Abortion Destroys More Than Just A Baby

Abortion is a cancer that makes our society sick on every level. It destroys us individually – one baby at a time; it erodes the essential institution of fatherhood by removing fathers from the most basic decision regarding their children; and, ultimately, it creates unstable consequences that damage our nation and our world. And rather than being a necessary industry that protects the weakest and neediest among us, it is in fact a holocaust among the very groups of people we claim to be trying to save.

First of all, abortion clearly results in the death of a child. Do the math: if your beloved mommy had decided to have an abortion during her pregnancy with you, you would not have been born. More specifically, you would have died. Mommy would have killed you. The same you who was once a teen ager, once a toddler, once an infant, was also once a fetus, once an embryo, and once a zygote. Killing you at any point during that continuum would have rendered you every bit as dead. If you don’t believe me, look at your brother or sister; a different egg and sperm produce a totally different child every time. Even in the case of identical twins – where a zygote divides – we end up with two different children. Abortion destroys a child.

But when the Supreme Court looked down from Mount Olympus and divined in the Constitution a woman’s right to choose abortion, it did something else: it destroyed the rights of fathers, and undermined the traditional family structure.

Think about it: if a mother exercises her “right to choose” abortion, it presupposes a duty upon the father of that child to idly sit by while his child is killed. While mommy beams down at her little bundle of joy and says, “I could have chosen to kill you, but let you live because I wanted a baby, daddy is outside somewhere saying, “Well, mommy didn’t decide to kill it, so I guess I’m a father. How can anyone who claims to have an IQ above that of the baby that abortion kills not see how radically abortion undermines the role of the father?

Conversely, if daddy dearest is a “pro-choicer” who doesn’t want anything to do with his child and would very much like to choose death for it, he may well be subjectively compelled by the courts to pay child support. A woman can kill her child at will during pregnancy. That is her right. But if she subjectively decides to keep her baby, the courts impose the burden on a father to support that child whether he wants it or not. That is his duty. Where’s daddy’s “right to choose”? He has no rights at all, only duties selectively imposed upon him by the granting of this bizarre woman’s right. So much for equal rights; so much for equal protection under the law. If daddy desperately wants his child and mommy wants to abort, too bad, so sad, dad. If daddy doesn’t want to be responsible for his kid but mommy wants to keep it, to bad, so sad, dad. Abortion is not only murder, it is also patently unfair by any meaningful standard.

In their infinite wisdom, the courts decided that fatherhood amounted to nothing more than donating sperm and writing checks. A woman kills her child and is regarded as making a choice with all the moral consequence of choosing whether to buy a particular blouse. A father walks away from a liftime commitment of supporting that same kid that momma could have had chopped into little pieces and he becomes a “deadbeat dad.” And the same courts that made all this possible – after creating the chaotic disaster of “no-fault divorce” – have also nearly unanimously decided that fathers shouldn’t get custody of their kids. They’re lucky if they get joint custody! Being a father means being pretty low on the totem poll. And of course, in recent years, we have lesbians actually taking advantage of the latest science to bypass daddy altogether. So much for dads.

Incredibly, the same secular humanists who utterly failed to see the consequences of their utter contempt for fathers have for going on forty years continued to fail to see the clear cause-effect relationship between abortion and the declining participation by fathers. But suprise, suprise. Fathers by the millions recognized and internalized the utter meaninglessness that society clearly impugned upon them and simply walked away. Duties without rights, plus criticism without recognition, is no way to attract men to embrace fatherhood. And, for that matter, rights without duties is no way to attract women to embrace motherhood.

