Exodus 21:22-25: The Bible Weighs in On Fetuses

Those who have religious objections to abortion believe the practice violates the law of God. Abortion is murder, plain and simple.

But what does The Bible have to say about this? Does scripture weigh in on whether fetuses are equivalent to born people?

The Bible and Abortion

Actually, it does. According to the Old Testament, Exodus 21:22-25, if a woman is killed in the course of a brawl between two people, the one who killed her must be killed. If she is pregnant, and the brawl injures her and causes her to miscarry, the guilty party must pay a fine.

The life of a fetus, in other words, is not equal to the the life of a born person.

Like many Biblical rules meant to guide the actions of ancient Hebrews, this seems rooted in common sense. The idea that the life of a days- or weeks-old embryo is worth the same as a living, cognizant human—loved, treasured and vital to society—and that an adult woman should perhaps even sacrifice her life to protect this embryo—is more than just nonsensical. It is immoral, and offensive. And would have been considered so by the people of the Bible.

At the very least, this biblical passage underscores the fact that there is no consensus—moral, political, scientific, religious, even scriptural—on the issue of abortion. From a social and legal standpoint, this is why there is no justification for an outright ban.

Clearing the Air on Kim Davis

Re: Kim Davis And Pope Francis Had A Private Meeting In D.C.

With the news of the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis swirling today, it’s worth reiterating: Kim Davis is free to believe whatever she wants about gay marriage, and we cannot realistically expect the head of the Catholic Church to take any position other than one sympathetic to her on this matter.

But this is not the point. The United States government, and the state government of Kentucky (modeled on the Constitution), does not mirror or represent any one stripe of Christianity, Christianity in general, or any other religion.

There is nothing more un-American than the idea that the government or its representatives should act on behalf of one particular religious ideology. This is what the Founders most feared, and why freedom from (proscribed) religion kicks off the Bill of Rights.

Kim Davis unquestionably broke the law, which is grounds for impeachment. She did it not to expand the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to more Americans (as the Civil Rights movement sought to do), but to constrain that right.

Children or Trash? A Note on Political Language

We all know language is used to serve political agendas. The pro-choice fetus is the pro-life child; one side's background check is another's gun grab, etc. I came across a particularly jarring example of this while reading up on a 2014 effort by St. Paul's College, a defunct historically black school in Lawrenceville, Va., to house illegal immigrant children in its empty dorms.

Here's a sample of headlines from Google:.

Each refers to the Mexican children differently: "immigrant kids"; "immigrant children"; "illegal immigrant." The kids are "housed" or simply "moved." But the Adolph Hitler Untermensch Award goes to the so-called American Thinker: "Feds Back Down on dumping illegals in small Virginia town." The subject is "illegals"—not humans—who are comparable to trash.

Well done, Thinker!

Woody Guthrie sang about dehumanization of illegal immigrants way back in 1948:

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

                           - "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)"

A Look at Lynching by the Numbers

The Confederate flag no longer flies

 at South Carolina's statehouse.

On the occasion of South Carolina’s removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds, let's take a quick look at the history of lynching in this country. 

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of this number, 72.7% of people lynched were black.

Nearly four out of five lynchings—79%—happened in the South. While most of the lynching that took place outside of the South was of whites, 86% of lynching in the southern states (those of the former Confederacy) happened to blacks. 

Mississippi had the most lynchings with 581. Georgia was second with 531, Texas third with 493, and Louisiana fourth with 391. Alaska, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut had no lynchings between 1882-1968.

South Carolina lynched 160 people during this period. 156 of them were black.

Pennsylvania had 8 lynchings. The last one—of Zachariah Walker, in 1911—was especially notorious. Walker was a black steelworker, dragged to a field outside of Coatesville and murdered by a mob. His death shocked the nation and led to the first federal anti-lynching law.

Note: The statistics quoted above are based on data from the Tuskegee Institute Archives.

The original Penn Station was demolished. That’s a good thing.

This originally appeared on a website I maintained about the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak and commuter rail, which is shutting down later this month. I’m preserving it here on the Redux. 

Originally published October 30, 2013

50 Years On, Why We Might Not Want to Mourn Penn Station’s Passing

To mark the 50th anniversary of the start of demolition of New York’s original Penn Station, The Atlantic Cities reprinted a series of photographs taken of the building in 1962 for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The pictures capture the station in all its monumental beauty: the soaring glass, the arches, the legendary ceiling... and all that light. It cannot be denied that New York lost an architectural treasure when the 1910 structure designed by McKim, Mead, and White was torn down to make way for Madison Square Garden.

Looking at the images another way, though, reveals something else: long exterior blocks of sheer neoclassical walls, repetitive doric columns, yawning windows and stairs all out of proportion to human patrons and the surrounding streetscape. Penn Station, while magnificent, was more a statement of grandeur than a vibrant urban hub.

