Opinion

If It’s OK to Kill Unborn Babies, How Can Killing and Eating an Ex-Girlfriend be Morally Wrong?

Just because someone wears a suit and tie does not mean he’s morally equipped to govern a state. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, and Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, govern their respective states while lacking ultimate moral authority for their actions.

In fact, if we were to apply their lack of moral reasoning to other situations, we would find a great many moral loopholes.

For example, a Texas couple was arrested after two malnourished children were discovered crammed in a dog cage — and two others were found smeared in feces. There was “ample food in the home, but it was kept under lock and key, according to a sheriff.” (Fox News)

What’s the difference between babies in the womb being killed by their mothers and children locked in cages deprived of food? Age, size, and lawmakers who define what a person is make the difference.

New York Gov. Cuomo “wrote in a New York Times op-ed that as a Roman Catholic, ‘I am intimately familiar with the strongly held views of the church. Still, I do not believe that religious values should drive political positions.’”

Does this mean that he could be religiously opposed to slavery and cannibalism, for example, but not outlaw the practices because he does not believe “religious values should drive political positions”? It was the Rev. Martin Luther King who led marches and spoke against segregation.

Francis A. Schaeffer wrote that a shift in worldview thinking has taken place “to a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by personal chance,” and I would add “personal choice.”1

Given that premise, anything goes.

A southern Indiana man was “accused of killing and eating parts of his ex-girlfriend. The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky reports a Clark County judge added a rape charge . . . for 34-year-old Joseph Oberhansley. He had already been charged with murder and abuse of a corpse in the death of 46-year-old Tammy Jo Blanton in September [2014]. According to court documents, Oberhansley told police he broke into Blanton’s home and killed and mutilated her, then ate her heart and parts of her brain and lung.”

What did Joseph Oberhansley do wrong? Not wrong because a judicial system says he did something wrong, but wrong in the sense of an ultimate wrong, a wrong that even the judiciary must come under? In an atheistic, evolutionary, materialistic — nature is all there is or ever will be — can there be an unimpeached moral standard? If so, how did it originate?

The United States justice system is in quite a quandary. There is no longer any basis for morality other than the decision of five unelected lifetime-appointed Supreme Court justices. But on what does the court base its decisions? Where is the final place of ultimate moral appeal?

There isn’t one.

There was a time when the Bible was actually appealed to. The court did so when it came to upholding a specific definition of marriage in 19th-century polygamy cases. Eighteenth-century legal theory assumed an ordered universe governed by God, “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” as the Declaration of Independence declared. It goes on to point out that our rights are an endowment from our “Creator.” There is even an appeal to the “Supreme Judge of the world” and “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

When’s the last time you ever heard a court make such an appeal? There is Democrat Steny Hoyer who has argued that same-sex couples are endowed by “their Creator — by God” with the right to marry. Where does it say this? Hoyer never says. Why appeal to God on same-sexuality when the Bible is clear that homosexuality is non-creational and a moral evil? Even if a person takes a purely scientific approach, homosexuality is non-productive by not contributing to the perpetuation of the species.

Darwinism put an end to any notion of a fixed set of moral laws based on the laws of nature, Nature’s God, and the “protection of divine Providence.” Nature evolves, and so does law. Organic and inorganic matter is all there is. There is no God and no fixed moral law.

Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), who served as Governor of New York, United States Secretary of State, Associate Justice, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said the following: “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution.”2

The courts have been redefining marriage based on the 14th Amendment. But what is the 14th Amendment based on? The Constitution. “But the Constitution is what the judges say it is or “We the people.” What if we the people say something is right or wrong? Then what? We’re stuck in a giant circular argument. We’re mice on a moral wheel that goes nowhere.

The legal justification for the final solution, the elimination of European Jewry, was accomplished in large part by lawyers. “Lawyers were everywhere and their influence was pervasive. Again and again, there was a need for legal justification.”3

Consider that the “Nuremberg Laws, passed in September of 1935, defined racial Jewishness, outlawed the social mixing of Germans and Jews, and stripped Jews and other non-Germans of citizenship. Throughout the 1930s, systematic persecution destroyed many Jewish-owned businesses and forced Jews from their homes.”4

This was all done in accordance with the law as the Nazi Party defined it. On what basis was any of these actions truly, surely, unequivocally wrong? Consider this 7-minute video:

  1. The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1984), 36. []
  2. Speech before the Chamber of Commerce, Elmira, New York (May 3, 1907); published in Addresses and Papers of Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York, 1906–1908 (1908), 139. []
  3. F.C. DeCoste, “Conspiracy: ‘All our actions must be predicated on law’” (August 1, 2003). []
  4. Cynthia Tanner, “Ninety Minutes that Changed the World: ‘Conspiracy’ and the Wannsee Conference” (February 8, 2015). []
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