As I look around I wonder what is the greatest evil we have to confront as a nation?
Some evils are with us for so long they become part of our decaying and—to people who see it for the first time—ghastly cultural furniture. The more we hear about same-sex marriage and the more we see same-sex couples kissing and marrying on the news, seem to find peace with a political settlement on the matter.
We are now at 38 years of nationally legalized abortions. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, our laws have sanctioned the killing of over 50 million people. The test of any society is surely how it treats its weakest members. Babies in the womb—the faceless, the nameless, and the most completely dependent on the care of others—are surely the touchstones of our selfishness or our decency.
Could it be that there are two great threats to America: abortion and the breakdown of marriage.
There is no denying the family is the foundation of society. By it, we form the next generation into citizens or criminals, social assets or social liabilities. There is no substitute for this “little platoon.” But we are working it away, entertaining it away, defining it away. The American family is suffering a thousand cuts from every direction—from tax policy to divorce law.
We have an urgency to identify the bloody stain of abortion and the faltering of our families as serious threats that are in every way comparable to the curse of slavery in the 1860s and the threat of Japanese invasion in the 1940s. (Thankfully, abortions have been declining since their peak in 1990, but we still lose 1.2 million children a year.)
We must strengthen and protect marriage and family with as much tenaciously as we now protect waterways and wildlife.
Can we pull ourselves out of this mess? Perhaps we will. But we will not do it as long as we continue to turn our back towards God. A nation is fundamentally a moral community. If we do not take proper care of our children, both in and out of the womb, there may not be a country to live in that we recognize as America.
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