Are We Any Better Than Hitler?

For the book club reading this month, I was reading, Sarah's Key. It is an absorbing novel about July 1942 when French citizens, who happened to be Jews, were rounded up and sent to their deaths. 13,000 French Jews, mostly women and children, were exterminated by order of Adolf Hitler.

The author alternates between the story of a young Jewish girl living in Paris in 1942 and the story of a middle-aged woman in modern times who is assigned to write a story about this event in French history. An event the French prefer to forget.

While the story is well-written, I admit that I stopped reading it. I'm not a fan of profanity and when I began a passage with the F-word I stopped reading the book.

Up to that point, I was riveted by the story and thought about the cruelty extended to a group of people simply because they were Jews. Hitler decided that they did not deserve to live simply because he thought Jews were inferior. Who gave him that right? And why on earth did so many people follow him? Why were so many willing to kill people--children especially? How could anyone do something like this? Why did so many turn their backs on the Jews and refuse to stop the insanity surrounding the Holocaust?

Then I have to ask myself, how are we, in our society, any different than Hitler? We have laws that protect the practice of killing innocent children every day. Over 3000 babies are aborted in this country every day. Yes, every day. Why? The majority are aborted because they are an inconvenience, because their mothers have decided they don't have the right to live. And we have groups like Planned PArenthood that applaud this so-called right.

For anyone who's read my blog before, you know that I have a son with Down syndrome. 9 out of 10 women whose pregnancies are diagnosed with Down syndrome choose to terminate the pregnancy. They choose to kill that growing baby simply because it has too many chromosomes. So I ask you, how is that any different than what Hitler did? We are outraged that he thought Jews were inferior. We say he was the devil himself to have killed so many innocent people, so many innocent children who didn't deserve to die. Yet, we consistently protect the right of women to do the same thing. Over and over and over again.

We like to see ourselves as advanced and pretend that our society is nothing like Hitler's. And yet, we are no different. Our politicians fight to protect a woman's right to kill her baby, as if that baby has no rights. Why? Because it is inside its mother's womb? Because it can't care for itself? If we were to apply that reasoning across the board then we'd have to say that all children fall into that category.

I cannot understand why any human being would do what Hitler did. I cannot see how he could justify any of his actions. I do not understand killing others because they seem to be inferior. I also do not understand how women's hearts can fail them and they can justify killing their own babies. In our country, women use abortion as birth control and our government wants to force businesses to allow women to do so through the healthcare they provide to employees, even if that business has strongly held religious beliefs (which is a violation of the business owner's rights). We are on the same road as Hitler once was. We are deciding who has the right to live and who does not. We pretend that we are better than Hitler, but we are not. Today we decide unborn babies can die at the whim of their mothers. What will tomorrow bring? When we disrespect the life of anyone, we disrespect the lives of everyone. How can we ever hope to teach people to stop killing innocent people in theaters and schools when we allow, and even advocate, the killing of our most innocent?

I think Mother Theresa said it best, "But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even his life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love - that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion. "

And, "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

If we want society to respect life, if we want to stop the violence, we must first protect all human life.

Crossing the Line

I read an article yesterday about a little boy who is deaf. He communicates using sign language. Apparently, when he was enrolled in school the school officials felt like the sign that he uses for his name resembles a gun.

Huh?

Yes, that's right. They think the sign for his name looks like a gun so they've asked the parents to change the sign that he's been using for his name.

This is beyond ridiculous. Asking a child who has already experienced the fact that he's different because he must use his hands to communicate to now change that sign to accommodate an overactive fear is callous and cruel.

I admit that the world today is different from the one I grew up in. While I was in school we had no school shootings. People could go to the movies without worrying about being shot. Violence has definitely escalated over the years and more and more people are using lethal force for no reason. However, even amidst all of this, have we lost our common sense? Are we so saturated with fear that we're willing to take something away from a small child simply because it *might* resemble a gun?

How far are we willing to go? Will we no longer be allowed to point because it might look like a gun?

Some years ago, we had a similar overreaction. A few kids were sent home from school because they'd drawn a picture of a gun. A picture. 

I have lots of kids in school and I absolutely want them to be safe. I expect school officials to do their due diligence in keeping students safe. If there's something amiss then I expect school officials to take care of it properly. A few years ago, a student brandished a knife on the bus. I know the kid and he was just showing off. He wasn't threatening anyone, but still he had a knife and we have very specific rules against bringing knives to school. It was a huge ordeal that included police, sheriffs, locking down all the schools and keeping the buses there for hours. It was very scary during the incident because no one was telling us exactly what was happening. In this instance, I believe the school officials acted with due diligence.

But, asking a kid to change the way he signs his name? That's just ridiculous and completely over-the-top. I hope that in this violent world we can still keep some common sense about us and realize that something like this is unnecessary. And hurtful.