The root of the word “innocent” reveals that the notion of innocence is connected to harmlessness. An innocent person is a person who does no harm. And we see immediately that there is a special quality of wickedness in premeditated violence against such people.
Since September 11, many Americans have spoken as though taking the lives of innocent people by the thousands represents violence and hardheartedness that are incomprehensible to us. But is the spirit that could commit such evil really a stranger to our own souls? In fact, Americans know a lot about that spirit and its fruit – we just won‘t admit it to ourselves.
For four months now, Americans have been proclaiming with one voice that no one has the right consciously to target innocent life for his own purposes. And yet, it is still unreflectively taken for granted by many of these same people that, somehow or another, the practice of abortion doesn‘t fall under that principle.
Last Tuesday was the 29th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, in which our Supreme Court decided that we have the right to take the lives of our own children whenever it is convenient. But the unborn are more innocent than anyone sitting in the World Trade Center on that terrible day. Are we not tolerating the same principle of evil that animated the attack of September 11? Within the practice of abortion, do we not give public sanction to the targeting of innocent human life?
We have adopted a language of euphemism to disguise this evil, just as some call terrorists “freedom fighters” and speak about their “action” against the United States. Similarly, we speak of the “right to choose,” without ever naming the choice. Thus we avoid the simple fact that abortion is the deliberate taking of innocent human life.
Osama bin Laden chose to kill those whose lives, in his fanatical and puritanical view, don‘t have the spiritual and moral quality that justifies their existence. The abortion choice denies that the unborn life in the womb has the quality which demands our respect. And in each case, once it is decided that certain people need not be respected, the door to killing is opened wide.
Our Founders said that we are all “created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.” We acknowledge that it is by God‘s authority, not by a human decision, that human beings have dignity. And that means that whether it‘s a mother deciding about her child or Osama bin Laden applying the fanatical standards of his moral puritanism, no human power has the right to withdraw respect from other human beings because we consider them not quite human enough for us.
Tragedy often softens the heart and leads us through our grief and pain to look at our own lives differently. Will America look at the tragedy we perpetrate against our own offspring in a different light given the terrible public evil that was brought on us by a similar callous disregard for innocent life? In uncounted millions of individual lives, this has undoubtedly already happened. September 11 was a wake up call to the conscience – for who could see what our fellow man did to us on that day without seeking in his own heart for the source of such evil?
And yet the hundreds of thousands of people who marched and prayed in Washington last Tuesday to observe in sorrow and repentance the 29th anniversary of legalized destruction of the unborn in America were met with even more than the usual disregard by the national media. The media blackout of the March for Life makes it clear that our national soul-searching in the wake of September 11 has not yet reached the media elites. Those elites are still trying to suppress national deliberation and repentance for our complicity in an evil that has already dwarfed anything Osama bin Laden has done.
The terrorists attacks are like signs written in the sky for all to see, warning us to remember the evil men can do. I pray that we as a people can come to acknowledge the full range of our capacity for inhumanity to the innocent and the powerless. Reminded that evil is real, let us recover the courage to shun it in ourselves as readily as we do in our enemies.
(Dr. Keyes is founder and chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles.)
