Dignity

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 5: Dignity – To ensure the future of this American Idea, we should:

• Keep reminding each other of the origin of our rights. Americans much smarter and more sophisticated than many of the anti-theistic fundamentalists of today – people like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln – were unashamed to talk about God as the creator, the source, the endower of rights.

Americans need to regain that lack of embarrassment in talking about God. This is so in part because it’s true, and in part because there is no other source of rights. There is certainly nothing else that can stand up against the onslaught of flawed human nature.

• End artificial definitions of who is – or isn’t – a human being. We can and should give up all of the destructive questions about when life begins, when human life begins, when human life is viable, how much quality makes for worthwhile life, and what defects of health or ability make life unworthy. We can refuse to listen to fancy explanations and rationalizing.

If someone has the DNA of a human being, he or she is a human being. This includes embryos at one end of life – like you or me only younger – and centenarians who can’t see, hear, or walk at the other end of life.

We can’t let the godless version of evolution – the one most frequently and dogmatically taught in too many classrooms across the land – debase the very special place that human beings hold in this world. For too many anti-theists, even more important than evolution’s attempted explanation of where we came from is its explanation of where they want God to go – away.

There are always those who will press the case that some people aren’t people. “Abortion-rights advocates invoke medical technology…observing that no early-term fetus – that is, one less than nineteen weeks old – has ever survived outside the womb. If you can’t survive on your own, are you a person?”[i]

This terrible question contains an obvious answer for anyone remotely familiar with the American Idea of Dignity. This question is like asking, “If you can’t get out of a mine shaft on your own, do you still have the right to vote?”

• Allow every human being full control of their own lives and health. The unalienable right to life is possessed by each human being alone. No one holds anyone else’s right to life on his or her behalf.

We can hold a power of attorney for someone else, but we can’t hold a power to execute them. This is so whether the execution is by passive means like withholding basic care, medicine, food or water, or by active means like administering fatal drugs.

When someone can’t care for themselves – unborn, newborn, small children, disabled, elderly, comatose – the American Idea of Dignity calls us to provide that care. They still have their right to life. It’s still unalienable.

The Idea forbids us from taking those lives into our own hands. It prevents us from deciding to end those lives by any means. It draws a line at any of us playing God. The Idea resists any and all notions about life being over because of insufficient quality. In America, a good-hearted child with cerebral palsy isn’t worth less than a healthy womanizer.

Since each person has a right to life that is all his or her own, they can choose to live that life as they wish. They can choose good nutrition or bad, exercise or slothfulness, purified water or soft drinks, filtered air or smoking, slim waistline or obesity. They can take risks even for fun, take vitamins or not, go to the doctor or not, lather on sunscreen or burn to a crisp. If sick or injured, they can receive medical treatment – or not. They can go with standard practice or try the unusual, even odd. Whatever they do – or don’t do – the choice is theirs.

• Avoid becoming a culture that willingly deals in death. The only thing we can’t do is decide things about life and death for other adults. We can decide for minors, up to a point, but can’t go over the line into harming or killing them. A small, terminally ill child still has an unalienable right to life.

It isn’t hard to imagine someone pulling the plug on someone else for a host of bad reasons – cost too much, create too much burden, have money I’d like to inherit. Although the reasons will always sound altruistic – alleviate pain, end suffering, terminate a life without quality or meaning – the reality will always be playing God and filling up graveyards.

Most Americans don’t want doctors shifting effortlessly between healing and murdering. We don’t want a separate class of professionals whose work is dealing death. We don’t want a culture of death – we want a culture of dignity.

• Take the debates about the unalienable right to life from the courts and give them back to the people. Here’s what those who are committed to the unalienable right to life can say to those who want to limit that right only to the viable or high quality or meaningful: Remove this issue from the undemocratic courts of the privileged legal aristocracy and bring it back into the public square. Let’s discuss this right and debate it out in the open and then see where we the people stand.

It’s been said that some ignorance is invincible, and this is certainly true. But an even more important truth is that some rights are unalienable. Some things are best left alone. The right to life – along with the rights to liberty and property and the pursuit of happiness – should be prominent on that short but very important list.

