Trustees of mankind’s better destiny

Next week there will be a national “summit” meeting in Birmingham,
Ala., to consider the state of the civil rights movement. It
commemorates the anniversary of the racially motivated bombing deaths of
four little girls 37 years ago in a Birmingham church. I am afraid that
much, or all, of the discussion in Birmingham will concern the strategy
and tactics of the rear-guard defense of the race-based spoils system
commonly known as “affirmative action.” This is too bad — and not only
because race-based preferences are a violation of everything the civil
rights movement once stood for. Focus on the self-seeking agenda of
liberal black politics is regrettable as well because it continues to
distract us from the real lesson for our time of the civil rights
movement. The politics of racial division prevents us from discerning,
as Americans, the real unfinished business of the cause of human justice
which flared so brightly in the aftermath of the Birmingham bombing.

What should those who would honor and serve the American civil rights
movement be thinking about today? While this is a question for all
Americans, the history and heritage of black Americans do have a
special bearing on our time. Those of us who look back to that
heritage of bondage and emancipation, of discrimination and liberation,
have a special word to speak to America today. Black Americans are
uniquely qualified to draw the attention of the nation to the preeminent
issue of civil rights today, the equality before God and the law of all
persons, born and unborn.

The history of black Americans illustrates, above all else, the
difference between the eyes of the world and the eyes of justice and
faith. Our entire experience rings out the truth that, in the midst of
all the woes and injustices of this world, there is indeed a God of all,
of master and slave, of white and black, of oppressor and oppressed.
And it is in the hand of that God alone that truth, hope and justice are
securely held. Slave and oppressed freedman survived and eventually
began to flourish by holding on to that faith.

And so did America. We have always been tempted to believe that the
visible things are the source of our greatness — the military power,
scientific and technical achievements, and economic prosperity. Even
the “American Dream” is often defined in material terms. And yet those
same Americans, from the beginning, have resisted this materialist
heresy. Again and again, we have managed to remember that our nation
exists on the basis of our founding principles, which made it clear that
the aim of human social life is not measurable in material terms.
America exists, and will continue to exist, as long as we continue to
hold as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

The premise of America puts first and foremost, not the desire for
any material thing, but our faith in God, Who is presented in that great
Declaration as the foundation of all justice, freedom and right in this
land. This truth, upon which we rely as a people, is really the same
truth to which, in the midst of all the oppression in slavery, black
Americans clung.

The creeds of America, of enslaved and oppressed black Americans, and
of the civil rights movement, are the same creed. Inscribed on the
memorial in Tennessee where Martin Luther King was killed is the
scriptural passage, “Behold the dreamer cometh.” Like the long-suffering
slaves, Dr. King and the heroes of the civil rights movement dared to
see more clearly than others, and even in the midst of continued
oppression and bondage, the real significance of our human dream of
dignity. Out of the depths of slavery and persecution, black Americans
have been able to see, so long as they have been willing to look, the
real meaning of freedom.

It’s a simple thing, really. Oppression and bondage led black
Americans to realize that real freedom isn’t lost when the body is
chained. They knew that they were free so long as they held fast to the
God of justice. That’s why they were able to sustain their human
dignity; they recognized that freedom doesn’t come from the riches of
our wallets, but from the riches of our heart.

From Independence Hall, to the cotton fields, to the triumphant
defeat of Jim Crow, the black experience in our history has demonstrated
that the American Dream is not about money but, rather, is about moral
dignity. That moral dignity which our Founders affirmed all men to
possess and which would, in America at least, be respected by government
and every human power. The civil rights movement is an organic part of
the American profession of faith and reason that our dignity is not a
consequence of human will, but of God’s will.

The American dream is the universal dream that human society can be
based on mutual respect, derived from an acknowledgment of the will and
authority of the Creator from whose hand we derive our rights and
freedoms. This dream is, and has long been, a hope somewhere hidden in
the hearts of all humankind. It is the real reason that the world’s
eyes turn to America. For we are, in some rough way, the manifestation
of that hope and even the beginning of its fulfillment.

Americans are, in a sense, trustees of mankind’s better destiny. We
are a nation dedicated to the principle that allows human beings to live
together in dignity, equality, liberty and peace. And the Declaration
of Independence’s self-evident truth that our rights come from God is
the foundation of everything. It is the foundation of our liberty, the
foundation of our rights, the foundation of our franchise and, hence,
the foundation of our government by consent. And it is the foundation
of our special mission and destiny before the world.

