Harry Blackmun once stated that the death penalty cheapens the country's respect for human life. You may remember him as the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion-on-demand and launching the American holocaust.
In a pathetic attempt to rationalize this decision, Blackmun contended that, while the unborn may indeed be human, they are not persons and are therefore not entitled to have their lives protected by the law. He did this despite the fact there is not one word in the English language for a human being who is not a person.
In fairness, it must be pointed out that Blackmun did not invent this "human-but-not-persons" concept; he simply ripped it off the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision authorizing slavery. In that case, it was decided that blacks had roughly the same rights as mules since they were "human-but-not-citizens."
In any event, Blackmun's personal crime against humanity has, so far, snuffed-out the lives of more than 50 million helpless children. But for the time being, I want you to set aside that breathtaking thought and consider a specific comparison between abortion and capital punishment.
In a death-penalty case, the legal requirement is that a state cannot execute someone if a jury determines that there is any reasonable doubt of his or her guilt. In addition to that, the defendant is assumed innocent and doesn't have to create this reasonable doubt. The burden of proof lies solely with the state.
But Blackmun's argument was that we should take an opposite approach when it comes to executing the unborn. And ever since then, the pro-choice lobby has relied on this "no-one-knows-when-life-begins" lie as a rationalization for their baby-killing enterprise.
The point is, if we were to apply the same logic to capital punishment that America's death merchants apply to abortion, our position would be that when a man is charged with a crime, the state has no obligation to prove that he is guilty; it is his responsibility to prove he is innocent. So at the end of a trial, a judge could say to the defendant, "Since the court has been unable to determine whether you did or did not commit the crime, we're just going to go ahead and execute you."
As outrageous as this sounds, it is exactly what the pro-choice lobby is saying every time they defend abortion by claiming that there is some question about whether the unborn is or is not a living human being.
Of course, the fact is that modern science settled that question when it gave us the first sonogram images of life in the womb. At that moment, the humanity of the unborn could no longer be called a theory; it had become an observable fact. The only problem is, gaining that knowledge didn't change our behavior. And so every 24 hours, this Christian nation of ours casually tosses another 3,000 or so corpses onto the pile.
In 1770, John Adams wrote, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Apparently, what Blackmun understood and Adams didn't is that facts may indeed be stubborn things, but they are also things that can be ignored.
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Mark Crutcher is president of Life Dynamics Incorporated of Denton, Texas.