The historic occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration sent chills down my spine. Never before did the Lincoln Memorial hover so majestically over the White House. The central monument of this inauguration was not the house that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but the marbleized man who sits at the end of the Washington Mall.

This inauguration shouts to us all that it has finally happened: the formal movement from slavery to freedom is complete. Freedom itself has been slow in emerging for those who came to America in the cargo holds of slave ships. First came freedom from slavery, then freedom from Jim Crow, then freedom to vote, then freedom from segregation.

Freedom from prejudice and discrimination is certainly not complete, but Obama’s inauguration is like the first landing on the moon – a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind. 

As a child of the 50’s, I personally celebrate that mankind is now free from the horrible ignorance that once counted black men and women as less than human beings. In slavery, slaves were considered property. The slave owner could disassemble families, sell children, and buy other men and women at his own economic whim. And as if the degradation of slavery was not enough, the 3/5’s Compromise in 1787 signaled that slaves were only to be counted as 3/5’s of a person for the purpose of determining the number of representatives a state had in Congress. 

It is difficult to believe that a people once existed in America who reasoned and made laws as though black people were not fully human and not possessing lives protected under the Constitution. They were considered as beings un-endowed by their Creator with the rights of life and liberty.

I also have chills in my soul today, because a great irony is taking place. The first black President, signaling the equality of all people, has said that among his first acts as President will be to promote abortion by making federal funds immediately available for this evil act.

His reasoning? Babies in the womb are not fully human. Embryos, in the cargo hold of their mother’s womb, are not full persons. Fetuses, chained to their mother with umbilical chords, sucking their thumbs and kicking their feet, do not have their lives protected by the Constitution. 

This irony must be used to remind us that racism did not have its beginning in differences of color, but in defects of morals and philosophy. Philosophers of secularism could always argue, on the basis of lesser goods (economic, social, utilitarian, etc.) that slavery was not all evil. They could claim that some good did come from slavery. But philosophers of religion and moral ethicists who believe that man is made in the image of God could never make such an assertion.

Failed clergymen and false theology aside, it has always been demonstrably clear that slavery is an evil “in itself.” It might have been a useful good for the economy, a utilitarian good for the education of the supposed “savage,” a pleasurable good for the benefactor, but slavery was never an intrinsic good – ever and always un-befitting to man. Slavery was and is a moral evil. 

Strange that Obama, the first black President, should operate out of the same philosophy of secularism that once enslaved his people. Obama brings his own 3/5’s compromise to the issue of measuring life in the womb. He counts the babe in the womb as less than human. It is above his pay grade to decide when to defend this life.

With the philosophy of secularism he considers the useful good of abortion (population needs), the economic good (abortion addresses the lack of resources for poor pregnant teens), the utilitarian good (college life and job preparation is interrupted by early child-bearing), thus using the same logic and rationale as those who argued for slavery. Like the masters before him, he misses the fact that none of these lesser goods erases the truest fact of history: Life is sacred, all of life, life of every size, every race, and every color.

Abortion, like slavery, is never an intrinsic good. It is ever and always a moral evil, unbefitting to man.

 

Greg Brown is pastor of Western Heights Baptist Church in LaGrange.