Today’s Penn Station, for all its cramped ugliness, is midtown’s throbbing heart (albeit with clogged ventricles). Millions navigate its crazy corridors via dozens of entrances and exits, all of which support busy retail and multi-modal transportation services. On the street level, Penn Station, while ignoble, is no imposing barrier. It fits into the flow of surrounding streets and therefore does the job it was built to do, which is increasingly miraculous given that it was designed to handle far fewer travelers than it does today.

Penn Station needs to be replaced, the sooner the better. It is a security nightmare, overcrowded nuisance for regular users and unwelcoming puzzle for visitors to the Big Apple. But the lessons to be learned in designing a new station should incorporate those elements which, in many ways, made Penn Station ’68 better than Penn Station ’10. If we could magically switch today’s Penn Station with the original, that would not be optimal. New York City today needs a station that combines great architecture with ease-of-use, free flow and integration with the surrounding city. This should be the goal of stakeholders as the city moves forward with redevelopment plans.

Let New Jersey Join the E.U.

“New Jersey Faces a Transportation Funding Crisis, With No Clear Solution,” reads today’s New York Times headline. The story is pretty much what you’d expect: people in power ignoring or actively killing funds for infrastructure; steadily decreasing subsidies from Washington; a greater burden placed on commuters at the turnstile and the pump as problems mount and service gets worse.

It’s the same formula for failure we’ve had to deal with in Pennsylvania, but in New Jersey, it’s most acute. As I’ve been saying for years, demographically and economically New Jersey is less like a U.S. state than a small European country, with the same sort of challenges faced by Belgium or Denmark—only far, far less political will or government support available to meet them.

New Jersey is a small country forced to beg for scraps in Washington like every other state, its two senators contending with colleagues from Vermont and Montana for money from an ever-shrinking pie. New Jersey needs and deserves subsidies more than most other states— and not just because it pays more federal taxes than most of them. The Northeast is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy and living on New York City’s doorstep creates transportation and infrastructure needs unique to this hemisphere.

How Libertarianism Erodes Individuality (and Makes Government Bigger)

In a brilliant essay in Salon, David Masciotra distills Libertarianism down to its selfish, anti-intellectual core—and in doing so makes the case for why the movement is neither contrarian, independent nor a foundation for liberty.

While I don't agree with all of Masciotra's analysis (his dismissal of the ideas and efforts of the Founders is both over-simplistic and anachronistic), his indictment of the deep conservatism and social conformity at the root of the post-Ayn Rand cult of individualism is spot on.

Libertarianism is Anti-Populist

"Libertarians," Masciotra writes, "proclaim an anti-government position, but they are only opposing the last measures of protection that remain in place to prevent the government from full mutation into an aristocracy." The dismantling of social programs, regulations and campaign finance rules empower the establishment at the expense of the have-nots and "transform the legislative process into an auction."

Libertarian Small-Government Goals Achieve the Opposite

Individualism tied to a sense of contributing to the collective good is the driving force of social progress. It also creates more autonomous souls. The "me first" mentality of simplistic bootstraps capitalism leads not to individual liberty but to a what-can-I-get approach that, ironically, fails to contribute to the Libertarian's goal of making government irrelevant. We see it in tax evasion among the wealthy and public benefits fraud among the less well-off. We see it in government bailouts and selfish, short-term policies (such as defunding infrastructure, robbing pension funds and neglecting schools) that lead to huge social costs—and government interventions—later on.

By rejecting the idea of an activist government, Libertarians do not eliminate it—they simply make it less efficient, less strategic and more crisis-bound. Investments critical to the future of the public and private economy are left unmade.

Libertarianism is Anti-Responsiblity

Libertarianism devalues the individual's responsibility to the greater good. Paraphrasing the philosopher Charles Taylor, Masciotra notes that ideas of personal freedom are "empty and meaningless without connections to 'horizons of significance'… bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity with people outside of one's own individual pursuits."

Libertarianism erodes the idea of a general sense of societal responsibility—public or private—leaving ideologically-driven largesse a pursuit and privilege of the rich (in nearly every case, aimed not at encouraging social solidarity but in reinforcing a "maker-taker" worldview).

Libertarianism: A Step Backward

How different we are as a nation from when John F. Kennedy famously said in his 1961 inaugural, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Kennedy's idea encompasses individual responsibility—to self and others—as well as public activism and service. It's a mid-20th century notion that helped launch a host of social initiatives—from the Peace Corps to the Voting Rights Act to Freedom Riders to Sesame Street—driven by something other than the profit motive.

Though Masciotra seems to believe otherwise, this approach is as native to our culture as free markets, dating back at least as far as the social movements of the 19th century. We should not let modern perversions of the idea of individual liberty—such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's attempts to strike public service from his state's public university charter—stamp it out.