The “Rev.” Al Sharpton urged Democrats to “message” abortion “in a way that it is about choice. It’s not about saying … I support abortion or not.”
For Sharpton, abortion (killing babies developing in their mother’s womb) is about “whether they’re going to have a safe abortion [killing unborn babies]. We always had abortions [women killing their unborn babies/we also always had slavery], but we had these back alley, very risky abortions and we’re saying that rather than have people in those situations, they should be able to choose whether or not they want to do [about killing their unborn children], even if it is something that I do not believe in.” Killing an unborn child is quite different from a woman piercing her tongue or getting a tattoo. Those are authentic choices about what a woman chooses to do with her own body.
I wonder if Sharpton believes buying and selling black people is a choice that should be respected. While some people might be against other people choosing to purchase and keep slaves, in the end, it’s all about choice.
Against All Opposition
The starting point is the God of the Bible. The Bible begins with this foundational presupposition: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1:1). Against All Opposition lays out the definitive apologetic model to help believers understand the biblical method of defending the Christian faith.
Buy NowTurning to the religious question, Sharpton claimed, “The Bible, if you’re using this as a religious argument, the Bible is about choice. You can go to heaven or hell. There’s nowhere in the Bible that says you had to go to heaven.” The Bible does say something about killing babies in the womb. People also choose to steal and murder. Those are choices the Bible deals with. The question remains: What determines what a person chooses to do is the right moral choice, and are there any consequences to such choices in terms of what God thinks about those choices?
Sharpton continued, “So, where do we get this theology of forcing something when the reality is you can’t even Biblically base that? It’s a question of choice. If you are a minister, as I am, you can preach to people to convert them, you do not make laws to compel them.” But there are laws that compel people to do many things, like paying rent, utilities, and taxes. There are laws against murder. If a person chooses to murder someone, there are legal consequences.
A minister could have made the same argument regarding purchasing, owning, and breeding slaves. It’s a choice. There were people who chose to buy and own slaves, and there were people who did not. No one was forcing those opposed to slavery to own slaves. We hear people say, “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but it would be wrong for me to impose my personal opinions on others.” The same argument could be used for slavery.
Someone might object to the above analogy because slaves are human beings, not property. Based on what? Who says? In the end, it comes down to the status of those being bought and sold and unborn babies, and by what standard can we know? Materialism can’t tell us, and neither can the evolutionary process of survival of the fittest. Even before the advent of the pseudoscience of spontaneous generation (something-from-nothing life), people were bought and sold as slaves. “If we are all biological accidents, shouldn’t the white accidents own and sell the black accidents?”[1] Who’s to say otherwise?
Aristotle believed in the reasonableness and “natural order” for the institution of slavery because there are some people who are “slaves by nature,” a phrase found in his Politics. Aristotle’s views, as a champion of reason, made their way to the early years of discovery:
Of all the ideas churned up during the early tumultuous years of American history, none had a more dramatic application than the attempts made to apply to the natives there the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery: that one part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of masters born for a life of virtue free of manual labour.[2]
Who’s to argue differently?
On what ultimate non-negotiable law do those “outside” the church use for their moral standard? While there is no formal agreement, most often we hear it’s some version of natural law. And that’s the problem. Whose version of natural law do we follow? And in a day when everything is said to be evolving—even law—can there ever be a fixed version of natural law? President Obama changed his view of homosexuality by telling us that he had “evolved” on the issue. If enough people “evolve” on a moral issue, does it mean that what was once immoral is now moral, and how does anyone know?
Co-host of “The View” Whoopi Goldberg stated that God approves of abortion because “God made us smart enough to know when” giving birth “wasn’t going to work for us” and added that God gave us “freedom of choice.” Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia, also appeals to her supposed Christian faith to support abortion. “While your faith tradition may tell you that you personally do not want to make that choice, it is not my right as a Christian to impose that value system on someone else.” Once again, apply her argument to slavery or refusing to allow blacks to sit at lunch counters: “While your faith tradition may tell you that you personally do not support slavery, it is not my right as a Christian to impose that value system on someone else.”
Following Goldberg’s bit of theological “logic,” could we argue that because “God made us smart enough to know when” women gave birth, and it “wasn’t going to work for them,” God gave them the “freedom of choice” to do away with the born child? Cultures practiced slavery and infanticide for millennia.
Infanticide was a widespread practice throughout human history that was mainly used to dispose of unwanted children. Its main purpose is the prevention of resources being spent on weak or disabled offspring. Unwanted infants were normally abandoned to die of exposure, but in some societies, they were deliberately killed…. A letter from a Roman citizen to his sister, or a pregnant wife from her husband, dating from 1 BCE, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed: “I am still in Alexandria. … I beg and plead with you to take care of our little child, and as soon as we receive wages, I will send them to you. In the meantime, if (good fortune to you!) you give birth, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.” In some periods of Roman history, it was traditional for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised or left to die by exposure. (Source)
It was all about choice, and for some of the same reasons pro-abortionists use today to justify abortion — “parents ease the killing of a newborn by persuading themselves that it is not yet a child.” This is equally true of abortion. “It’s just a conglomeration of cells.”
It’s interesting that people who react hysterically when conservatives appeal to God and the Bible, suddenly appeal to the Bible to support killing unborn babies. Here’s why they do it. They have realized that there is nothing within the materialistic worldview of anything-goes-morality that can be appealed to for justification for any moral standard. This was the same problem the prosecution encountered in dealing with Nazi war crimes. Why was killing millions of people wrong based on the science of the survival of the fittest? Germany had a different way of looking at morality. Who were these non-German nations to impose their view of morality on them? John Warwick Montgomery writes:
The most telling defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system, in complete consistency with it, and that they therefore could not rightly be condemned because they deviated from the alien value system of their conquerors.[3]
Being consistent with evolutionary “ethics” is dangerous for everyone, including those who embrace it and enact it into law. All a person has to do is walk the streets of some of our major cities to see how lawlessness has become normative. The following is a quotation often attributed to Voltaire: “Whatever you do,” he told his mistress, “don’t tell the servants there is no God or they’ll steal the silver.”
Restoring the Foundation of Civilization
The main reason anti-Christian civilizationists survive and seem to thrive is that Christians have not engaged with, answered, and built a competing alternative culture—THE ORIGINAL CIVILIZATION—founded on the principles found in God’s Word and observable in creation.
Buy NowIt’s stunning to find these three prominent black people supporting abortion. In 1973, Jesse Jackson said the following: “Abortion is black genocide…. What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?”[4] It was no accident that Planned Parenthood, originally the American Birth Control League, set up offices in minority neighborhoods and enlisted black pastors to push their agenda. Today, Planned Parenthood “targets African Americans by locating 62% (approx. 2 out of every 3) of their surgical abortion mills in black and minority communities.” (Source)
[1]James Scott Bell, The Darwin Conspiracy (Gresham, OR: Vision House, 1995), 64.
[2]Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), 12-13.
[3]John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis, MN: Dimension Books/Bethany Fellowship, 1975), 24-25.
[4]Robert E. Johnson, “Legal Abortion: Is it Genocide or Blessing in Disguise?,” Jet Magazine, 43 (March 22, 1973), 15. Also see, “Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Abortion Flip Flop Timeline” (March 10, 2011).