Human Rights and the Death Penalty

5 May, 2018

If abortion is not the murder of a child and contraception not the deliberate abolition of sacred human life, then “prolife politics” has no raison d’etre.  And if the doctrine of the sanctity of human life is not grounded in the Christian proposition that mankind is created in the image of God and therefore “endowed with certain inalienable rights,”  then governments have no firm foundation for any body of law in support of human rights of any kind!  We might, at best, advance some random utilitarian principles advocating, perhaps, for the survival of the fittest or the prettiest or those with the best singing voices.

We do, we aver, have such a principle.  We assert the pre-eminence of homo sapiens as not only pre-eminent biological specimens, but singular “animals” among all creatures, fashioned in the imago Dei – the very “image of God.”  And, by divine decree, the proper moral assessment of the intentional destruction of this life is that it is murder.  It is not a matter of privacy and “personal choice.”  Rather, it is statutory and actionable and meriting, in truth, the death penalty.  This is justice.

This must be the consistent position of  those who would re-establish the disestablished principle for human rights starting with the “right to life” of the child in the womb.  Human rights for all depend upon the human rights for “the least of these.” There must be justice for all or there looms the consequence of justice for none –  national judgment: captivity, war, economic ruin.