Exodus 20:16
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
Truthful speech is the currency of a happy and virtuous human community. If a society begins to abandon its commitment to truthful speech (oh by, say, winking at politicians who declare “We do not torture” while overseeing a program of torture and murder of detainees) then the bad currency begins to drive out good. A society which accepts lying language into the core of its way of thinking is a society that is hurtling toward a very severe judgment. The United States discovered this in the 1860s when all the piled up lies about black men and women as “property” finally became insupportable. It will discover it again if we do not repent of falsely calling our unborn neighbor a “piece of tissue.” God is not mocked.
