Sanctity of Death
Posted by Henry Meyerding on Jun 23, 2007 - 12:20:00 AM
By conservative estimates, the death toll in the post-911 American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceed 800,000 human beings killed and more than one and half million seriously wounded(1). This does not take into account the one and a half million refugees, mostly children and the elderly, who died at the very beginning of the current Afghanistan war when the US acted to prevent relief supplies that they depended on from reaching them.
This also does not include more than 3,500 American soldiers killed, nor the 40,000 or more seriously wounded American soldiers, nor the untallied death toll of coalition mercenaries and civilian contractors killed or wounded in these wars.
For good or for bad, and for whatever reason you want to believe, these wars were started and pursued by George W. Bush, who continues to resist any kind of curtailment in our forces in these conflicts. In fact, he has been an active and vocal supporter of increased troop levels offering a greater level of violence to the indigenous people of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention additional threats to other nations in the middle east.
And yet, this self-same war maker seems to be overcome with remorse for embryos: he disparages legislation that would "support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others" but he's fine with routine slaughter of men, women, and children in hope of "promoting effective democracies."
It reminds me of George Carlin's line about how anti-abortion people are so obsessed with the sanctity of life that they will go through any length to protect the unborn, unless one of those unborn gets born and grows up to become a doctor who performs abortions; at which point, they may be in favor of killing that formerly unborn embryo. To quote the great gentleman George W again: "If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would, for the first time in our history, be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos, and I'm not going to allow it." But he's not going to allow any timetable for the reduction in our troops planted all over somebody else's country that have resulted in and will continue to result in the deaths of multitudes of people, And some of those were embryos, too.
Our government has raised and spent lots of taxes to fund the deliberate destruction of human life. You can't "bomb them back into the stone age" without killing at least some pregnant women. If you kill pregnant women, then you're essentially conducting random abortions on the population of an entire country. Our government has sent more of our money on the preparation for war, both nuclear and conventional, than all the other nations of the world combined. We do this every year. What is war all about? Killing people.
And the embryos Bush is so worried about will be thrown away instead of being used for legitimate medical research. It is ludicrous to decide not to use stem cells from embryos who would have been collected anyway. That is like saying that you won't allow the corneas of traffic fatalities to be given to other people because it will give doctors a reason to commit vehicular manslaughter to get more eyeballs. If you don't use them, you lose them.
But in the end, we all know that the Bush policies don't make sense, don't need to make sense, and never were meant to make sense. They're about currying favor, earning the support of tiny, vocal, and powerful special interest groups whose support they feel is necessary to win elections. Rationality is irrelevant. Venal self-interest is the hallmark and sole moral value of the Bush administration, period.
