Monday, February 8, 2010

The difference between Barack Obama and William Wilberforce

At the Life Training Institute blog, Jay Watts writes:
In the course of his [recent] speech, President Obama recalled the efforts of Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and William Wilberforce as examples of people who saw God in the faces of their enemies. Here is where President Obama's delusion is most apparent. He is so eager to cast himself in the light of those great men and see similarities in the resistance they faced that he misses the common thread that unites them and excludes him. It certainly was not their shared civility and gift of articulation.

Those men are remembered in high esteem because they refused to compromise basic principles in relation to the equality and value of all human life. They faced down injustice with courage and strength in the face of resistance that was well beyond common political incivility in declaring a whole race of human beings as less important than another. We honor them because we understand that it would have been easier for them to care less, but that the particular evils that confronted each of them demanded people of strength be willing to commit themselves to opposing those evils. Whether by design or in the course of those unfolding events, these men joined their lives to the struggle for freedom and equality for all time.

You do not join the ranks of those men by passing legislation that any old democrat at any time would champion if they held the presidency. You do it by recognizing that injustice and inequality are still present today and that a group of human beings are currently the victims of terrible inhumanity. The unborn human beings that are destroyed and exploited today, like all the powerless before them, are in need of men and women of courage to stand up and seek the recognition of their basic humanity.
But President Obama chooses not to stand up on their behalf.