human rights

Occasional commentator to AOI blog and human rights activist Wesley J. Smith warns in a recent article that, “society’s belief in the unique moral value and importance of human life is under unprecedented assault…Most people still believe in human exceptionalism and are unaware that powerful social and cultural forces are working diligently to dismantle the sanctity of life ethic as the fundamental value of our social order.”

He is correct. Read it carefully, think through the logic, and heed the warnings. The crisis in the West is one of anthropology with ominous implications.

Wesley J. Smith

By Wesley J. Smith. Published on The Church Report website.

Society’s belief in the unique moral value and importance of human life is under unprecedented assault. Most people still believe in human exceptionalism and are unaware that powerful social and cultural forces are working diligently to dismantle the sanctity of life ethic as the fundamental value of our social order.  But the time has come to pay attention.  If human life is knocked off the pedestal, universal human rights will be impossible to sustain.

Take bioethics, the influential field that exerts tremendous influence over medical ethics and health care public policy. The bioethical mainstream disdains the sanctity of life ethic as irrational and based on religion. In its place, they promote “personhood theory,” that equates moral value with cognitive capacities such as being self aware over time. This “quality of life” ethic, as it is sometimes called, creates a two-tiered system in which some humans have greater value than human non persons.

Who are these so called human non persons? All the unborn, to be sure, a presumption used to justify embryonic stem cell research, even fetal farming—growing fetuses to the later stage of gestation for use as organ sources, an odious idea already been promoted at the Huffington Post.

Personhood theory also denies the equal value of newborn infants. Thus, Princeton University’s Peter Singer—the most famous bioethicist in the world—argues that infants can be killed if they don’t serve their family’s interests.  He even compared the value of babies to that of fish, writing in Rethinking Life and Death, “Since neither a newborn infant nor a fish is a person, the wrongness of killing such beings is not as wrong as killing a person.” Continue reading →

In the June issue of Reason Magazine, Ezra Levant details his long and unnecessary struggle with Canadian human rights watchdogs over charges that he insulted a Muslim extremist, who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. This sorry episode also cost Levant, the former publisher of Canada’s Western Standard magazine, about $100,000. Read “The Internet Saved My Life: How I beat Canada’s ‘human rights’ censors.” (HT: RealClearPolitics). Levant sums it up this way:

The investigation vividly illustrated how Canada’s provincial and national human rights commissions (HRCs), created in the 1970s to police discrimination in employment, housing, and the provision of goods and services, have been hijacked as weapons against speech that offends members of minority groups. My eventual victory over this censorious assault suggests that Western governments will find it increasingly difficult in the age of the Internet to continue undermining human rights in the name of defending them.

In a review of “Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays on Global Concerns” by Archbishop Anastasios Yannoulatos (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), I talked about the archbishop’s critique of human rights laws and how they should be properly understood by Christians.

In the essay “Orthodoxy and Human Rights,” Anastasios takes a critical view of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and the later development of these declarations into exhaustive lists of economic, social, and political rights. Anastasios makes an important distinction between rights declarations, and their enforcement through legal and political forms of coercion, and Christianity’s preferred method of persuasion and faith. “Declarations basically stress outward compliance,” he says, “while the gospel insists on inner acceptance, on spiritual rebirth, and on transformation.”

Anastasios reminds us of Christianity’s contribution to the development of political liberty. “Human rights documents,” he says, “presuppose the Christian legacy, which is not only a system of thought and a worldview that took shape through the contributions of the Christian and Greek spirit, but also a tradition of self-criticism and repentance.” Those words should be hung from banners everywhere new constitutions and declarations are being drafted. Continue reading →

Greek Orthodox Metropoiltan Iakovos has issued a “call to action” on an Illinois bill that right-to-life advocates describe as a state level Freedom of Choice Act. The metropolitan has posted a clear and forceful letter on the Metropolis of Chicago Web site condemning the proposed HB 2354 as unjust and a violation of “the very principles of our faith in Jesus Christ, the Life of the world.”

The metropolitan said HB 2354 “would affect all health care workers by removing their right to conscientious objection to abortion and related procedures, forcing them to participate in or provide abortions or face legal punishments. This bill would basically make the right to an abortion a fundamental human right in the State of Illinois.”

More:

The forces that oppose religious freedom and are actually seeking to increase the number of abortions in our society are well organized, well funded, and well connected to the political process. It is high time for Christians to raise their own voices to demand their elected officials attend to the “weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Perhaps those who want this bill believe we will be distracted by the economic crisis facing our nation and affecting many of us personally. We must resist the temptation, especially during this Lenten season, to neglect this matter as “someone else’s problem.” None of us wants the government to come between us and our doctor. We should likewise not want the government to come between health care workers and their God. If we allow one step, we will never prevent the next.

Read the full text of the letter on the Orthodoxy Today website.