A democracy, in the form of a representative republic, is perfectly designed to deal with serious, divisive, controversial issues like attacks on the unalienable right to life. Democracy may yield a variety of answers and significant compromise, but this will be more accepted in part because it was arrived at honestly and openly with everyone having a say – and in part because there will always be a chance to change it further.

But on this most important issue, there is no democracy and no representation. Abortion was made the law of the land by seven unelected lawyers wearing robes and meeting in secret, monarchs who wiped out the abortion-related laws in all 50 states – laws which had been passed by elected representatives and signed into law by elected governors. People could write their congressperson, but what good would that do? It had been taken out of their hands as well.

Justice Byron White, one of two to dissent in the scorched-earth landmark case Roe v. Wade, said that this issue “should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.”[ii]

There is no moral case to make in defense of abortion, which is perhaps why no one calls herself or himself “pro-abortion.” Perhaps we will find that Lord Shaftesbury was right when he observed, “What is morally wrong can never be politically right.”[iii]

Even Joe Klein, a very liberal commentator, wrote that “The liberals’ defense of abortion beyond the first trimester has no moral rationale unless the life of the mother is at risk.”[iv] Elsewhere, he said that “issues like abortion should be put to a vote. This is an idea unthinkable to most Democratic politicians, who believe the right to an abortion is tucked somewhere in the Constitution…Perhaps it is time, finally, for Democrats to embrace democracy.”[v]

And finally, if we want a right of privacy, then let’s have a constitutional amendment to create it and a good fight to define it. Let’s make sure we leave out a private right to eliminate preborn children. If nine unelected lawyers (or as few as five of them) get to decide this instead of 300 million citizens, then whatever else we are, we are not a democracy or a republic, and we are not governed by a constitution.

A lead editorial in USA Today started out, “Since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973…”[vi] It is an amazing moment when a major American newspaper can think that the Supreme Court can legalize anything. It is supposed to be a judicial, not legislative, body.

Five to nine people shouldn’t get to decide for 300 or 400 million what a baby is or whether it is all right to kill it. Let’s have all of us vote on this at all levels of government. In a democracy, the time has come for…democracy.

• Eliminate the censoring – like showing videos of abortions – that allows disrespect and destruction to grow in the dark. Evil grows when truth is buried. Let us all see video of partial birth abortions and saline abortions – if they’re just fetuses, what’s the problem? Let’s view sonograms of babies who are deformed (as though we aren’t all deformed in some way) before they are deselected. Let’s watch disabled children and adults being starved to death (already happening in hospitals).

They’ll show everything else in documentaries and television programs and motion pictures – why not these? Then let’s see if the American Idea of Dignity – and Americans – will still support these appalling decisions.

Part of the darkness is allowing people to make life-changing decisions when they aren’t ready to make them, and pretending to support them with evidence. But people and organizations can be schizophrenic when they want innocents to die and evil people to live. “The American Psychological Association claims…that killers under the age of 18 are incapable of making appropriate moral judgments. But this is the same organization that has told the [Supreme] Court in the past that teenage girls are mature enough to decide whether to have an abortion without parental input. Which is it?”[vii]

Indeed. In an episode of Law and Order called (appropriately) “Dignity,” Sam Waterston’s District Attorney Jack McCoy says, “My daughter was pro-choice until she taped a sonogram of my grandchild-to-be on her refrigerator. Now…” His assistant, played by Linus Roache, declares, “An unborn child is a life and a soul to me.…It’s time to face the facts, the tide has turned. Most American’s are pro-life now.”[viii]

In the meantime, the hypocrisy of the pro-choice agents of death should not be allowed to drive public policy. They demand that people that promote carrying a pregnancy to term tell people the whole story – that they are not medical clinics, do not and will not provide abortions, etc.

But they themselves are 100 percent committed to not telling their customers the whole truth – talking about development of the baby, showing video of babies in utero at the same stage as the customer’s baby, offering sonograms, giving help on either keeping the baby or putting him up for adoption. Quite a lot of missing choices for people and organizations that claim to be pro-choice.

• Use fair language that describes a position without artificially elevating or degrading it. For decades, those in favor of abortion and “death with dignity” have called themselves “pro-choice,” and the media has stuck with that line, refusing to call them “pro-death” or “anti-life.” At the same time, those in favor of preborn babies and the terminally ill and aged getting to live have called themselves “pro-life,” but the media has often altered that, usually calling them “anti-abortion” (or at times “anti-choice”).

