John Kerry on Personhood

First of all, the Mighty Barrister is back!!! and he posted this gem.

Sen. Kerry: My personal belief about what happens in the fertilization process is a human being is first formed and created, and that’s when life begins. Something begins to happen. There’s a transformation. There’s an evolution. Within weeks, you look and see the development of it, but that’s not a person yet, and it’s certainly not what somebody, in my judgment, ought to have the government of the United States intervening in.

Gracious me! He actually answered the question, at least in the first sentence. Then it goes downhill. Here’s the short translation: It’s a human being. But it’s not a “person.”

There was a period of time in the life of this country when another group of human beings were not considered persons. See, for example, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 U.S., 1856, where the Supreme Court announced that slaves were not “men” as defined in the Declaration of Independence, and were not “people” as declared in the Constitution, stating, “When the Constitution was adopted, they (blacks) were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State, and were not numbered among its ‘people or citizens.’ Consequently, the special rights and immunities guarantied to citizens do not apply to them.”

You can’t ignore the obvious parallels between the way the unborn are treated today, and the way Americans of African lineage were treated 150 years ago. And you can’t ignore the fact that John Kerry uses practically the same language to describe the unborn as white racists used to describe blacks – they’re not “people.” If that doesn’t completely disgust you then you’re just the person John Kerry’s looking for in November.

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