And perhaps you recall Horton’s most famous line: "A person is a person, no matter how small!" That story and that single line have stuck with me for more than 40 years now. And, as you can guess, those three adorable little children who heard that story read to them and later insisted on reading it to me, now have a collection of ten children of their own and the reading tradition has continued.
So has the emphasis on Horton’s profound line. This is why we are so elated that upon the premier of the new movie, Horton Hears a Who, scheduled for tomorrow, March 14th, pro-lifers will be celebrating that wonderful elephant and his very special message. This is particularly so in Colorado, where a personhood initiative is currently being pursued and thousands of signatures are being collected. Tomorrow in Denver there will be a special event hosted by the Colorado for Equal Rights leader, Kristi Burton as she focuses our attention on the wisdom of that special pachyderm. In fact we hope she reminds her listeners that the same wisdom should translate to personal conviction on the part of every single human being who has ever been conceived.
Note I did say “should.” We know, of course, that this is not the case and that this is but one reason why more than 3,000 preborn children will die tomorrow. Abortion has become the tool used to destroy the smallest members of the human family much like the devious plots the Wickersham brothers as they plotted for ways to eliminate the entire population of Who-ville by silencing Horton once and for all. Remember these words from the book:
But, Just as he spoke to the Mayor of the speck,
Three big jungle monkeys climbed up Horton’s neck!
The Wickersham Brothers came shouting, "What rot!
This elephants talking to Whos who are not!
There aren’t any Whos! And they don’t have a Mayor!
And we’re going to stop all this nonsense! So there!"
The Wickersham Brothers did not want to admit the presence of the Who people so they simply denied that they were there. Today, because of the tyrannical decisions of the United States Supreme Court, the pro-abortion cartel behaves in precisely the same way. They shout that nobody is there during pregnancy. They cajole and deride the thousands of pro-life Americans who insist that a human being’s life begins at the beginning, even though he is smaller than the head of a pin.
One can only hope, over the course of time, that the monkeys who pretend to be acutely in tune with reproductive health will be exposed as the intellectual frauds they truly are, much as the Wickersham brothers were in the end of the tale about Horton and his beloved Whos.
Until then, let’s not avoid one opportunity to focus on personhood, talk about personhood and teach our fellow human beings that “a person is a person, no matter how small!”