But many pro-choice people really are pro-death – they’re for ending human life in certain situations. Or they are anti-life – they’re for ending human life whenever it becomes a burden to someone else. And many pro-life people aren’t just anti-abortion – they’re for the lives of the mothers as well. Or they aren’t anti-choice except for one choice – they’re very much behind women having many options and making good choices for their lives.

And of course, just the basics of calling one side “pro” (pro-choice) and the other side “anti” (anti-abortion) is a terrific way to move the “positive” side ahead and cripple the “negative” side – much like calling the opposite of conservative “progressive.” Who wouldn’t want to be progressive?

• Make the penalty for the destruction of human beings as severe as the crime. Writer Saul Bellow said that “Our humanity is at risk…It is at risk because the feeling that life is sacred has died away in this country.”[ix]

Humanity has always been faced with the question, “What do you do with people who destroy life and annihilate the dignity of others?” It’s an uncomfortable question, but not a hard one. Some say, “If you’re pro-life, you have to be against capital punishment.” But if we really understand the incalculable treasure that has been irretrievably destroyed by a murderer, we see that their statement is upside down.

If society chooses to impose the penalty of a life for a life, it shouldn’t be because of anger, or revenge, or to even the scales, or to demand an eye for an eye. It should be because any civilization worthy of the name says, as strongly as it can, “There’s a boundary you may not cross – the sacredness of life – and if you cross that boundary there is simply no punishment commensurate with the crime except to demand your life in return.” Nothing – no terrible background, no mental defect, no abuse, no living in a broken world full of shadows – frees us to cross that boundary. The reality is this: If you’re pro-life, how could you be against capital punishment? How can you say, “Well, it is really bad that you killed her and took away perhaps 80 years of her life, but…”

And that isn’t even addressing its deterrent effect. There was “a study conducted at Emory University, which found a direct connection between reauthorization of the death penalty, in 1977, and reduced homicide rates.” The study determined that “on average, every execution deters eighteen murders.” The authors of the study concluded that “this calculus makes the death penalty not just morally licit but morally required…A government that fails to make use of it…is effectively condemning large numbers of its citizens to death.”[x]

Allowing the life-taker to live is a statement not of how much we value human life, but of how cheap we think it really is. Paying for a murder with imprisonment (and often parole) is akin to making restitution for the theft of a priceless jewel with a ten-dollar bill. And regardless of a deterrent effect on other would-be murderers, life for life is a 100 percent deterrent for people who have chosen to cross an unalienable line. If allowed to live, they often have no reason not to kill again. In effect, we’re choosing to put other people’s right to life at future risk.

This issue of protecting human life and harshly judging those who destroy it is no small matter. The ancient prophet Ezekiel said, “Since you…shed blood, should you then possess the land?…I will make the land a desolate waste, and her proud strength will come to an end.”[xi] America is a proud, strong nation – but “from those who have been given much, much will be demanded.”[xii]

• Recognize that someone’s right to life can only be surrendered by their own choice. This is a supporting truth that grows out of an understanding that the right to life is unalienable.

My right to life can be surrendered by good choices:

• I can choose to defend our nation. People who volunteer for the armed services are, among other things, choosing to die if necessary. They have voluntarily entered a profession that may by its very nature require them to give up their lives. We should be most grateful to these brave people who are willing to yield this fundamental right on our behalf.

• I can choose to protect other people. From secret service agents and police to firefighters and courageous citizens, a small number of us will choose to protect others, at the cost of our own lives if necessary. These brave ones are willing to put their right to life in a subordinate position to the lives of many others. To appreciate their sacrifice is insufficient payment.

• I can choose to save the life of another. There is truly no greater love than laying down our lives for someone else. When we have the opportunity to save another human being by putting our own lives at risk, by sacrificing our own right to life, we are declaring that there is something very good – and very non-Darwinian – about the human race.

