What would Lincoln do?

Today is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and Washington has been holding festive and solemn ceremonies to honor the 16th president, one of President Obama’s personal heroes. At the morning ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Lincoln’s actions and words were recalled in the opening prayer, and in Obama’s speech, but they’re all missing an important and obvious point.

In the invocation, Rev. Barry Black quoted Lincoln as saying “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, a truth Dr. Martin Luther King carried into the civil rights movement. In his speech, Obama referred to Lincoln’s “absolute certainty in the righteous cause of ending slavery”, which was also in the minds and hearts of civil rights activists in their struggle to end discrimination against a whole class of human beings.

The undeniable truth is that abortion and euthanasia constitute today’s civil rights movement. There’s a direct connection between the two human rights causes, and it’s hard to believe Obama of all people cannot see it (or will not admit to it). Slave owners made the same arguments against recognizing blacks as human beings with the same inherent dignity and rights as whites (abhorrent to even recall this) that abortion rights activists are making against recognizing pre-born babies growing in their mothers’ wombs as human beings with the same inherent dignity and rights as anybody and everybody else. Which includes the disabled, the elderly, the impaired, the dying and dependent class of human beings.

Rev. Black ended his prayer imploring the Lord to ‘inspire us to follow his [Lincoln’s] footsteps until justice flows like mighty waters’ across the land. We need a serious public debate over what constitutes justice.