The Issue That Won’t Go Away

This week hundreds of thousands of Americans will gather in Washington to march in peaceful protest of the Supreme Court decision that stripped our smallest children of their right to exist. They have been marching every year for over three decades.

Those who support the Supreme Court decision are equally adamant.
Abortion is the issue that never goes away.

The question is, why?

The answer has less to do with the actual act committed during an abortion, and more to do with the vision of America that each side represents.

It’s not a coincidence that many of the same groups that support abortion rights also are on the front lines of removing any reference to a Creator from the American public marketplace. If they succeed, this will be a completely different nation than the one that was created with the signing of the Declaration.

In the original vision, we recognized that each individual was endowed with rights by a Creator. Our entire system of government flows from that recognition. If we remove that premise, everything changes.

If there is no Creator, no one can have endowed rights. If rights are not endowed, they can not be inalienable. If there are no inalienable rights, it cannot be the purpose of government to protect them. If government was not instituted to protect the inalienable rights of its citizens, it cannot be judged by those citizens on its performance. If citizens do not have the authority to judge the performance of their government, they cannot act to change it. A government that cannot be judged or changed by its citizens is, by definition, a tyranny.

So, what does that have to do with abortion?

In legalizing abortion, the government declared that it had the authority to decide who was entitled to exist and who was not. It redefined the very existence of its citizens from a God-given inalienable right to a government entitlement. The fact that unborn children were the focus of this particular act of redefinition is irrelevant to the reality of the redefinition itself.

If the existence of one individual in America can be redefined from an inalienable right to an entitlement, the existence of every individual has been changed. The government may not have gotten around to touching everyone yet, but it has declared that everyone can be touched.

This is the reason that abortion is the issue that cannot be dealt with through compromise. Either we are a nation that recognizes that every citizen has God-given, inalienable rights, or we are not. Either we are a nation where the purpose of government is to protect the inalienable rights of its citizens, or we are not. It can’t be both ways.

With the death of every tiny child, America moves farther from the vision that created the beacon of hope that has shone around the world for over 200 years. Opposing abortion is not just about saving the precious lives of those children, it’s about saving the very soul of our nation. Both are well worth the effort.