The statistics are overwhelming and inexorable. Abortion. Fatherlessness. Out of wedlock births. Single parent households. Crime. Drugs. Gangs. Prison. Chronic dysfunction. Studies galore support the death of the family with the rise of a sociopathic youth culture. In many major cities, 65% of babies are born to unmarried women. Nationally, 70% of the long-term inmates in prisons who have committed the most violent crimes grew up without fathers. INTERPOL statistics have likewise revealed that single parenthood ratios were strongly correlated with violent crimes. Studies of juvenile offenders have shown that family structure significantly predicts delinquency. Children born out of wedlock are three times more likely to drop out of school than children in two parent households, and they are far more likely to end up on welfare. And study after study has demonstrated that children without fathers are far more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, far more likely to be sexually, physically, and emotionally abused, far more likely to become obese, and far more likely to perpetuate the vicious cycle by having out of wedlock children themselves. And there is no connective link – NONE! – that more determines poverty than single parenthood.

You want to turn this tide around? Criminalize abortion. The problem isn’t too many children being born; the problem is fatherlessness! Stop the insane double standard. If fathers should have any duty whatsoever to support their children, surely mothers have at the very least the duty to allow their children to live! Hey, guess what? This isn’t a meaningless fetus; it is a precious, valuable human being, and BOTH mother and father have a duty to care for their child. Dad, you brought this little mouth into the world, and you have an obligation to provide for your baby; mom, you conceived this little bundle of joy, and you have an obligation to nurture your baby. But only a fool decrees that mother gets to decide whether a child should count enough to live, and that a father must somehow be duty-bound to completely respect and honor whatever her choice is. That is insane, and it is evil.

If we as a society begin to respect life enough that we begin to recognize that it is worth nurturing, worth, providing for, worth loving, and worth sacrificing for, then we will finally begin to see a turnaround in our society. Decades of terrible statistics will begin to improve as the society that demands that fathers recognize their children itself fundamentally recognizes children.

Abortion by its very design and by its very nature removes fathers from the equation of life. It is time to bring them back.

When fatherhood is trivialized, ignored, and removed as a factor by abortion, chaos follows. That’s what all the trends tell us. And that chaos has had a terribly detrimental impact upon society. The liberals who decry the United States’ involvement in the five-year old Iraq war may well have a point in noting the trillion-dollar debt that the war will cost American society; but they will not for a single nanosecond consider the multi-, multi-, multi-, multi-trillion dollar cost of abortion upon our society as it triggered massive fundamental philosophical and sociological degredations of human life. It is frankly incredible that so many supposedly intelligent people failed to see that the stupid logic that you are human only if you are wanted would not have massive unintended consequences.

And we will increasingly see the result of the international aspect of abortion as well. A June 13, 2007 news story (Infanticide, Abortion Responsible for 60 Million Girls Missing in Asia) begins as follows:

There is a little-known battle for survival going in some parts of the world. Those at risk are baby girls, and the casualties are in the millions each year. The weapons being used against them are prenatal sex selection, abortion and female infanticide — the systematic killing of girls soon after they are born.

According to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of the World Population Report, these practices, combined with neglect, have resulted in at least 60 million “missing” girls in Asia, creating gender imbalances and other serious problems that experts say will have far reaching consequences for years to come.

“Twenty-five million men in China currently can’t find brides because there is a shortage of women,” said Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute in Washington, D.C. “The young men emigrate overseas to find brides.”

The imbalances are also giving rise to a commercial sex trade; the 2005 report states that up to 800,000 people being trafficked across borders each year, and as many as 80 percent are women and girls, most of whom are exploited.

“Women are trafficked from North Korea, Burma and Vietnam and sold into sexual slavery or to the highest bidder,” Mosher said.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,281722,00.html

Here we have a clearly established link between abortion and sex selection, as well as clear correspondence between abortion and sex slavery as well as a link between abortion and an unstable and unsustainable societal dilemma in a nuclear state. What will be the long-term psychological state of an already rogue nation as hundreds of millions of men begin to come onto the scene who cannot possibly marry or ever enjoy a normal relationship with a woman?

