When Rick Santorum dared to allude to an historical moment in America’s flawed history, liberals went into full denial mode. What is it about history that causes such a visceral adverse reaction from liberals? Santorum, in a CNS interview about President Obama’s denial of personhood to the unborn, found it remarkable for a “black man to say ‘no, we’re going to decide who are people and who are not people’. Considering black people were considered less than human and subjected to dehumanization throughout our history, Santorum’s remarks were a powerful and legitimate commentary on the question and history of personhood.
Liberal pundits fumed. How dare Santorum use…HISTORY…to call liberal ideology to task?!
Ed Rollins (Republican strategist who clearly had no idea of the context or the import of Santorum’s statements) and Roland Martin obviously don’t get it. It IS about race, when the reference is about the denial of black people’s humanity throughout American history. We don’t care whether one is Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or any other political stripe. You are NOT immune to the challenges of history. You are NOT immune to the scrutiny that is necessary to understand why certain social policies are destructive. You are NOT immune to the appropriate application of race when it is invoked in every other instance in American life, often unnecessarily.
It took the Reconstruction Amendments to begin to rectify more than a century of the barbaric practice of slavery and the dehumanization of black people in this country. These amendments (13th-15th) were passed by the party of abolition, the Republicans. Today, it is the same party that believes, contrary to the institutions of media, public education and most urban governments, that another group of people deserve the same personhood ascribed to us all. Yet, many are content with repeating history again, allowing humankind to decide who is worthy of personhood and who is not.
Our founders (many of whom were NOT slaveholders, but abolitionists themselves) emphatically stated in our Declaration of Independence, that our equality comes from our Creator, not institutions of man. Our Constitution was the tool future generations could use to enshrine this equality. Frederick Douglass, renowned abolitionist, came to realize it would invaluable to the abolition of slavery. And the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments proved him to be right. Our hope is that it will be the same for the abolition of abortion, today’s most heinous human rights abuse.
