Thirty-three years ago this week, ABC aired a mini-series entitled Roots. I was a ten year old boy at the time, and I watched every night of the miniseries with my mother. The longing of the slaves to be free and the cruelty of the slave masters to deny freedom to those slaves made quite an impression on me. Even though I haven't watched Roots since that original 1977 airing, two scenes still stand out: a master brutally forcing Kunta Kinte to accept his slave name of Toby and a master chopping off half of Kunta Kinte's foot to end his repeated attempts at running away.
After seeing the multi-generational story on TV, I began taking an interest in my own "roots." I asked my mother about her grandparents and what she knew about them. Apparently, our genealogy includes southern slave owners. I asked her if they were anything like the cruel masters in the movie. She told me that they weren't cruel, that they were very good to the slaves they owned.
I've been thinking about that lately. The concept of slavery is, in and of itself, cruel. Why do we want to console ourselves (or our children) by saying that our ancestors were better to their slaves than other slave owners? The fact is that the slaves were denied their basic right to life and liberty. How is that not cruel? And given our wonderful Declaration of Independence and Constitution, why was slavery tolerated in this country during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
A lie was perpetuated throughout society during those times, and that lie was that black people had not achieved a certain level of advancement to have earned the right to be treated as human beings. And since they were not human beings, they were considered property, to be bought and sold like any common good. The cost to our country of debunking this lie was devastating.
Another lie is being perpetuated right now throughout our society, and it bears a striking resemblance to the lie used to justify slavery. This lie says that children in the womb have not achieved a certain level of advancement to have earned the right to be treated as human beings. And since they are not human beings, they are to be considered property of their mothers and can be killed at will by those mothers. This how abortion is justified. Many in the pro-abortion movement could not support their own position if it involved killing "babies," so they simply deny that they are babies. Just as slave owners justified their own action by claiming that the slaves were not "us," pro-abortionists claim that unborn children are not children at all (even though science repeatedly tells us that they are).
Another lie that was used to justify slavery was that the slaves would be better off under the "care" of their masters than they otherwise would be. What they did was deny these slaves their own basic rights under the pretense of taking care of them. The pro-abortion movement claims that the children killed by abortion would be better off dead than by being born as an unwanted child, perhaps in poverty and abuse. I have to ask in both instances, who are these people to judge what is best for another group of people?
The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is something with which we are all created. These rights are not granted by the government or by our founding documents. These documents do rightly state that these rights come from the Creator. Government only exists to ensure these rights. For many years in the early days of this country, our government failed in this most basic responsibility to ensure these rights to an entire class of people. It is still failing another class of people. It is time for us to rise up and demand that these God-given rights are absolute and that our government officials take steps to defend these rights for ALL of us. This is what the Personhood movement is all about.
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