vote, or anyone else’s.