I still recall Senator Hillar Clinton going to a women’s conference in China and lecturing the Chinese on abortion. In her view, although it is perfectly legitimate for American women to abort their progeny out of whatever subjective preference that entered their minds, as long as it is a woman’s “choice.” However, it is immoral for a nation-state to attempt – out of what they perceived as a direct threat to their national survival (i.e. a one child per family edict to control overpopulation) – to control the number of children born. This view is particualarly hypocritical coming from a liberal Democrat who generally favors big government bureaucratic solutions over individual free market ones. If her reasoning process wasn’t already twisted enough, she then proceeded to undermine her whole “abortion is wonderful as long as women choose to do it” by lecturing the Chinese on sex selective abortions, which are done not only in China but in much of the developing world out of long-standing cultural practices that value sons over daughters. In Senator Clinton’s reasoning, abortion is fine as long as it is a woman’s choice, as long as she doesn’t choose to abort her girls.

Sex selective abortions routinely take place throughout Asia, and is also a rampant practice in India and much of Latin America. In a bizarre but talionic twist, “a woman’s right to choose” has resulted in a literal holocaust against women.

And it is not only women who fall prey to the abortion mills. While so many liberals who claim to champion civil rights laud abortion, the fact remains that abortion has cut a terrible swath among black Americans. There is a clear prima facia case to be made that abortion seems to selectively favor the weakest, the poorest, and the most vulnerable members of society. If liberals had a functioning moral compass, they would be troubled by the ramifications of their ideologies. They don’t, and they aren’t.

Last month UCLA students had an actor call Planned Parenthood development centers in seven states asking whether his donation could be specifically targeted to “lower the number of black people.” Each branch agreed to process the racially earmarked donation. None expressed concern about the clearly expressed racist motives for the donation, and some staffers explicitly agreed with the racist reasoning. Planned Parenthood issued a statement that attempted to redirect attention from its profoundly racist staffers. We should likewise forget that 79% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are in minority neighborhoods, or that the founder of Planned Parenthood was a prodoundly racist proponent of eugenics. From its inception, Planned Parenthood has readily agreed with the statement, “the less black kids out there, the better,” which was uttered by the UCLA actor in his recorded conversation with Planned Parenthood’s Autumn Kersey. She called his position “understandable,” and indicated her excitement to process the donation. He was acting; the Director of Development at the Idaho Planned Parenthood office was not.

The Rev. Johnny Hunter has bemoaned the plight of black Americans, who are killing themselves off at an incredible rate, and has pointed out that abortion has killed far more blacks than the Klu Klux Klan. Dr. Alveda King, the niece of the famed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has used the same analogy, saying, “The great irony is that abortion has done what the Klan only dreamed of.” She quoted her uncle as having said, “It’s time that we remember the sacrifices of men like my father and my uncle who worked and died so that our children could live.” And she said, “It’s time to stop killing the future and keep their dream alive.”

The numbers are simply staggering. Dr. Alveda King says that a full one quarter of the black population is missing from the abortion genocide. “15 million black people have been denied their most basic civil right, the right to life,” she says. Out of 42 million total abortions in the United States, 15 million (35.7%) have been black. Black women are three times more likely than white women to have an abortion, and a nearly half of all black pregnancies are ending in abortion!

If conservatives championed a campaign that would inevitably come to result in the termination of women and blacks in massive numbers, one can only imagine the rhetoric of disgust and righteous outrage that would flood the media ink and airwaves. But the central plank of both liberalism and the Democratic Party has clearly done exactly that, and there is nothing but stony silence.

And may I point out (again) that abortion – which removes fathers from the equation and thus trivializes fatherhood – has anhiliated black fatherhood every bit as much as it has anhiliated their babies. When we look at the shocking statistics regarding black crime, drug use, incarceration, and dysfunction on virtually every level we need to realize that abortion is not the cure, but the disease.

Finally, let me discuss the relationship of abortion with the impending Social Security meltdown. By 2017, Social Security be greater than what it takes in (the definition of bankruptcy, by the way), and the trust fund will be completely emptied by 2041.

