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GENOCIDE AND PRIVACY: THE SHAME OF SLAVERY AND ABORTION
Genocide' s participants and defenders are universally ashamed of their behavior, unless they are sociopathically incapable of humiliation. John Chester Miller, in his book The Wolf by the Ears, supra, says Jefferson "... even when he was president, bought and sold slaves. To conceal his part in these transactions, he used a third person." Merrill D. Peterson notes similarly in Thomas Jefferson And The New Nation, supra, that:
He sold lands occasionally and was finally pushed to the awful extremity of selling several families of slaves. (Not wishing to have his name linked publicly with a transaction of this kind, he arranged to have the slaves sold at some distance from their Bedford plantation.)
Likewise with abortion, Butler & Walbert note in Abortion, Medicine and the Law, Facts on File, 1992, that the Court in Roe vs. Wade, supra at 153, "... build its doctrinal framework on the constitutional right to privacy, which it thought ' broad enough to encompass a woman' s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.' "Whether the issue is racism or abortion, privacy is vital to those who are ashamed of their conduct.
Los Angeles abortionist Edward Alred has been sued in a class-action lawsuit filed by 125 former abortion patients who alleged that he negligently disposed of their abortion records (and those of some 10,000 other women) in open trash bins where the records later came into the possession of others. Women who abort are more victim than oppressor but privacy is so important to abortion "patients" that many cover their faces while entering and leaving abortion clinics. This desperate desire for anonymity is never displayed by women seeking any other treatment at any other type of "health care" facility. (After the procedure is once again criminalized, women should never be criminally charged, in part, because a high precentage are coerced by threats of abandonment -- express or implied -- by boyfriends who don' t want to marry them or pay child support, fathers who don' t want to be embarrassed by the "scandal" of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and by husbands who don' t want to compromise a life-style dependent on the second income earned by their now pregnant wife).
Cleveland, Ohio' s newspaper, The Plane Dealer, reported a Ku Klux Klan rally in their Sunday, August 22, 1999 issue, with a photo caption of the "grand dragon" whom the paper described as "... one of the few Klansmen who did not wear a hood over his face."
HATE LANGUAGE TO DEHUMANIZE WOMEN
Nor have women escaped this tragic trend. Stephen Jay Gould notes in The Mismeasure of Man, Norton & Co., 1981, that Darwin disciple Gustave Le Bon (the father of social psychology) believed:
[Even in] the most intelligent races [there] are large numbers of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains.
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Women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and ... are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.
Impugning the "humanity" of women made it easier, of course, to deny them such personhood rights as sufferage, the right to hold property, obtain the best education for which they were academically qualified, obtain the best job for which they were occupationally qualified, be justly compensated for services rendered, etc., etc., etc.
William Brennan, in his book Dehumanizing the Vulnerable, Loyola University Press, 1995, (see generally for further discussion of several of the foregoing examples) explains that belittling of female personhood also created a climate in which Mississippi was able to legalize wife beating in 1824 and "other states soon followed suit." It is impossible to know how many women were killed by this genocidal custom but we do know that it considerably pre-dated the Mississippi act and remains widely -- though now unlawfully (at least in this country) -- practiced to this day.
GENOCIDE AND CHILDREN, UNBORN AND BORN
Is it fair to compare the killing of an unborn child with the killing of a victim of tradition genocide? Of course, not least because huge numbers of victims of traditional genocide are also children. Time magazine, August 16, 1999, in an article (" Into The Shadows" ) on the genocide trials of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, comments on the numbers of children, slaughtered in the "Killing Fields," whose photos are displayed at a grim museum: " ... [H]undreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed or terrified, recalling the people, often children ... who were executed here."
In the Fall of 1998, The Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., sponsored a special exhibit entitled "Remembering The Children [Of The Holocaust]." Many were, in fact, newborn infants. Time, December 31, 1999 reports that "Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing." What meaningful moral distinction can be drawn between the extermination of a newborn Jewish baby and the killing of any contemporary late-term unborn baby?
RAPE AS GENOCIDE
Expanding the definition of genocide to include abortion may seem a stretch to some but its definition is being broadened all the time. The Associated Press reported on September 2, 1998, that United Nations judges with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, had ruled that "In Rwanda' s 1994 bloodbath, rape and sexual violence were brutally wielded as tools of genocide." The story was headlined "Rape as genocidal crime: U.N. ruling sets precedent."
A story in The Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1999, datelined "United Nations," reads:
For the first time in history, a woman has been charged with rape as a crime against humanity .... Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a former Rwandan minister of family and women' s affairs, already faces a genocide charge before the U.N. war crimes tribunal for Rwanda for her alleged role in the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. The tribunal ... allowed the rape charge to be added on grounds that the accused knew her subordinates were raping Tutsi women and failed to take measures to prevent or punish them.
MURDERING THE VICTIMS OF RAPE
How does rape as genocide relate to abortion as genocide? Time, January 18, 1999, featured an unimaginably bizarre article on rape in Jordan, entitled "The Price of Honor:"
Sirhan, a 35-year-old murderer, is cheerful and relaxed and happy to tell his story. He' s especially proud to describe the efficiency with which he shot his young sister Suzanne in the head four times last March. ' She came to the house at 8:15' he relates, ' and by 8:20 she was dead.' Three days before, the 16-year-old girl had reported to police that she had been raped. ' She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will,' says Sirhan. ' Anyway, it' s better to have one person die than to have the whole family die from shame.' His is not a logic rare in the Arab world.
This, of course, is precisely the "logic" which motivates Americans to kill an equally innocent unborn child who is as much a victim of rape as his assaulted mother: It is better that an unborn child be killed than that its family endure the shame, emotional trauma, etc. of the rape. The same thing happens in Bangladesh where The Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1991, reported that ... "a raped Bangladesh girl is threatened with death by male relatives ... [and rape victims] are usually refused political asylum by Western nations. These are customs, they are told, not human rights violations." And in India, The Los Angeles Times explained in its November 26, 1992 edition, raped girls are often sold into prostitution by relatives humiliated by the girls' violations. This is a virtual death sentence for more than a third of the prostitutes who will become HIV-positive in many Indian cities. But raped girls can become an economic burden to their families because they are viewed as "unclean" and no man is likely to find them desirable for marriage.
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