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HOLOCAUST ARCHITECT DIDN'T HATE JEWS?
Should the phrase "hate crime" be defined by the character of the "feelings" a perpetrator harbors toward his victim or the nature of the "behavior" by which he victimizes? A New York Times article, appearing in the August 13, 1999 Orange County Register (CA), reported the publication of the memoirs of Adolph Eichmann, the SS official who oversaw the deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II. He also promoted the use of gas chambers in the death camps. The sub-headline for the article reads: "The Nazi who led Germany's genocide against Jews contended obedience, not hate guided him." Surely the fact that he didn't "hate" his victims (if true) would make him no less guilty of monumental hate crimes.
SLAVE OWNER DIDN'T HATE BLACKS?
Slavery and the legacy of "Jim Crow" was also an extremely "hateful" form of genocide but slave-owner Thomas Jefferson rationalized that he "loved" his slaves. On Jefferson's "kindness" toward them, author Virginius Dabney quotes Edmund Bacon, overseer at Monticello from 1806 to 1822 in his book The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981: "Mr. Jefferson ... would not allow them to be overworked and he would hardly ever allow one of them to be whipped." How's that for "love?"
John Chester Miller, in his book The Wolf by the Ears, The Free Press, 1977, says Jefferson did not hate his slaves: "Jefferson prided himself upon being a 'good' master; kindly, compassionate and considerate of his servitors' well-being." He adds, however, "Even so, about thirty of his slaves ran off to the British army during the War of Independence, thereby depriving Jefferson of the agreeable illusion that kind treatment was a credible substitute for emancipation."
In his book The Constitutional Principles of Thomas Jefferson, Caleb Perry Patterson, University of Texas Press, 1953, argues that Jefferson was caught up in astounding self-justification:
... it was Jefferson's humane feeling for his slaves that kept him from freeing them. To free the ordinary slave was not very different from starting him on the road to starvation. Or as Jefferson put it ... like abandoning children.
Would Jefferson's "humane feeling" for his slaves make slavery any less a crime against humanity?
Merrill D. Peterson adds in Thomas Jefferson And The New Nation, New York Oxford University Press, 1970 that " ... to turn loose the mass of slaves would have been, in his eyes, an act of heartless cruelty." What could be more "heartless" and "cruel" than slavery? Yet Jefferson's greed drove him to such self delusion that he saw its repudiation as "an act of heartless cruelty." This is not, of course, unlike the supposed "duty to abort" "unwanted" children in order to spare them lives of "hardship." Never mind that it is the selfish desires of born people which really motivate the "magnanimous" killing of the unborn. And so it was with Jefferson's oppression of his slaves. But Jefferson was as embarrassed by his avarice as are today's pro-aborts.
Dumas Malone, in his book The Sage of Monticello Little, Brown and Company, 1981 describes the head games Jefferson played with the euphemisms he employed to rationalize his ownership of slaves:
He resented the designation of these unfortunate human beings as property. He did not even like to call them slaves. When referring to those in his own possession, he generally spoke of them as servants or as his 'people.'
The dream world quality of Jefferson's self-serving rhetoric calls to mind awkward feminist references to "pregnancy termination" as they refuse to even say the word "abortion."
Jefferson fantasized an obligation to brutalize blacks. Virginius Dabney quotes in The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal, supra, an 1811 letter from Jefferson to John Lynch stating that "... to emancipate one's Negroes would be a betrayal of duty, since only a few exceptional slaves could fend for themselves." This is precisely the argument made by self-conscious pro-aborts who demand the deaths of fetuses who "might be born into poverty and thereby burden society."
It is cold comfort to an aborted baby that his mother didn't "hate" him.
HUMANITY DEFINED
There is, of course, a consensus in the scientific community that human life begins at the instant a human egg is fertilized by a human sperm. The widely used medical textbook The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th Edition, Moore, Persaud, Saunders, 1998, states at page 2 that "The intricate processes by which a baby develops from a single cell are miraculous .... This cell [the zygote] results from the union of an oocyte [egg] and sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being ...." At page 18 this theme is repeated: "Human development begins at fertilization [emphasis in original] ...."
PERSONHOOD DEFINED
"Humanity," however, is quite different from "personhood." As seen above, the humanity of the unborn child is a matter of objective science. Personhood, however, is a legal status which society can confer upon or withhold from a class of human beings as a function of the subjective values which inform our "politics." In the medical ethics text entitled Abortion, Medicine and the Law, 4th Edition, Butler & Walbert, p.18, Facts On File, 1992, personhood is discussed in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade, supra: "... [T]he Court specifically repudiated the claim that fetuses are persons within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment ...."
We, therefore, know when life begins but we must decide at what point in the development of that life, we, as a society, will confer rights of personhood, the most fundamental of which is the right to not be slaughtered. The competing developmental points at which society might grant personhood include fertilization of the ovum, implantation of the blastocyst, viability of the fetus (ability to survive outside the uterus), birth, or the passage of some period following birth (in his book Practical Ethics, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, 1993, Professor Singer of Princeton University, shockingly advocates the denial of personhood until one month following a child's birth).
So terms such as zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, newborn, toddler, adolescent, adult, etc. merely describe arbitrarily defined stages in the biological development of a human life. But the inclusiveness with which we extend rights of personhood defines our collective morality. Are we greedy or generous? Are we brutal or compassionate?
PERSONHOOD SELFISHLY LIMITED
Dominant societies have traditionally been selfish in the way they grant personhood. Ours is no exception. When a vulnerable group gets in our way or has something we want, we tend to define personhood in terms which exclude them. Indians got in the way of Westward settlement so we said they were subhuman to justify taking their land. We wanted the uncompensated work product of blacks so we said they were subhuman to justify taking their freedom. Unborn children have gotten in the way of our "liberation" so we say they are subhuman to justify taking their lives.
HATE LANGUAGE TO DEHUMANIZE THE UNBORN
In a crude attack piece featured in the April 12, 1990 issue of Parade magazine, the late Carl Sagan, a viciously pro-abortion astro-physicist, mocked unborn children as animals, comparing them with "segmented worms," "fish," "amphibians," "newts," "tadpoles," "reptiles" and "pigs." Dr. Sagan's language was as mean and hateful as that of any racist. Note the parallel with an article appearing in Time magazine, August 23, 1999, which reported that many neo-nazis who are members of the white supremacist group, Aryan Nation believe "... non-whites are 'mud people' on the level of animals."
FORM AND FUNCTION FACTS THAT STRENGTHEN PERSONHOOD CLAIM
Dr. Sagen conveniently overlooked the fact that an unborn baby's heart is beating by about the end of the third week after fertilization. "Heart activity begins by day 22 of ... [embryonic] life." (van Heeswijk, Nijhuis & Hollanders, "Fetal heart rate in early pregnancy," Early Human Development, 22, 1990). An embryo's brain is so fully formed by six weeks (before most surgical abortions are performed) that it is producing brain wave activity which will register on an electroencephalogram. Brain wave activity is the legal standard by which we determine whether adult victims of illness or injury are dead or alive. (Manlin, H. M.D., "Life of Death by EEG," The Journal of the American Medical Association, 190 (2) (12 October 1964): 112-114).
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