In 1950, there were 16 workers for every recipient of Social Security. Today there are only three workers for every recipient. And given current trends, within a few decades there will only be two. There are obviously other factors to account both for this trend and for the overall problems with Social Security in general, but no problem is greater than the fact that we have killed off more than 42 million potential workers since the 1970s. Grandpa’s generation did not exterminate themselves, you see (and all the wars from the Revolutionary War to the war in Iraq haven’t begun to kill off Americans the way abortion has!), and so there are a lot of people to support, and way too few to support them.

Medicare is in even worse shape. By 2014, payroll tax revenue will cover just over half of Medicare’s budget, and the program’s trust fund – which pays for critical medicare care – will be exhausted by 2019. Something dramatic will have to be done to save the program, and liberals’ promises to pump more government money into health care amount to what one of my professors – commenting on students who wrote lengthy answers to exam questions that somehow never arrived at an answer – called “pumping sunshine.” By the time the bickering parties and entrenched interest groups get around to seriously trying to turn around this Titanic, it will be too late to cut benefits, and workers will revolt on a level not seen since the early 1930s if they are called upon to pay the taxes necessary to keep the entitlement programs alive.

My fear is that the younger generation and the government bureaucrats will apply the same twisted reasoning as the thinking that brought us the abortion mills that caused so much of this growing disaster in the first place. If you can kill a baby before it has a chance to be born and become potential burdens upon society, why not kill the elderly before they have a chance to become guaranteed burdens on society? Watch out, grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will almost surely come after you!

Liberals despise the Bible, so let me end by quoting it. Proverbs 8:32-26, urging readers to pursue godly wisdom, says, “And now, o sons, listen to me: blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.”

Abortion is the love of death, and the pursuit of death over the pursuit of life. And the end of a culture that loves death is death.

Toward Genuinely Overcoming Racism in America

I begin by pointing out that I am white (well, caucasian, anyway: my skin is actually a fair shade darker than ‘white’). To many, this fact alone disqualifies me from talking about racism. In fact, quite a few would say that my being white is sufficient to condemn me as being responsible for racism. I frankly have little to say to this group, because it is impossible to have rational debate with irrational people. But to those who are susceptible to reason, I would offer that my ancestors on both sides of my family tree fought in the Civil War on the side of ending slavery, and in fact even made the ultimate sacrifice for that cause. Why doesn’t this count? Why doesn’t it count that so many other [white] Americans’ ancestors similarly championed the right side of freedom and equality?

As is now well known, Barack Obama’s pastor – the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. – has been repeatedly quoted as having made despicable statements about “white America,” even going as far as pronouncing America with three Ks in a transparent effort to characterize the United States as the United States of the Klu Klux Klan.

Some – such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich – have said that Jeremiah Wright’s statements shouldn’t be characterized as being particularly racist, given that just about any committed member of the left (regardless of skin color) basically agrees with the sentiment that America is a terrible place with a racist and immoral past. That doesn’t excuse Wright, and it certainly shouldn’t make Americans feel any better that an even larger number of Americans than we might think hate and despise their countries’ past. But the central problem with Wright’s view is not racism per se, but rather that if you hate and demonize America’s past, then in what meaningful sense can you say you love America? You’re essentially saying we need to overthrow histoic, traditional America and replace it with something entirely different. But how would that different thing still be America?

Wright has gone all the way back to our founding fathers and our most cherished traditions and applied the label “racist” to the whole lot. Remember, Barack and Michelle Obama’s pastor is the one who said, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!… [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.” When Wright gets through cutting away all of what he views as the racist and immoral parts of America, what would be left over? Is it any wonder that a man who so profoundly despised America and everything it has stood for would come to embrace liberation theology, which is Marxist (and fundamentally anti-American) to its very core?

