Opinion

On Senator Cory Booker’s Self-Refuted Moralism

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Alan Keyes Former Assistant Secretary of State
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Therefore, is my people led away captive … Therefore, hell has enlarged her soul, and opened her mouth without any bounds, and their strong ones, their people, and their high and glorious ones go down into it … Woe to you that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as the rope of a cart … Woe to you that call evil good and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter … They have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and have blasphemed the word of the Holy One of Israel (Isaiah 13, 14, 18, 20)

I’m here to call on folks to understand that in the moral moment, there is no neutral in a moral moment. There is [sic] no bystanders. You are either complicity in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it. There’s a saying from the Abrahamic faiths, from one of the Psalms, that says “Yea though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” We are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. But that doesn’t say “Though I sit in the valley of the shadow of death,” it doesn’t say, “I’m watching on the sidelines of the valley of the shadow of death,” it says, “I am walking through the valley of the shadow of death.”

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. (Thucydides-History of the Peloponnesian War, Interlinear English Translation. Book 3.82.4)

Six things there are which the Lord hates, and the seventh his soul detests: Haughty eyes; a lying tongue; hands that shed innocent blood; a heart that devises wicked plots; feet that are swift to run into mischief; a deceitful witness that utters lies; and him that sows discord among brethren. (Proverbs 6: 16-19)

Like California Representative Nancy Pelosi, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker supports the “right” — speciously so-called — of a pregnant mother to murder the nascent child in her womb.

He does so even though it violates the self-evident truths that America’s Declaration of Independence proclaims as the first premise of America’s creed.

That creed holds it to be a self-evident truth that from the Word through which God conceives them to be objects of His will, which Word the Gospel of Christ proclaims to be our Creator, all human beings are equally endowed with certain unalienable rights — rights that all human governments should exist to secure. Among these rights, our nation’s creed lists, first of all, the unalienable right to life.

We are not born into this right, as the arrogant oligarchs of old claimed to be born to their power to condemn and oppress those they held to be inferior. We are entitled to our rights by the will of God. They come to us even before His wisdom informs the flesh in our mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5). So, the Psalmist — whose words Mr. Booker abuses merely to ornament hollow rhetoric — says to His Lord:

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when there was not yet one of them.

This passage declares that God previses humanity in precincts of His creation that transcend the limits of human understanding. Now, in his remarks, Mr. Booker strikes a pose, as if he subscribes to one of what he tellingly calls “the Abrahamic faiths.” But if he reveres what the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob reveals to us in the Bible, how can he wickedly honor what God hates — i.e., the murder of innocent humans in the womb?

I frankly don’t know whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh will prove to be the threat to wrongful “rights” abortion-mindful politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Cory Booker think he will be.

I do know that they implore anti-Constitutional Judges and Justices to enforce such wrongful “rights” as a matter of civil and criminal law. In doing so, they deny and disparage God-endowed unalienable rights that constitute the foundation of our sovereign liberty as a people.

Our national creed proclaims them. Since the United States first stepped foot into the world, our responsibility to preserve them in action has been the key premise of our common identity as a people.

By mistaking evil for good, elected leaders like Senator Booker and Representative Pelosi help to strengthen the forces of strife that mean to disintegrate that identity.

It is especially hard to understand why someone of Cory Booker’s practically “All-American” heritage would be working in league with those who mean to subvert the premise of God-endowed rights and to favor instead the premise of “might makes right.”

That promotion of unrighteous power is the real implication of the pro-abortion regime. It promotes elitist, racist genocide. It is predicated on the inferiority of anyone who still relies on the rule of our Creator, God as the standard of humanity’s conscience.

Senator Booker speaks of a “moral moment.” But there is no way he can claim to speak for any “morality” except the hateful perpetrations of ruthless strength that criminal gangs, and powerful, gangsterish elitists, wickedly honor as evidence of more than human will-power.

In their creed, force is power, and the successful application of force, regardless of God’s justice, is the only rule of law.

Slavery, in one form or another, is the regime that results from it. Senator Booker promoted a bill to remove from the U.S. Capitol every state selected statue honoring historical figures who owned slaves or defended the regime of government that abetted their enslavement. This rubric must eventually lead us to demolish the Jefferson Memorial.

Ironically, doing so would defame the Declaration of Independence, the summary of America’s creed that epitomized our nation’s goal of reverence for God’s intentions for our nature. The ideas of right and justice it advances inspired even those Unionists who felt antipathy against blacks, to fight in or support the heart-rending war that brought finally confirmed emancipation.

The practice of abortion egregiously despises the self-evident truth that, from the moment God conceives of us, we are all of us equally endowed with the right to life.

So, by working to preserve the practice of abortion likewise Senator Booker discards the principles of the Declaration. He encourages people to abandon the moral reasoning that defied 19th Century racism in America to such an extent that people who despised slaves for their color joined or supported the war that brought on their emancipation.     

This active promotion of wrongdoing belies Mr. Booker’s crusade against past enslavers. Detestable as it was, slavery did not aim at the foul abuse of slave labor, nor the extinction of their lives.

By contrast, the promoters of so-called “abortion rights” aim at the extinction of human life. They embolden deleterious freedom. Abortion hardens the hearts of parents against their offspring, and the heart of humanity against itself.

I deeply feel the tragic contradiction that besets Mr. Booker’s death-disseminating walk with evil. It not only betrays such of our (his and my) ancestors as lived in the belly of bestial enslavement. It betrays all our posterity to live with consciences seared by the degradation of our nation’s sense of right.

There is no way Senator Booker can defend this travesty of right, justice and decent humanity. There’s no way he can reasonably justify it with respect for the principles of God-endowed right. Those principles came to the aid of people in every past generation.

But they were people who chose to fight the sacrifice of life to the idol of power. Instead, Mr. Booker chooses falsely to promote the imposition of wrong as “right.”

If ever he met me in debate, the force of reason and God’s law would expose his pretense of public piety as a wicked fraud. But devotion to the powers-that-be in these benighted times soon makes cowards of its acolytes.

Power presently takes forms better suited for poisoning the mind and subverting the spirit of the body politic than for winning its allegiance in open, passionate, reasonable debate. So it has ever been with those whose reverence for God is a self-refuted sham.

Alan Keyes is a political activist, writer and former diplomat.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.