Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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When we choose to kill, we are blatantly trampling on the inherent dignity of each and every human being, a dignity found in the fact that every person is created in God's image, even the most hardened criminal. We must denounce the violent crime we see each evening on the news and read each day in the newspaper. We must, and do, sympathize with the victims of these crimes, and we must do what we can to bring about healing. But if we are to create a society in which the lives of all Americans are protected as valuable...
...argue about how to help the poor or how the United States ought to behave in the world, we are making ethical judgements about how we as Americans ought to act. These are indeed fundamentally moral and ethical judgements that in many cases revolve around the dignity of human life...
...innocent life. We believe enough in the dignity of life that we cannot allow those who are underprivileged in our society to lead degrading lives. So we have welfare and Social Security, always two important and controversial political issues. We even believe so much in the dignity of all human life that we have laws against discrimination, saying that all humans, simply because they are human beings, deserve certain rights. To say that questions of human dignity have no place in the American political scene is to deny much of what makes us American...
...fact, few even see the necessity of debating the death penalty. Abortion, another area where we fall far short of protecting human life, is at least a hot political topic. Whether it is abortion or capital punishment, each time we condone the execution of another person, we are chipping away at the dignity of all life. It is simply not consistent for us to support the dignity of all with one hand and cut it down with the other...
...contend that human life is valuable, that we ought to preserve it and that people ought to be punished for taking it or maltreating it, then we cannot and must not allow our states or our federal government to employ the death penalty. We must tell all candidates for public office that, though we must punish our criminals, we cannot make our punishment into vengeance, for then we begin to destroy our laws and ourselves. We have too often seen in the far too recent past the disastrous effects of a culture that breeds violence and death...