Thou shall not kill

Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death.

~ C. S. Lewis

The sixth commandment, “Thou shall not kill,” is God’s call to national order and veneration of the rule of law. The original Hebrew and Greek words meant, “Thou shall not murder.” As applied under the rule of law, it mandates that culprits of the most heinous acts must be quickly identified, tried in a court of law and killed.

Regarding the sixth commandment, Christian apologist and Renaissance scholar C.S. Lewis, in his book “Mere Christianity,” said the following:

Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death. If one committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace.

Presently, there is an open controversy at the famous Catholic university Notre Dame because President Obama has accepted an invitation to be the commencement speaker and to receive an honorary degree. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Obama, perhaps more so than all of his 42 predecessors combined, appears to be hell-bent on following an uncompromising pro-abortion position. In fact many of the earliest acts of his administration were brazenly perpetrated to promote more abortions both here in the U.S. and throughout the world.

The most recent example of this tyranny, according to published reports, occurred in late February where Obama began the process to rescind a regulation that enforces federal laws protecting the conscience rights of doctors and health care providers. Under Obama, we are all abortionists now.

“The Emerging Brave New World” covers the gradual dehumanization of human beings that has invaded American culture

But why would such a prestigious, pro-life Catholic institution as Notre Dame invite such a virulent, uncompromising foe of the pro-life movement as President Obama? It is a sign of the times. There seems to be a lack of courage from any of our leaders and venerated institutions to stand on principle rather than popularity.

This dearth of honor regarding the Obama/Notre Dame controversy is in stark contrast with Sunday’s dramatic rescue from Somali pirates by Navy SEALs of Capt. Richard Phillips and the crew of the Maersk Alabama. Why? I truly believe that all Americans and the world are hungering for authentic heroes.

Returning to C.S. Lewis on the sixth commandment, “Thou shall not kill,” he said:

All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when he met a Roman sergeant-major – what they call a centurion. The idea of the knight – the Christian in arms for defense of a good cause – is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken.

Liberals love to use the sophism of moral equivalence to equate the Catholic Church’s prohibition against capital punishment to disparage the fact that America still has the death penalty in most states, which (in their minds) makes Christians appear to be hypocrites on the abortion issue. Because most liberals have long ago abandoned reason, common sense and the Judeo-Christian traditions of intellectual thought in exchange for Machiavelli’s “The end justifies the means,” it is now self-evident why in America and throughout the world there is no longer a Politics of Life. There appears only to be a Politics of Death.

How can Obama, a man of such a singularly pro-death position, accede to the highest office while America’s churches ignore or celebrate the genocide that his policies and the abortion industry profit from? As I stated many times before, I believe abortion to be a modern form of slavery.

It is therefore galling to me that our most venerated educational institutions like Notre Dame, Harvard, Columbia and other Ivy League schools (all originally Christian-originated schools) can only bow the knee to these pro-death demagogues, whether it is an Al Gore and Jesse Jackson at Harvard, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia (twice), Noam Chomsky at MIT, Cornel West at Princeton, or unrepentant terrorists Bernadine Dorhn at Northwestern Law School and Bill Ayers at University of Chicago, just to name a few.

C.S. Lewis said, “All killing is not murder.” He was right. The Bible, the Constitution’s framers and settled judicial precedent codified this natural law in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

On this point during an especially dark period of Supreme Court history (1972-76) the Court overruled the death penalty as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the infamous case Furman v. Georgia (1972). What happened during that that four-year window when the Court violated God’s sixth commandment by outlawing the death penalty? One of America’s most savage serial murders, Charles Manson (and his gang of cultists), were all tried in California and given life sentences at taxpayers’ expense to this day. Also, in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority in Roe v. Wade, began a legacy that gave the death penalty to over 50 million innocent babies while Charles Manson and his murderous cohorts got free cable TV, health care, fawning media coverage, book deals and possible parole.

America, please let us stop the insanity of killing our future doctors, lawyers, scientists, philosophers, teachers, engineers and ordinary people while elevating the vilest people in America to offices of great honor and respect.

Let us remember God’s sixth commandment, “Thou shall not kill,” by giving murders and terrorists swift justice, while extolling Reason and giving innocent babies, in the words of Jefferson, the freedom to have Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

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Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

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