The revelation of Wright’s views certainly helps us trace the origin of Michelle Obama’s views that she is proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, and that “America in 2008 is a mean place.” We now can understand that her attitude was substantially influenced by her pastor. Is it beyond the pale of reason that the same ideology that clearly seems to have influenced her thinking similarly might have influenced her husband’s? Barack Obama gave a beautiful speech yesterday, but he didn’t even attempt to answer why he chose to keep going to such a church, under such a pastor, for year after year after year.

In flat out disagreement with Jeremiah Wright, I would argue that from its very outset, America was founded by good people with great ideals. And also from its very outset, America has been a country that has had its share of not-so-good people who have frequently undermined and perverted many of those ideals. On the balance, the United States of America has been a beautiful face marred with some blemishes. So called “white America” needs to confront the blemishes; but so called “black America” surely needs to look at the face and begin to appreciate its beauty.

And I think – ultimately – that loving one’s country is rather like loving one’s spouse. It is only when you love despite the imperfections and blemishes, love in spite of past hurts and wrongs, that you truly love. It is easier for some to love the United States of America than it is for others; but I think that they who know her flaws and still love her passionately love her more deeply than the those who don’t.

But even as “white America” examines America’s blemishes, and asks itself why the nation founded on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution somehow managed to tolerate slavery for another century, and why the greatest and freest nation in the history of the world has continued to struggle with inequality to this very day, “black America” needs to examine itself as well. If we refuse to look critically into a mirror, it is as impossible to see our own imperfections as it is easy to notice the imperfections of everyone else. Let me now mention some blemishes that “black America” desperately needs to work to resolve.

It is fairly well known that black men are incarcerated at a significantly higher rate than whites, Asians, or Hispanics. It is also fairly well known that black apologists commonly cite “racial profiling” as the reason for such high rates of incarceration; it is not that young black men are either so unable to control themselves, or are so morally depraved that they have become predators, it is rather that the police are always looking for them and therefore finding them. It is an almost impossible argument for society to refute, because it amounts to proving a negative (i.e. Prove to us you didn’t do it).

But the incarceration rate of black men does not stand by itself. There are a lot of other facts to consider, which, when taken into account, actually do refute the “racial profiling” polemic. Recently, the Center for Disease Control released data pertaining to teenage girls having sexually transmitted diseases. This new study (April 2008) reveals that 50% of black teens have STDs, as opposed to only 20% of whites. Was this the result of some kind of “profiling”? Obviously not. Rather, a significant sample of whites, blacks, bispanics, and asians were tested, and the percentages emerged from the test results. Likewise, a 2005 study also finds that nearly 70% of black births are “out of wedlock,” as opposed to the still tragically high numbers of 25% of white births. Now, it is fair to ask: did black single girls and women become pregnant because they were “profiled”? Again, no.

We commonly see the diversity agenda in media and academia emerge in its shameless flogging of racial “disparities” in such areas as education, law enforcement, public health, business ownership and even mortgage interest rates. There’s almost always a clearly-stated assumption of “institutional bias” or racism against blacks. But what we don’t see is the numbers in these categories being balanced with the statistics relating to crime, out of wedlock births, and STDs. But when we look at the entire picture, a very different story emerges than the one we are commonly told.

