(Originally published in American Thinker.)
President Joe Biden clearly stole pro-life messaging for his commencement speech at traditionally black Howard University, saying, “We’re all created equal in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.” As a pro-life strategist, the belief I have been articulating for years, motivating peaceful pro-life behavior, is that all people are equally valuable, without qualification, deserving of blessing and protection precisely and only because we are all made in the image of God.
It is this belief, standing between freedom and tyranny, that is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, claiming “we are endowed by our Creator,” not by our government. It is this belief that gives each person inherent value and dignity. It is this belief that reveals the injustice of excluding anyone from equal protection under the law, including preborn boys and girls. Yet pro-life people have been treated as second-class citizens by the Biden administration, and Maoist Antifa domestic terrorists who violently attack pro-life people, even Supreme Court justices, have been given a pass, and law enforcement are trained to consider pro-life moms as terror threats.
Imagine my curiosity as to what President Joe Biden would say after being given an honorary degree on Saturday, May 13, from Howard University for what was described as an “open embrace for all.” Oddly, the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history, Joe Biden, after insisting a breath earlier that America was not founded on religion, described the foundation of America as follows: “the sacred proposition rooted in Scripture and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that we’re all created equal in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.”
Why should it make you nervous when the most pro-abortion president in history invokes the primary pro-life message?
Early in the president’s speech, he said, “We’re living through one of the most consequential moments in our history with fundamental questions at stake for our nation. Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we believe? Who will we be?”
The president is right. America is at a crossroads of choice — but not about whether we will permit the destruction of the preborn or genital mutilation of our children, but about what we believe about the purpose of humanity. Biden went on to say that America is in a “battle for the soul of the nation.” Does this mean that Biden understands that the violence that has gripped America, in the form of abortion, mass shootings, and Antifa domestic terror, is rooted in a fundamental forgetfulness of America’s core founding belief?
Biden seems to be describing the violence facing our nation as two opposing forces seeking to determine America’s soul. But violence exists not because there are two souls, but precisely because America has lost her soul, forgotten what she believes, and therefore no longer knows how to behave. There is no context for civil debate because civilization requires shared core beliefs. Either we believe we are made in God’s image, treating one another with the inherent dignity we deserve, or we believe the steady diet of lies America has been force-feeding our children for decades: that humans are nothing more than meaningless, complex biochemical reactions.
If we will continue to believe that mankind is a product of the arbitrary — just a really smart animal — then human equality, mutual respect, and any meaningful moral framework are absurd, purely contrived by those in power to control the masses. However, if we believe that we are made just a little lower than God, made by Him and in His image, endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, not by our government with fabricated ones, we have a shot at returning to a civilized order — unshackled by tyrants masquerading as democratic representatives, promising license to satiate the appetites of wolves in sheep’s clothing — or, perhaps more literally, men in women’s clothing (and vice versa).
Howard has been a predominantly black university. Appealing to the truth that equality comes from God, not government is important in this context since, at one point in U.S. history, the government disqualified blacks from personhood status, denying the constitutional rights endowed by their Creator as well as equal protection under the law. One would think that for an institution such as Howard, invoking the hallowed image of God in order to promote the disqualification of preborn boys and girls to legally justify their destruction via abortion is too ironic to be missed — especially since the black community carries 40% of the burden of all U.S. abortions while only 14% of the population, a silent genocide.
But if that were too subtle, his next sentence eliminated all confusion as to his definition of freedom and America’s future: “Protect fundamental rights and freedoms for women to choose and for transgender children to be free.” Biden sounds eerily similar to the pro-abortion Antifa domestic terror group when they said in a communiqué, “We fight not just for abortion rights, but for trans liberation … and the uprooting of the entire global civilization.” Biden is using the pro-life vision of humanity not because he believes it, but in order to peddle the age-old concept that government is god, fashioning Americans into its own image through fabricated rights, including abortion and transgender child mutilation.
Rev. Jim Harden, M.Div. is a medical ethicist, author of the newly published Ethical Theory and Pertinent Standards in Women’s Reproductive Health, and the CEO of CompassCare Pregnancy Services. He pioneered the first measurable and repeatable medical model in the pregnancy center movement. He has written extensively on medical ethics and pro-life policy and developed materials and strategies used by 650 pregnancy centers nationwide. Rev. Harden’s network of pro-life medical offices has been the target of Antifa domestic terrorism since early 2022.
