Dennis Peacocke comments

Dennis Peacocke

In America, calling a white man a "honky"; Italians, "dagos"; Asians "gooks;" and other racial slurs that fallen man gives to his brothers, is substantially different than calling a black man a "nigger." The reason for this is simple. The ravages of slavery have made the latter term more of a statement of dehumanization than racial competition. A slave in America was deemed less than fully human, therefore the racial slur carries with it a far deeper and uglier wound. How tragic that pre-born children in America are now called "fetal tissue." In so doing, we have stolen from our children their full human rights in exactly the same way we stole from African-American men and women their rights under the curse of racist slavery and through the guise of "property rights."

Those familiar with the debates surrounding the adoption of our nation's Constitution in the late 1780s are well-reminded that slavery was the major obstacle the framers could not reconcile. The Southern states would not sign a document freeing the slaves; and the founding documents themselves, both directly and indirectly, leveled a heavy indictment against slavery. The assertion in our Declaration of Independence that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," is the notable example. For the nation's philosophical integrity to be anything other than a sham, especially if the founders' logic was to hold, life must be God-given, and His rights attached to all He creates. Either the framers were going to uphold the principles of freedom and dignity asserted in our national charters, or they had to declare, even tacitly, that black-skinned men and women were not fully human and therefore excluded from the Creator 's God-given rights. The slavery issue was knowingly pushed off to a later generation to be resolved by either ballot, pen, or blood. By permitting slavery to stand for the sake of political expediency in the short run, the founders mistakenly underestimated the prejudicial drive among those to retain slavery.

And sham it became. The infamous Dred-Scott decision of 1856 upended legal precedent and the intent of the founding documents by ruling that slaves were property not persons. The majority opinion of Justice Roger B. Taney was not consistent with the position or hopes of the original framers. The Constitution affirmed the personhood of slaves, though blacks were declared to be three-fifths of all other persons for apportionment. It was a compromise to be sure, but also a political incentive to free slaves.

Of course, the Dred-Scott decision was, at the time, intellectually fashionable, closely preceding as it did, the greatest racist document ever published (1859): "The Preservation of Most Favored Races in the Struggle for Life," by Charles Darwin, otherwise euphemistically known as "The Origin of the Species." I have personally seen the original first edition in the British Museum and wondered when our nation's educators would have the intellectual honesty to give us the truth concerning the development of the book, its racist presuppositions, and the book's whole racist title, but that is just another example of the educational establishment's hypocrisy. With all its crying and wringing of hands for justice, the educational establishment pushes as "scientific fact" a theory built on the superiority of some races over others.

Today's abortion debate is proceeding downstream from the headwaters of our nation's founding schizophrenia: We believe in the idea of freedom, but not if it overly interferes with our wallets or genitals. Since we cannot admit that we don't love freedom for all men or women, we dehumanize those we choose to sacrifice on the altars of our own selfishness. What does this mean? It means women who choose to abort the dehumanized "fetuses" in their wombs are exercising their status as full human beings over those babies judged less than fully human.

The women's cry for ownership over the property of their own bodies has given us an America where mom's womb is now the "Southern plantation," overseen by women who claim to be well-intentioned and benevolent slave-holders, looking out for the good of everyone's "property rights." And those little fetal properties, like the blacks of former times, aren't even fully human until their second tri-mester of life, if then. Even the white racists of the 1850s couldn't slaughter millions of blacks with legal impunity, as our modern-day "plantation" mentality now permits!

The women who demand "freedom" over their own pregnant bodies, be they white women, black women, or brown women, sound exactly like the white, racist slave-holders who demanded freedom over the black-skinned property they called slaves. Will America ever live up to its Declaration of Independence that affirms the God-given right to a fully human life for all its citizens? First, it was the blacks; now, it's the babies. Who is next? We must stand for those rights of full human status for all our citizens, or we will just continue flushing those little non-human "properties," those unborn fetal fluids in the evolutionary chain, right down the drain, while the feminist slave-holders march for the ways of racist yesteryear. Let's all hear it for the property rights of the plantation owners, and let's all "lift that barge and tote that bale," and that's the bottom line.

Reprinted by permission. This article is excerpted from Dennis Peacocke's book "The Emperor Has No Clothes" available at www.gostrategic.org