By Judie Brown
Being old enough to recall the television series The Twilight Zone, it occurred to me that Webster’s definition—“an area just beyond ordinary legal and ethical limits”—applies to our current age.
We see this twilight zone in so many aspects of our culture today. For instance, there are politicians vying for the office of the president who cannot agree on the morbid question of whether or not aborting children should be curtailed after their fifteenth week of life. It is as though all babies prior to that arbitrary line mean either nothing to any of them or are not actually human!
According to their way of thinking, 99% of abortions would continue, yet they call themselves pro-life! Such absence of logic is astounding.
In Ohio, the headlines tell us that the state’s Catholic bishops publicly commented on the fact that pro-abortion Issue 1 was approved by the voters. These men call it a tragic day, having spent nearly two million dollars on a campaign urging Catholics to vote against it. But given the fact that less than 20% of the state’s population is Catholic, barring a miracle, their vote could not have changed the outcome.
After all, a majority of Ohioans view the act of abortion as a simple human right. In such a climate babies have no chance, regardless of what the bishops say or do.
The youngest of our preborn brothers and sisters are now in greater jeopardy because of such alien thinking. This is so even though learned biologists like James Sherley, PhD, know the truth. In a recent article, Dr. Sherley wrote:
There they go again: science reporters are calling human beings “blobs.” Not blobs as in the classic science fiction movie that wreaked havoc and death on unwitting victims. No, they are back to labeling innocent embryo-age human beings as mere “blobs of cells.” This Orwellian tactic deceives the public into believing that nascent human beings, rather than the unethical scientists experimenting on them, are blobs of cells.
The dehumanizing of these embryonic children began many years ago. In the process, citizens are educated into accepting the idea that aborting a child is just another decision some women and men have to make. After all, they say, this is a free country and opting to abort is a choice.
Such abuse of language has dire consequences. Relegating an entire class of human beings to the status of non-human is not new, but it is a serious problem. For a people living in this age of higher educational levels and presumed intelligence, many of us would hope for sharper consciences. But there’s the rub.
In this process of dumbing down in America’s twilight zone, too many people have become numb to the dubious marketing campaign that sends a message that human beings are no longer equal and that facets of scientific fact are no longer true. When that happens, people die.
Monsignor Richard Antall points this out in his article “We Live Among Barbarians,” as he discusses the tragic outcome of the Ohio vote on Issue 1. He writes, “A society that enacts an unjust law is unjust. God will punish us for that injustice. An old Spanish saying has it: Dios tarda pero no olvida. The meaning is God takes His time but does not forget.”
Unjust laws are the epitome of cruelty. This underscores the fact that there is murder in the twilight zone—in this nation where too many have accepted those who earn a living taking lives and calling it freedom of choice.
