Saturday, October 10, 2020

The preeminent moral issue of our time

As American Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) once said: “The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.”

That is why I decided to publish this post. It is an understatement to say that our upcoming elections are divisive, yet so important. I will vote the side of life!  Yet, instead of using my own words here, I am pasting below those of somebody I deeply respect, apologist Trent Horn. 

Of course, I am happy to lovingly discuss this, if anybody reading this post would like to.

(The words below are from Trent's video, whose link can be found at the bottom of this post) 

It’s the 1860 presidential election and you have four candidates to choose from. Three of them want to allow the new states in the West to practice legal slavery. The fourth, Abraham Lincoln, says that the federal government should prevent these states from ever making it legal to enslave a human being. 

Whom do you vote for? I bet it’s the candidate who opposes legal slavery.

Does that make you a naïve, “single-issue” voter? After all, voters in 1860 were concerned about many important issues, including poverty, tariffs, women’s rights, and secession.

Yet out of all those issues, only one of them, slavery, was preeminent—far and away the more important social issue of that time.

It wasn’t abortion—because although abortions did happen then, they were illegal and rare. Those who broke the law and performed abortions were condemned by groups like the American Medical Association. This made abortion less important an issue than the four million Americans—13 percent of the population—who were legally enslaved.

Today, however, the situation is very different.

Slavery is illegal, though some criminals still practice it through human trafficking. But abortion is legal, and in this country alone it kills 850,000 pre-born children every year. Ten percent of these abortions take place after the first trimester and use a procedure called dilation and evacuation, in which fetuses may be decapitated and dismembered.

Most people today think they surely would have opposed slavery in the nineteenth century, yet they ignore or defend the legal killing of children in the womb, citing the “right to choose.” Yet abortion is the “slavery issue” of our time, the preeminent issue, and, just like slavery, it can be fully defeated only once the evil laws that uphold it are overturned.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that laws “may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.” [...]

You can watch the whole video (and series) made by Trent Horn on this subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDWKA8Wyp8&feature=emb_logo

And if you are one of my catholic readers, please read about the 5 non-negotiables issues for Catholic voters.




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