A few weeks back, Rick Santorum made news when he declared it “almost remarkable for a black man” like President Obama to be in favor of reproductive choice because, in the Religious Right worldview, abortion is just like slavery.
But in case that tortured analogy was not clear enough, right-wing Indiana talk show host Peter Heck has penned a column that has been posted on the AFA’s OneNewsNow claiming that Obama’s support for reproductive choice means he is an enemy of the likes of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln and is therefore a disgrace to “his ancestors”:
Only a man terrifyingly unmoved by the injustices perpetrated against his own ancestors could, just a century and a half later, facilitate even worse atrocities without a hint of remorse.
Intellectual honesty demands that we face a harsh and uncomfortable reality: Barack Obama — our first black president — has chosen to take up the whip against his fellow man. By doing so, he carves out an eternal legacy for himself far removed from the dignified halls of honor reserved for those with the moral courage to defend the defenseless. By instead regarding them as subhuman, Obama wars against the life work of [Frederick] Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln.
Imagine how history would regard Lincoln had he chosen to respond to the great moral evil of his day as Barack Obama has chosen to respond to the holocaust of child sacrifice that has occurred with impunity since 1973. Imagine Lincoln proclaiming that determining whether blacks were entitled to human rights was “above his pay grade.” Imagine Lincoln pledging to “protect this constitutional right” of slavery, while calling the brutality of plantation masters a “legitimate disciplinary procedure.”
How would history have judged such a small man if not for the same way it will soon regard Mr. Obama: an utter coward. When given the incredible opportunity to stand on the shoulders of the Great Emancipator — an opportunity generations of slaves labored to make possible — Barack Obama chose not to use it to defend the inalienable rights of all, but to undermine them.
In the final analysis, such an incomprehensible betrayal of human rights for the sake of convenience and political expediency far outweighs any contributions his electoral success has brought to “black America.” For what Douglass, Tubman, Truth and so many other courageous black abolitionists fought for was not the day when they would see a man with dark skin pigmentation sitting in the White House. They fought for the day when all men — black and white, large and small — would see their inalienable rights protected from those who would callously demean them as less than human.
Obama has failed miserably in living up to their vision, and shamefully discredits their efforts. As he commits himself to what Douglass called the denial of justice, the perpetuation of ignorance, and the organized conspiracy to degrade his fellow countrymen, it can rightly be concluded that Barack Obama disgraces his office, his ancestors, and his place in the eternal struggle for the rights of man.
