Planned Parenthood: Our Wilberforce Moment

What is happening right now with the Planned Parenthood videos is a “William Wilberforce moment” in our culture. Wilberforce was the Christian man who looked into his Bible, saw that racism and slavery were evil reverse-images of the gospel, and dedicated his life to accomplishing what seemed culturally and politically impossible in late-1700’s Great Britain: the abolition of the slave trade. In a decisive moment that now lives in history, Wilberforce once commanded the floor of British Parliament for over three hours doing nothing but reading gruesome horror-stories of the African slave trade to the men that politically protected its continuation and then concluded with this sentence…

“You may choose to look away, but you can never say again that you did not know.” – William Wilberforce On his deathbed in 1833, after a lifetime of being told abolition was impossible, he received word that parliament had passed the Slavery Abolition Bill, granting freedom to all slaves in the British Empire.

In the last three weeks, videos of Planned Parenthood officials (the organization that performs over 40% of our nation’s abortions) harvesting and selling the body parts of dismembered infant corpses have surfaced to national outrage. See them HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. Rumors are there are 8 more to come. In a nation that has been legally pro-abortion for ~40 years, why are these videos now causing such outrage? Because the reality of what abortion obviously is (the killing of a human infant) is being non-ignorably thrust into our faces. This is our William Wilberforce moment: the stories have been viscerally told and people may choose to look away, but nobody can ever say again that they did not know.

Yes! And Huckabee has been a strong pro-lifer for as long as we can remember. Here is a transcript from 12-30-07, Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: Some Americans believe that life does not begin at conception, and that it’s...

GOV. HUCKABEE: Well, scientifically I think that’s almost...

MR. RUSSERT: But...

GOV. HUCKABEE: ...a point that you couldn’t argue. How, how could you say that life doesn’t begin at conception...

MR. RUSSERT: Right. Do you respect that view?

GOV. HUCKABEE: ...biologically?

MR. RUSSERT: Do you respect that view?

GOV. HUCKABEE: I respect it as a view, but I don’t think it has biological credibility.

MR. RUSSERT: And what would happen to doctors or women who participated in abortion?

GOV. HUCKABEE: It’s always the, the point of trying to say, “Are you going to criminalize it?” That’s not the issue.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, if it, if it’s illegal, it would be.

GOV. HUCKABEE: It would be. And I think you don’t punish the woman, first of all, because it’s not about—I consider her a victim, not a, not a criminal. You would...

MR. RUSSERT: But you would punish the doctor.

GOV. HUCKABEE: I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that’s why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor. I don’t know that you’d put him in prison, but there’s something to me untoward about a person who has committed himself to healing people and to making people alive who would take money to take an innocent life and to make that life dead. There’s something that just doesn’t ring true about the purpose of medical practice when the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath is “First, do no harm.” Well, if you take the life and suction out the pieces of an unborn child for no reason than its inconvenience to the mother, I don’t think you’ve lived up to your Hippocratic Oath of doing no harm.

[After this answer from Huckabee, Russert abruptly changed subjects. My husband and I were cheering Huckabee on. It wasn’t easy to be grilled by Russert, of course, and Huckabee handled it so well.]

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22409176/ns/meet_the_press/t/meet-press-transcript-dec/#.Vb569m5Vikp

For how long was there slavery before the churches decided it was wrong?

A great many centuries. The question, actually, is asked by Thomas Sowell: What people other than Christians ever decided that slavery as an institution (not merely slavery for themselves or their kin) was an evil to be opposed? Sowell’s answer to that question is, none. Not Confucianism, not Shinto, not Hindu, not pagan, not atheist (e.g., Communist), certainly not Islam.
Critics of Christianity complain that Christianity did not abolish the gladiatorial games for a whole ten(!) years after its establishment as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The games had only been an institution in Roman life for two centuries by then - and all it took to end them was for a monk to basically lie down on the tracks and immolate himself in protest against the games.
The gladiators were slaves. But Christianity did not become hostile to the institution of slavery until the era of Wilberforce, up towards two millennia after the advent of Christ. And even then, the Christians in the American South didn’t readily accept that decision by others. Sowell points out that the only literature to be found justifying slavery came from the American South - simply because the institution of slavery was so entrenched and accepted in other times and places that it needed no defense.
Sowell: Irresponsible 'Education' (slavery)
William Wilberforce
Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell
Epistle to Philemon
Slavery and the Civil War.

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