Opposed in every age to the American Dream of human equality before
God is the nightmare of the sovereignty of arbitrary human will. In the
19th century it took the form of the claim that “popular sovereignty”
could determine the dignity of other human beings according to race.
This version of the American heresy was not finally stamped out until
the triumph of the civil rights movement of the 20th century. But the
nightmare has returned, in the 20th and 21st centuries, in the issue of
abortion. And the simple truth of America’s situation is that we must
reject the destructive logic of abortion or we will lose our republic.
There is no middle ground.

This republic rests on the premise that rights and freedom come from
God. The notion of abortion rights rests on the premise that the
humanity and rights of the child come from its mother’s choice. We
can’t have it both ways — the foundation of our liberty is either human
choice or God’s choice. The principle at the heart of the abortion
rights movement is the resurrected principle of arbitrary human
willfulness, and of oppression and slavery, that beat down black
Americans for centuries and almost destroyed America.

Abortion is better hidden than slavery, but the eyes of justice are
not fooled. In place of auction blocks and pens we have “clinics” and
“doctors.” And the veneer of scientific justification is a bit thicker
than it was in 1830, just about as thick, in fact, as it was in the
Germany of 1938. The Nazis invoked very studiously developed
“scientific” criteria to determine that some life was “unworthy” of
respect. They, like today’s abortion theorists, reasoned torturously to
the conclusion that some people were not people at all, but “subhumans”
who, if they only had the “consciousness of human beings,” would want to
die anyway. And so they were taken to “clinics” and murdered by men who
wore nice white smocks and had “doctor” in front of their names. How
familiar.

The civil rights movement exists wherever the question is put: “Are
we still a people of the Declaration?” The abortion issue puts this
question to us, as clearly as ever. Are we still a people based on the
premise that all human beings are entitled to the same respect for their
God-given moral dignity?

We will remember next week as a founding moment of the civil rights
movement what happened to four defenseless children in a Birmingham
church. The cruel killing of children by unopposed physical violence
arrested the nation’s attention as the worst form of abuse. The
Birmingham bombing epitomized the indecent indignity of evil and
awakened a moral consciousness that would not be denied. We understood
that the destruction by force of the innocent and wholly dependent was
particularly evil because it was an abuse of power.

How can we then recommend this to the women in our society? How can
we urge — as a matter of constitutional right! — that they should take
advantage of the fact that the life of their child is, for a time,
helpless and wholly within their power? How can we tell them that it is
precisely because of that dependency that they have the right to
destroy it? The abortion doctrine epitomizes the distilled and focused
evil the civil rights movement rose up to oppose. The defense of that
evil in America today marks us — as surely as any racial bigot was
marked 50 years ago — as a people no longer sensitive even to the most
rudimentary moral principle.

How stands the civil rights movement? Today the very community that
once understood the cause of American liberty best, black Americans, see
their political leadership joining arms with the National Abortion
Rights Action League and their ilk to defend a holocaust that claims
more victims, more consistently, than slavery or the Klu Klux Klan ever
did. Worse, it is a holocaust performed by those who ought to be the
guardians of the future in their womb.

Thirty-seven years ago, four young people were ripped by violence
from the sanctuary to which their equal dignity as God’s creatures and
American citizens entitled them. Galvanized by their horror at this
evil, and inspired by their faith in God and American justice rooted in
universal moral principle, a long-suffering people summoned the courage
to make their stand publicly in defense of the dignity they had long
harbored and nurtured in their hearts. Today, millions of innocent
children of God are ripped by legalized violence every year from their
own sacred sanctuary. A “civil rights movement” that acquiesces in —
even supports — this most profound violation of the spirit of human
equality that rose from the ashes in Birmingham cannot claim the mantle
of justice.

The pro-life movement is the civil rights movement in America today.
Veterans of Birmingham, and the other places of honored struggle in the
fight for black dignity, can find in the pro-life cause the true heir of
the cause they love.

There are those who think, however, that they can ignore the cry from
the womb and devote the moral treasure of Birmingham to the enrichment
of themselves and the cultivation of racial division in America. But,
like Moses leaving Egypt, we will take their moral treasure from them
and we will put it to the service that God intended — the glory of
Jefferson, of Lincoln, and of King will, in the end, serve the cause of
the unborn and the principle of human equality under God which is the
soul of America.