The dehumanization of your neighbor

By Tom Quiner

It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s our humanity that is at stake.

A Fox News website article this morning was chilling: “Cannibalism, ‘mommy porn,’ and sexting, oh my!”

It details the progression of our culture’s decline, characterized most notably by the recent spate of “cannibal” attacks.

As if that’s not unsettling enough, the top three books on the NY Times best seller list are a series of explicit, erotic novels that target housewives. Porn goes mainstream.

And then they reported on the rising use of ‘sexting’:

“A teacher in Texas was arrested for “sexting” with a student only days after he was named Teacher of the Year. “Sexting,” sending nude photos or videos of oneself via cell phone, is on the rise in high schools across the country as students seek approval in the wrong places from their classmates and teachers. A recent survey shows that even among adults the practice is on the rise, with 1 out of 5 smartphone users admitting to sexting.”

All this makes me think of the “nuns on the bus” tour. I don’t care who you are, you have to appreciate their commitment to the poor and needy.

God bless these nuns for their efforts in humanizing the marginalized.

Here’s the rub, though. They trust government. They want government to be bigger. They want government to take an even bigger role in setting the moral tone for our country.

Unlike the nuns on the bus, I fear government.

Our government has participated in the dehumanizing of our culture with its embrace of abortion. The party in power wants to advance the spread of abortion with more taxpayer funding.

The party in power has a perverse view of humanity: they view it as a disease to be mitigated with taxpayer-funded birth control. And if you have religious objections, tough. If birth control fails, there’s a simple solution: abortion.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has done more damage to this country than abortion, because abortion dehumanizes.

That’s not the only way we are being dehumanized. Pornography is rampant. Porn turns people into objects. Anti obscenity laws are on the books which make porn illegal. The executive branch does not enforce the laws.

Depictions of human depravity are a push-of-a-button away from our children, our parents, our teachers, our clergy, from all of us.

The current president has made it clear he is selective on which laws he chooses to enforce and not to enforce. Could he please tell us why he chooses not to enforce anti-pornography laws? Are pornographers one of his voting blocks, too?

Good grief, out in Washington, a public school uses Planned Parenthood curriculum to teach fifth graders about oral and anal sex.

Porn producers must be smiling.

You see, the progression of our dehumanization is being aided by our government. Steve Deace pointed out the connection between economic prosperity and limited government:

“The most prosperous economies are those that truly understand the role of government. As it is stated in our founding document, The Declaration of Independence: there is a God, our rights come from Him, and the only purpose of government is to secure and defend those God-given rights. To put it another way, government is to encourage (not do) good and punish evil.”

Deace points out the risk of letting government become the arbiter of morality:

“Of course, government in and of itself is not a moral agent, and usually inflicts the most horrors on humanity when it attempts to be, so it needs another institution to define for it what is good and what is evil. That is the role of the church and the family. These clearly defined spheres of jurisdiction between cultural institutions are what produce the proper balance of liberty and morality, thus allowing for the most prosperity.”

You may ask if I trust Republicans? The answer is absolutely no. That’s why our Constitution called for limited government. Because man is flawed, regardless of which party is in power. Our government was designed to be limited, not the sprawling mega bureaucracy it has become.

I don’t call for dismantling our nation’s safety net. But we have let our government grow beyond reason to a point where the fabric of our nation is fraying. Our very soul is rotting.

Government policy has allowed and encouraged the dehumanization of our neighbor.

Cannibalism is now mainstream. Wake up, America.