My right to life can also be surrendered by bad choices:

• I can choose to take my own life. I have my life, this most precious of all rights – a gift, really – but I can choose to give it up for a thousand miserable reasons. I can put myself outside the law and bring my life to an end through the actions of good people (right-protectors) or bad people (right-destroyers). I can give up my right to life to drugs or alcohol or body-destroying perversion. I can feel so broken in a given moment that I can commit suicide. These are all sorry ends, but I have it in my power to live in such a way that I end there.

• I can choose to take someone else’s life. If someone’s right to life is truly unalienable, what possible justification can be given for another person taking it away outside of self-defense or due process? Many miss the fact that the ancient injunction of a life for a life was a statement of equivalence more than of revenge. When someone kills another human being – taking “away all he has, and all he’s ever going to have,” as Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven[xiii] – how can years spent living at state expense be a sufficient price to pay?

• Don’t make excuses for bad decisions and actions, or allow a way out that costs others their dignity. We don’t dignify human beings by going soft on their life-altering mistakes. In fact, it’s quite the reverse – we honor people by holding them accountable for their decisions and actions.

For a long time now, some have claimed that girls and women get pregnant because they don’t know how to not get pregnant. But how can that be? Children have been taught for years everything they need to know – and a lot they don’t need to know – in sex education classes. And still. The problem can’t be one of education.

So why do so many still have unwanted pregnancies and abortions? In part, because we’ve erroneously allowed the risk of getting pregnant to be taken out of the equation. Everyone knows that abortion is there as a backup. It’s because we allow for abortion as a last resort that it’s used so often as a last resort. If people knew that the last resort was either proactive (contraception or sterilization) or reactive (raising a child or giving that child up for adoption), they would use what they know to make (at least in many cases) better decisions.

No first-class, non-barbaric society should have to accept the ongoing slaughter of the living unborn because people choose to use abortion as a perverse contraceptive. Everyone with a mind knows what produces babies – and how to get around the only physical action that produces them.

• Instead of just condemning people for making bad choices, help them make good ones. We can indeed condemn bad choices, but we shouldn’t too quickly condemn those who face them.

For example, women facing hard choices, with tough pregnancies and bad men, can be given care and support and understanding. It’s very hard to raise a child, and anyone who believes it isn’t is either lying or delusional. Women must be protected in their right to control their own lives and bodies. They should be given access to birth control and prevention. Those wanting to keep their babies should be generously supported by generous Americans, and those giving them up for adoption should be given ways to be involved with the flesh of their own flesh.

Men who want to make their lives hard must be kept away, legally and practically. Rape, including date rape, must be vigorously prosecuted without making women two-time victims.

Living is hard. Condemnation alone often only makes it harder, not better.

• Always value the one more than the many. Great crimes have been committed against millions of individual souls in the name of community or nation or kingdom. If the many – however they’re defined – is valued over the individual, those great crimes will never stop.

The counterintuitive truth of the American Idea of Dignity is that the many are only really honored when the individual is given the highest respect. Too many in power are willing to lose people as collateral damage in their quest for some big goal. Even Franklin Roosevelt, a self-proclaimed champion of the downtrodden, refused to allow 900 Jewish refugees on the ship St. Louis to land in the U.S. He sent them back to Europe where they died in the death camps.[xiv]

Richard Breitman, an apologist of sorts for Roosevelt, said that Roosevelt “made a decision to go for big results,” and that Roosevelt thought allowing small numbers of Jews to enter would be “a gesture, not a solution” to the very large refugee problem.[xv] What bigger results could you have than letting 900 people live? And a gesture? It would have been far more than a gesture to them – it would have been life-saving, the ultimate solution rather than the final solution.

In a Law and Order episode entitled “Dignity,” one of the detectives addressed the question of the child conceived by a rape: “You got it backwards man! The horrible thing is the rape, not the bringing of a life into the world…That unwanted child could change the world, cure cancer, be president!”[xvi] Some propose abortion being acceptable in cases of rape – like the baby committed the crime. Is the solution really to coddle the rapist and execute the baby? Two wrongs still don’t make a right.

• Refuse to talk about or measure human worth in terms of externalities. Because human differences are so great and so obvious, it’s really easy to misuse them and really hard not to let them translate into calculations of worth. But those externalities aren’t even accurate measures of worth.

