Today I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I know it happened, yet it seems unreal. It is incomprehensible that humans created in God’s image could unleash such unspeakable horror on fellow human beings. Yet it goes on today.

For me the most moving part of the Museum was the small section about the murder of children who were mentally retarded or handicapped in someway; killed all in the name of “reducing suffering.” But they weren’t suffering. They just couldn’t do algebra. They were ordered killed because they were considered less.

I took my girls aside for a talk. We talked about how God made people in His image, about how they aren’t less because they are different, or even because they ARE mentally or physically less. We talked about how it is our responsibility to take care of them, to watch out for them.

There are two significant things happening in the culture today that seemed to come from the Nazi playbook.

First, the healthcare bill being debated in Congress has a provision for a death panel of some sort—-a team of people who reportedly would have authority to decide who was worthy of additional health care and who was too old, or too sick, or in some way…….less. I don’t pretend to understand all that goes into the healthcare debate, and I certainly believe we need to pay attention to this issue as a country. The system is broken. But I blanche at the thought that a “committee of the enlightened” would be given authority to decide who is worthy of more care, or less care because they are deemed more or less worthy. That is just inherently wrong.

Second, as I stood looking at pictures of naked children moments before they were killed, and at one physician posing over the surgical table holding the dead body of a sacrificed child he was preparing to cut open and explore in the name of science, I couldn’t help but have a gut reaction about the decisions we allow in America today for innocents to be killed. Abortion is simply wrong. Politicians say it should be rare but legal. I think that is doublespeak designed to placate both sides from men and women who either don’t know the truth or are afraid to speak it. It is our responsibility to protect the innocents, including those who haven’t yet drawn a breath. The Bible says that God knows them in their mother’s womb and there He knits them together. John, the cousin of Jesus is reported to have leapt in the womb of his mother at the announcement that Mary was pregnant with the Savior.

I don’t know everything about this issue. There are complexities. There are women who should have never gotten pregnant. There are babies destined to be born into adverse circumstances. But the notion that women can kill their babies because it’s not a convenient time in their life to have a child is just inherently wrong. I know some will say its about a woman’s right to her body,  and I agree that a woman has a right to her body, to keep her knees closed. But her rights end where exercising them deprives that baby of its right to life. God is knitting him in his mother’s womb, and what God has knit together let no man rend asunder.

I know that many of the people lauded so grandly for donating to the Holocaust Museum are also supportive of abortion rights. And, I just don’t get it. It’s wrong. How can an advanced nation like ours memorialize the horror of the Holocaust while simultaneously allowing it in our midst? I just don’t get it. It’s wrong. And I’m clear on that. If you think otherwise, you simple need to change your mind.