This year, Martin Luther King day will be observed six days after what would have been his 84th birthday. And, in fact, its observance coincides with Inauguration Day. And of course March for Life Day is four days after that.
So let’s talk civics, and rights, and politics for a minute. Let’s talk Washington, D.C. subjects. Lincoln-Memorial, Supreme-Court-building subjects.
Let’s presume that all of us will be marching For Life next Friday, either physically marching, or accompanying the March spiritually with prayers and support.
Why? How do we explain what we will be doing?
1. Killing an innocent and defenseless human being is wrong. But cheating on a seventh-grade vocab. quiz is also wrong, too, and we don’t march about that.
Abortion is not just wrong; it’s criminally wrong. When the Supreme Court declared on January 22, 1973, that no state of the Union could outlaw abortion, that was one of the gravest legal mistakes ever made by mankind. Forty years of advancement in gynecology, obstetrics, and neonatology has only made the Supreme Court’s decision that day look all the more blind.
2. We live in a free country. Free in a relative sense, of course; not absolutely free. I do not have the freedom, as a US citizen, to walk across an ice-covered parking lot with no fear of falling down on my tuckus. I do not have the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want to do it, with no thought regarding the welfare of others.
But we do have the freedom to travel to the front door of the Supreme Court and yell, Hey hey, ho ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go.
It’s got to go because it’s wrong. It is wrong by any honest standard of judgment.
When Martin Luther King took a stand against the degradation of an entire race of people, based on their skin color alone, he appealed to the same fact:
By any honest standard of judgment, it’s wrong to degrade a fellow human being, just because he or she is black.
Dr. King never said all black people are good. He never said all black people are going to heaven. He just appealed to the basic principle of honest judgment. Can anyone honestly say that just because someone is black, they’re no good, or less good—just because of that? No. Can anyone honestly say that it’s okay to kill a baby in the womb? No.
Dr. King quoted the Bible all the time. But you didn’t need a Bible to grasp his fundamental point. And you don’t need a Bible to know that Roe v. Wade has got to go. You don’t need a Bible to know that anyone who pressures a woman to have an abortion is a villain. To stand up against Roe v. Wade is to stand up for women, as well as for unborn babies.
There are plenty of forces at work in our country to “ghettoize” our Catholic Church, to make Catholicism seem foreign, strange, and murky. We know, of course, that it is none of these things.
And one of the best ways of showing it is to appeal to the fundamental principle of honest judgment, just like Martin Luther King did, when it comes to the innocent and defenseless unborn.
Father Mark White Blog 