Black children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than are white
children–but not because they are “born black in America,” according to a new
study from The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (CDA). Examining
data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,
Heritage analysts determined that child poverty rates are driven primarily by
single-parent households and dependency on welfare benefits. When these and
other, less significant, factors are taken into account, the disparity between
black and white child poverty rates disappears. “Race alone does not directly
increase or decrease the probability that a child will be poor,” says Robert
Rector, Heritage’s senior research fellow in welfare and family issues and a
co-author of the report. The study notes that 68.8 percent of black American
children were born out of wedlock in 1999, compared to 26.7 percent of white
children. And black children were five times more likely to be dependent on Aid
for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the government’s largest welfare
program. Black children also live in poverty longer than whites-46.9 percent of
their time since birth vs. 26.7 percent for whites. Yet when black children and
white children are grouped by levels of single parenthood and welfare dependence
the poverty rates for both groups are nearly identical, Rector found. The
analysis also found that nearly half (44.5 percent) of all children born to
never-married mothers depend on AFDC, compared to a fifth (20.4 percent) of
those born out of wedlock, whose mothers later married. Only a tenth (10.7
percent) of the children born to married couples who subsequently divorce end up
relying on AFDC, as do a mere 2.5 percent of those whose parents’ marriages
remain intact. The press release can be read below, and the entire paper,
“Understanding Differences in Black and White Child Poverty Rates,” is available
online at http://www.heritage.org/library/cda/cda01-04.html.
Cited in a posting from Smart Marriages Listserv on May 29, 2001. (source: http://www.divorcereform.org/pov.htm).

So what we see is a crystal-clear connection between family status and poverty. The institution of marriage, and the presence of a father in the house, is the ultimate determiner of poverty, not race. And I find it more than passing interesting that “Black children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than are white children,” given that more than twice as many out of wedlock births occur in the black community than in the white community, and that more than twice as many black teenage girls have STDs than white teenage girls. Do you see how the former would be expected to result from the latter?

Every time an individual or a societal or government institution makes mention of facts such as these, they are immediately set upon as racist. I vividly remember Bill Cosby making some of these observations and being labeled an “Uncle Tom.” And I similarly remember hearing Rev. Jeremiah Wright shout out the names of “Clarence, Colin, and Condoleezza!” to defame Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as white collaborators. I believe that no one has served “black America” more terribly than the perversion of the civil rights movement and the current leadership of that community. The day when a man would be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character has been replaced with a shrill demand for race quotas. And there has been a refusal to examine the real issues that have had the most severe impact on the black community, and one vicious attack after another on anyone – regardless of skin color – who has attempted to address the issue squarely and legitimately. There can be no improvement when one refuses to look at the actual problem.

The ugliest blemish on the beautiful face of America was the institution of slavery. One of the most terrible outcomes that occurred as a result of slavery – at least according to some sociologists and cultural anthropologists – was the conception of something called the “vicious cycle.” As a matter of simple history, the American institution of slavery routinely resulted in the breaking up of black families. Fathers and mothers were separated from their children by being sold to new owners individually rather than as families. And black men and women were bred like animals to produce more slaves. The vicious cycle theory holds – accurately, I believe – that several generations of this practice created a dynamic that has been incredibly difficult to overcome. And had this dynamic been perpetuated against ANY racial group, the vicious cycle would be born out in that group for generations to follow.

what I’m trying to say here is that one does not need to “blame the victim” to recognize the obvious increasing breakdown of the black family in America. Rather, Americans black and white can come together and acknowledge that a despicable institution – slavery – created a long-term disaster that has yet to heal. And Americans – black and white – need to be allowed to come together and focus on the healing of the black family. If whites continue to be labeled as “racist” every time they try to come to the table and express their views, there will be no coming together.

The problem is – as I see it – that the moment we begin to focus on “family values,” liberals tend to become extremely fidgety. They do not want the focus to be on practices such as guilt-free sexual expression, the diminishing of the role of the father, rampant divorce on demand, teenage pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births, because they have championed all of these things for the past 40 years. Rather, they want to focus on discrimination, race quotas, glass ceilings, and the like. But the figures I’ve provided clearly demonstrate that the former dwarfs the latter as the real cause of racial inequality. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted blacks to be judged by the content of their character, but nothing shapes and strengthens the content of one’s character more than a solid family structure!

Does it seem completely unreasonable to claim that if a baby is born to a poor, uneducated single mother on welfare, that that child will grow up twice as likely to be poor? Does it seem completely unreasonable to claim that such a child is far more likely to turn to drugs, gangs, and crime than a child born into a married family with a father? Why can’t we try to resolve these problems?

