By Krista Kafer (krista555@msn.com) It was a tough week for women and children. The US Senate passed Colorado Representative Diana DeGette’s bill to provide taxpayer funds for the killing of unborn children to harvest their tissues. Michael Schiavo, who starved his mentally impaired wife to death, came to town to campaign for Angie Paccione in her election bid against Representative Marilyn Musgrave. He has formed a Duty-to-Die PAC to fund candidates who support euthanasia. On the other side of the world, terrorists murdered over a hundred train passengers in India. In Iraq, the <a href="killing of civilians has hit an all time high.
It is easy to see how the culture of death pervades terrorist ideology. To them human life has little or no worth. The value of jihad is greater than the value of human life. Where human life is not sacred, guns fire into crowded market places and bombs explode on buses.
In America, the culture of death lacks the loud drama and irrational fanaticism of its eastern counterpart. Quietly it has seeped into the foundation like lethal radon gas. And it seems so eminently sensible. If over a million children a year die from abortion, isn’t that a million fewer unwanted children? If they are going to die anyway, why not use their tissues to help others? Why not let people who cannot feed themselves die? Aren’t they and their families better off? Don’t these people deserve privacy?
The privacy of individuals seems like such a reasonable demand. The Rocky Mountain News article about Schiavo says he will be campaigning for those “who share his sense of privacy.” The article quotes Paccione saying "Michael puts a human face on the invasion of privacy.” This sounds familiar. Three decades ago, the Supreme Court denied the protection of unborn children under the auspices of “privacy. In the United States, the privacy of some is greater than the life of others.
If the value of privacy trumps that of life itself in this country, who are we to judge Muslims who hold the value of jihad over life? What is the difference? In practice, nothing.