“Blue lives matter,” read the signs at the pro-police rally last weekend at Civic Center in downtown Denver. Participants stood up for officers’ lives.
That same weekend, at the Netroots Nation Conference in Los Angeles, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley declared, “All lives matter,” and was booed by Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
To them, “all lives matter” obscures the history of racism in this country and the undervaluing of black lives under slavery and Jim Crow, and among some in law enforcement today. Hopefully, the ongoing national conversation on appropriate use of force by law enforcement will ultimately reinforce rather than undermine the belief that all lives matter — blue, black, brown, white.
After all, do not all lives matter?
Meanwhile, a second undercover video was released showing Planned Parenthood employees blithely discussing the sale of organs ripped from unborn children during abortions. Legal, so long as it’s billed as a kind of shipping and handling charge, Planned Parenthood sells fetal organs to research facilities.
In the first video, released July 14, Dr. Deborah Nucatola describes how abortionists can customize the abortion to ensure that ordered parts are not destroyed during the process: “So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
In the second video, released July 21, Dr. Mary Gatter jokes that she’d like a Lamborghini while she haggles over the price of human livers. All of this while eating lunch and sipping wine.
The hearts, livers and lungs in demand are human, though they are bought and sold as though they came from a cattle slaughterhouse. An unborn child is not a person under the law. He is something less, and his value is determined by those already born. He is a baby to be nurtured or a human commodity to be sold. Who decides?
Throughout history, people in power have dehumanized the vulnerable to justify the taking of land, labor or lives. Before the Civil War, whites dehumanized blacks to justify slavery. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney echoed the sentiments of many, at least in the South, when he wrote that African-Americans were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Thus they remained slaves, even when traveling in the North.
Fast-forward to the late 1930s. Before their extermination, the Nazis launched a persuasive campaign to convince Germans that the disabled were a burden to society. When these lebensunwertes leben (lives unworthy of life) and nutlos esser (useless eaters) disappeared, few asked questions.
Meanwhile, Jews and Slavs, the untermenschen (subhumans) were systematically dispossessed of property, liberty and ultimately of their very lives. At the concentration camps, living and dead “human material” was procured for Nazi scientists to experiment upon as they pleased.
Human material is what humans become when they are said to lack intrinsic value. It is not surprising that there exists around the world a thriving red market of body parts swindled from the poor, stolen from political prisoners, and plucked from the bodies of unborn children.
Which lives matter? Depends. Who decides? Those with power, money, forceps.
When will all lives matter?
When enough of the strong stand up for the threatened, the marginalized, the poor, the dispossessed, and the unborn to stop the injustice?
Krista Kafer (tokrista@msn. com) is co-host of “Kelley and Company” airing 1 to 4 p.m. weekdays on 710 KNUS.
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