In 19th century England there were slums that shocked the senses. Filthiness, criminality, prostitution, drunkenness, sloth, and every other imaginable vice had come to completely characterize entire sections of cities. William Booth – the man who founded the Salvation Army – came into these places and preached not only salvation, but individual responsibility. He told the inhabitants of these slums that no one would help them because no one even viewed them as human in their current condition, but that if they began to clean up their streets and start to take control of their own lives, that others would see their efforts and begin to provide the economic assistance that they needed. And history proves that William Booth was exactly right. It wasn’t that the wealthier class didn’t want to help people in the slums; rather it was that they had never seen these people begin to act responsibly and demonstrate that assistance would change anything. But when residents of the slums began to clean up their streets, willing help came from all directions. This ought to stand as a template for any social movement.

Similarly, it isn’t that whites don’t want to put racism behind them, help blacks, or recognize that it is in their legitimate interest to do everything they can to reach out to fellow Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. was successful because he led his people to stand up for themselves in a positive manner and begin to take individual responsibility. He literally shamed whites who had held blacks as being somehow inferior into changing their attitudes. Over in India Ghandi accomplished a similar success. Clearly, it can be done. It is only a matter of choosing the right approach and framing the discussion in a way that does not begin by attempting to frame any subsequent discussion in terms of bitterness and blame. But that is exactly what has been done, over and over again.

What is racism? I would define it simply as holding negative views about a person or group of people on account of race. And it can’t be a despicable thing when whites hold racist views against blacks, but permissible when blacks hold racist views against whites. And any justification for such a double standard – such as the frankly self-serving notion that black racism isn’t racism because blacks aren’t the group in power – will do nothing but create bitterness and anger and continue the division. It’s not that whites don’t want white people who make despicable comments to be held accountable; it’s that they expect blacks to hold themselves to the same standard that they demand whites adhere to. If “black America” really wants “white America” to overcome its incipient racism, then they must work toward doing the same. It’s as simple as that.

Does anyone seriously doubt for a moment that, were it discovered that Senator John McCain had attended a racist white church for twenty years, that Democrats en masse would be screaming for his resignation, much less the end to his presidential campaign? And Senator Barack Obama in the past couple years called for Senator Trent Lott’s resignation for his comments honoring 100 year old retiring Senator Strom Thurmond, just as he called for Don Imus’ firing over his line against the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Bad as their words were, can anyone say that they descended to a lower level than blaming white America for a genocidal campaign to murder blacks with the AIDS virus? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have made numerous racially charged comments against whites and Jews in their pasts, but they to be allowed to serve as the judge and jury of selective black outrage. Frankly, anyone who believes that continuing the politics of the dual-standard will lead to racial healing is a fool.

“White America” and “black America” need to arrive at a consensus on how to – in the words of our founders – “form a more perfect union.” And I would recommend we begin by focusing on issues in which both sides can come to common agreement. If “black America” demands that conservative whites either support a socialist-liberal redistributionist program or be labeled as racist, then nothing will happen except the continuation of the historic division and bitterness. Conservatives don’t believe in welfare as a general principle; they don’t want white people to live on welfare either. But if “black America” decides to truly begin to come to grips with the problem of the broken family structure in America, then “white America” – and particularly religious whites – will rally to their cause in huge numbers. Religious whites yearn to see a healthy black family structure; for that matter, they yearn to see a return to a healthy white family structure.

All sides in the racial divide need to understand that we are all in this nation – and the dilemmas we face as a nation – together. That “Why don’t you just go back to Africa!” line is pointless and hurtful; no one is going anywhere. We are all Americans. And Americans of every skin pigmentation need to come together in common cause and work – and do I mean WORK – to resolve and overcome differences and begin to make progress toward a better and stronger United States of America by focusing on common causes and common agreement.

Any naysaying aside, I do have a right to express my voice in the discussion toward racial harmony in America. My ancestors secured that right for me with their sacrifice and their blood.