Suffer (not) the children
By Miguel Guanipa (10/05/06)
There’s a recurrent determinant behind the headline news that we have been subjected to in the last few days that bespeaks of a grave moral bankruptcy to which our world today is inextricably captive.
To recap, we learned about the disclosure of a homosexual House Representative’s lurid e-mails aimed at seducing an unsuspecting young page, the shooting rampage of a disturbed individual in an Amish school ending in the death of five innocent children, and the release of a signed petition in a major feminist publication by women audaciously and unashamedly proclaiming they had had an abortion.
The consociate levels of tragedy and exploitation are enacted by very different kinds of agents with just as many diverse scruples and sensibilities, but there is one common thread that is woven through these purely unrelated misfortunes-and that is a seemingly unremitting trend that reveals this society’s failure to protect some of its most vulnerable members: our children.
In one case it is a sexually disordered person subtly assailing his victim while masquerading himself as a champion of children’s rights. In another case it happens to be a member of a community who wanted to satisfy unnatural urges and sought to consummate them by also focusing on the easiest available targets which ended up being killed in the process. The last case represents the dual purpose of a social movement seeking to repackage a cause by using the testimonies of those who, ironically, are the ones most hurt by it: the women who made the terrible choice of ending their pregnancies believing self autonomy to be paramount.
All of these stories intersect at the nexus of a chief ideological doctrine.
Hereto a certain ideology that has supported the cause of the first agent as a citizen lawfully endowed with a right to pursue the private designs of his predestined sexual orientation; presumably a civil right on which no government should place any infringements.
The exigencies that position women to make the exculpated choice to kill their unborn baby are also fully escorted by equally altruistic imperatives. Her right to reproductive freedom is not to be trifled with by pretentious judicial entities that are incapable of fathoming the moral intricacies of an individual’s personal choice.
We would think that the man who entered the Amish school and killed the five innocent girls stands far outside of this civilized domain of ethical inquiry, since he is merely a madman who lacked possession of a moral compass. But he is not too far from espousing an eerily adjacent outlook on reality.
At least one part of what drove this man to commit such an atrocious act of violence is wedded to a conscious apathy for the sanctity of human life lurking under the dark veil of insanity; a very similar tenor of apathy prompted the sane politician to try to exploit the innocence of one less experienced than him, and the woman to dehumanize her child in the womb to the degree that the embattled philosophical proposition did not proffer sufficient moral incentive to help her refrain from going through with the procedure.
Many may deem moral extrapolations of this sort to be wholly unwarranted, but those who have opposed abortion on demand envisaged from the very outset that such a disregard for the life of the unborn would be a catalyst that would eventually translate onto further disregard for the sanctity of life of other vulnerable members of society.
Perhaps the recent news involving the sexual exploitation and killing of innocents will serve as a reminder that we may need to revisit our reasoning on what we sometimes mistakenly reckon are our inalienable rights.
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