I read the following in a church bulletin, written by Fr. Frank Pavone. It’s another view on the abortion issue, and all these "rights" groups that believe that the killing of an innocent life is an OK thing to do.
"While some have tried, shamelessly, to obscure and contradict this teaching, many are quite able to understand and accept it. Yet, the truth is even deeper than the statement, "Being wrong on abortion outweighs being right on other issues."
The full truth is: If you are wrong on abortion, you cannot be right on other issues.
To permit abortion, but then, to cry out for the right to work, housing, education, health care, etc., is to say these other rights belong to some people but not all. They, obviously, do not belong to those who were snuffed out by abortion.
Therefore, these rights cannot be human rights, because you have already said that not all humans have a claim on them. This trivializes those other rights and puts them on an obscure and questionable foundation.
If you permit abortion, then, on what basis do you defend the other rights? Why do we care for the poor, because they have a right to food, clothing, and shelter? Why do they have a right to those things, because they have a right to live? Why are we concerned about unemployment, because people have a right to make a living? Why do they have that right, because they have a right to live? It all comes back to that foundational right. Abortion is not the only issue, but neither is the foundation of a house the only part of a house. Take the foundation away, and see how well you can build the rest.
The reason that being wrong on abortion makes it impossible to be right on other issues is that the heart and soul of every "issue" is precisely the dignity of the human person, whose right to life is not under the dominion of any other person. A person's dignity comes from the fact that he or she is human, not that someone else decides to grant that right at some point in time. Any human right begins when human life begins; otherwise, it is not a human right, but rather some kind of benefit bestowed for another reason.
Now, if you take the right to life away from some humans (as abortion does to the children in the womb), then, obviously, you can take away all human rights from those same humans, because none of the other rights made a claim upon your respect that you had to let those people live to possess it.
When one is wrong on abortion, one cannot be right on anything else."
Think about this on election day.
By George Konig
Oct. 17, 2004
www.georgekonig.org
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