By Dan Miller, Spritual Reflections

On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. This occasion will not mark the death of racism in our land. It will, however, betoken a crucial stage in the sluggish uprooting of racism’s influence upon this nation.

It is no small matter that the majority of voting Americans in the recent election resolved to appoint an African American to the highest office in the land — arguably to the most powerful governmental post on the planet. This marks a ground-breaking stride toward an America in which one’s abilities and opportunities are wholly disentangled from one’s skin pigment — toward an America in which citizens of every class and ethnicity share equal status.

Dan Miller

On a visit to the east coast just days before Obama’s victory, I visited two museums. Each of these museums preserves the viewpoint of one-time purveyors of a societal vision that hinged on the perceived inferiority of a specific class of people. The Gettysburg Museum in Pennsylvania and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. each immortalizes the convictions of sincere intellectuals who sought to benefit one segment of society by oppressing another.

Alexander H. Stevens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, declared that the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy “rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” In the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1858, Sen. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina proclaimed: “Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race.” Countering such sentiments, Abraham Lincoln declared in a debate at Galesburg, Ill. (Oct. 7, 1858): “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil …” In a letter to Albert Hodges, Lincoln wrote: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

These are two radically distinct positions, both vehemently held and publically debated by sincere Americans. Mercifully, the viewpoint that eventually prevailed insisted that suppressing one class of people to protect the status of another was not only evil, but degraded the protected class — a thesis Booker T. Washington ably champions in his autobiography, “Up from Slavery”). The presidency of Obama rides on the wings of this achievement.

A similar ideological battle is put on vivid display in the Holocaust Museum. Walking through this museum is a sobering exercise. The emotional impact of witnessing the horrors of suppressing a purportedly inferior race for the benefit of a supposedly superior race is nearly overwhelming. And the incessant assault of heart-wrenching pictures and relics produces no more angst than does the vivid quotations of sincere intellectuals preaching the inferiority of Semitic people. Mercifully, the viewpoint that prevailed denounced the suppression of Semites in order to protect the status of Arians as a social evil that degraded and dehumanized both ethnicities. The presidency of Obama rides on the wings of this philosophical triumph.

Yet despite the triumph of an African American serving this country as president, a strange irony overshadows this historic moment. Ironically, faint echoes of Southern gentlemen clamoring for the oppression of the “negro race” and echoes of Nazi philosophers justifying the slaughter of Jews can be heard as Obama labors to elevate the status of fertile women by dehumanizing unborn children and stripping them of every right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

No one should dismiss the severe trial of a woman who has experienced an unwanted pregnancy. Yet such women (exempting the fringe cases of pregnancy due to rape and mother-endangering pregnancies) have freely chosen to engage in unprotected sex and freely chosen against adoption. Nevertheless Obama denies all rights to the unborn — even to those who have attained viability.

I rejoice in what Obama’s election potentially means for racial reconciliation and equality in this land. What influence he could wield were he ever to realize the hypocrisy of riding a philosophical vision of humanity into the Oval Office as an African American, while denying justice to another class of oppressed people. Obama takes office in a land deeply divided over the rights of the unborn, as President Lincoln took office in a land deeply divided over the rights of African slaves. I pray for the day when Obama’s oppressive policies toward the unborn sound as barbaric and archaic as Alexander H. Stevens’ comments regarding slaves sound to us today.

Slavery is dead. The Holocaust is over. I pray for the day Roe vs. Wade joins these failed ideologies on the trash heap of worldviews predicated on oppressing one creature made in the image of God so as to endow another with superior status. God hasten the day when Lincoln’s view of slavery is predominantly applied to this next frontier of human rights: “If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

(Dan Miller is pastor at Eden Baptist Church in Savage and is one of several area pastors who contribute regularly to Spiritual Reflections. This column is one of several opinion and commentary pieces appearing regularly in this newspaper.)