How many have been murdered by smart or healthy people? On the other hand, how many have been killed by those with cerebral palsy or down’s syndrome? How many rich people have hoarded their wealth and earned it by thievery and crushing the poor? And how many poor people have shared generously and elevated the lives of others?

Human worth is intrinsic. Wise people always look past outward appearance and make right judgements.

• Remove barriers of distinction from our dialogue. When people talk about things like lower class and the poor and the bottom fifth and the subculture, and the inner city, they may be trying to be helpful but they’re not. People respond to labels, which are often limiting and always artificial.

Many of the people in these categories have an inconvenient habit of leaving them. Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton – among many others – came from nowhere and had nothing. A significant percentage of those in the bottom quartile of earnings aren’t there several years down the line.

This isn’t a matter of political correctness. Political correctness requires us to replace truthful language with comfortable language. This removal of barriers requires us to replace comfortable categories with truthful possibilities.

• Respect everyone, because the difference between us isn’t that great. Everyone ends up at the same place, and almost everyone is forgotten by the generations that follow. This hit me very hard when I once had the daughter of someone who was one of the top ten best-selling singers of the 1950s in my living room. She was asking to borrow an old car. How did she end up here? What turn of events led her from a heritage of riches to a life of total poverty?

But in a sense, we’re all just a moment away from our lives dropping out of whatever respectability we think we’ve earned. Joe Louis, thought by many to be the greatest heavyweight boxing champion of all time, ended up working in a bar (and accepting charity from Max Schmeling, whom he defeated in the ring years before).[xvii]

We should respect others for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that our roles could easily be reversed. And the respect we show can be meaningful beyond all apparent ways of measuring. Who really knows if the kindness we show to one homeless person on the street isn’t greater than our largest donation to charity?

• Reject all discussion about whether lives are worthy of being lived. All of our lives are incredibly short. No one knows whether they will be alive tomorrow, or whether they will outlast a person in a hospice, regardless of how healthy or vigorous they seem today. No one knows if their work, praised openly by others, will last as long as the painting or writing of an unknown artist in a tiny lightless room. No one knows if their speeches and public appearances in their 30s and 40s and 50s will count as much as the prayers of a terminally ill person in their 80s or 90s. Only one person can determine our worth, and that person isn’t any of us.

• Don’t cross moral boundaries to save some at the expense of others. It’s only a short walk from believing that it’s appropriate to unilaterally end the lives of some people to believing that it would be immoral to let their bodies go to waste. And it’s only around the corner from there to believing that it’s all right to move a little faster on ending those lives in order to make those organs available on a more timely basis.

This has always been at the core of the stem-cell debate. Is it all right to destroy a human embryo (a living being with fully-human DNA) to gain knowledge and possibly solutions to save or lengthen the lives of others? But the real question is, “Shouldn’t we ban using people as biological resources and direct medical research in other directions?”

One of those directions became clear during the ban on embryonic stem-cell research: “Researchers have been able to derive human stem cells from the amniotic fluid surrounding babies in the womb, potentially providing a source of stem cells that is easily available and uncontroversial…One advantage is that these cells, unlike embryonic stem cells, don’t form tumors when implanted into mice…the huge advantage would be that they can be easily harvested from both amniotic fluid as well as placental tissue after a baby is born…because amniotic fluid is so easy to harvest, it would make it possible to create thousands of cell lines.”[xviii]

Is it surprising that ethical research might yield better results than killing some to save others?

One ethicist wrote that “precisely because science is flexible, ethics must be clear and firm. Given proper direction from the larger society, our scientists are up to the task of finding ways to advance research without crossing crucial moral boundaries.”[xix]

Hard science is relatively solid, but it’s a soft thing compared with the American Idea of Dignity.

• Speak up for the voiceless. Speaking up for ourselves when we’re oppressed is a good thing. Speaking up for others when they’re oppressed, when there’s nothing in it for us, is a better thing. The American Idea of Dignity reminds us to find the people who are least able to defend their unalienable rights, and raise our voices to the highest level at just that point.

Slaves in Africa and the Americas, Jews in Germany and Russia, women in the Middle East and China, preborn babies in Europe and America, the poor and different almost everywhere – these are the places where the moral person goes, to the point of greatest oppression at that moment in time.