Nazis

I know it sounds trite, but Back to the Future helped me concretize the vague ideas I had back then about trying to imagine people my parent's age as once being young.

I saw Marty's mother as young Marty's mother, and it helped me get over the delusion that most young people have about old people.... they have a hard time visualizing old folks as once being young folks.

What was your take-away from Schindler's List?

Mine was seeing how normal people could step by step start seing the Nazis as normal. Pretty soon pushing around Jews in public became normal. Pretty soon shooting them in public became normal. All nice and organized and normal.

Really.. who knows what Europe would look like today had they not been defeated.

And so it is with the today's killing of the young and old right here in the grand U.S. of A.

Really.. who knows what we will look like tomorrow if it is not defeated today.

link

Dr. Jean Garton, in her classic pro-life book, Who Broke the Baby?, noted that the legalization of abortion opened the door to a dangerous and destructive “new ethic.” She wrote,

In the acceptance of abortion-on-demand, there occurs a subtle but profound shift in the attitude of society toward all people who are unwanted, imperfect, and dependent. The same forces involved in legalizing abortion, while claiming to alleviate the suffering of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, are the same forces involved in the promotion of infanticide and euthanasia, claiming to want to eliminate the suffering of the handicapped, sick, and senile. When we choose to offer death as an alternative to suffering, the list of those who qualify under “the new ethic” expands greatly.

On September 18, United Church of Christ minister Kristi Denham announced that a new organization of clergy called the End of Life Consultation Service (ELCS) had been created that would be devoted to ministering to critically ill medical patients. Rev. Denham explained that this organization would “help terminal patients access hospice, pain treatment, and other excellent end of life care.”

The new organization plans to man a 1-800 hotline that would provide potential callers with “volunteers [who would] visit patients and families in the home, and together they [could] identify a path to peaceful dying, well-suited to an individual’s illness and circumstances.” After the consultation, the clients would then be free to “obtain and self-administer the means” of killing themselves.

As disturbing as the creation of the ELCS is, with its effort to wrap doctor–assisted suicide in clerical attire, its methods are really nothing new. Indeed, one cannot fail to see the parallel between the creation of the ELCS and the effort forty years ago by activist clergymen and women to legalize abortion.

The pro-choice movement in the 1960s and 1970s was greatly assisted by many Christian denominations’ support for the liberalization of existing abortion laws. The American Baptist Church, the Episcopal Church, the two denominations that became the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) all spoke out in support of legal abortion. Even the Southern Baptist Convention, which is today seen as one of the most pro-life denominations, originally approved of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, calling it an advance in the efforts for “religious liberty.”

The Nazis were crazy, then they were stopped. They're back.