In a CNN debate on September 4- the eve of today’s vote on Syria authorization – Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida argued with Republican Congressman Michael Burgess about the need for American intervention in the Syrian civil war. U.S. intervention is being considered because Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad is being suspected of having used chemical weapons on his own people. These people were civilians, and among them were hundreds of young children. The civil war has also created two million refugees, half of whom are children, according to the United Nations, who are calling these million children a “lost generation.”
In a poignant summary of her opinion that U.S. involvement is necessary, the congresswoman said the following:
As a mother, to me, I have an indelible searing imprint on my mind after seeing the pictures of those babies lined up. We have a moral responsibility to respond.
It is an unimaginable tragedy and utter injustice that hundreds of Syrian children appear to have died at the hands of the man who is designated to look out for their welfare. Wasserman Shultz overlooked fundamental flaw in her argument when she observed America’s moral responsibility to respond: Wasserman Shultz has spent her career ensuring that chemical and other forms of death continue to be protected by law and carried out on the babies in her own country.
You see, Wasserman Shultz has an extended track record of voting against the rights of American children by working to further abortion and research rights that endanger and ensure the end of millions of innocent young lives. She has voted in favor of destructive embryonic stem cell research. She has voted against laws that would protect American children by withdrawing government funding from abortion providers. She has worked against protecting young American women from predatory abortion practices by voting “no” on legislation that would restrict interstate abortion availability to minors.
Wasserman Schultz, like any compassionate human being, is appalled by the use of chemical weapons on children. But she has created a false dichotomy by working to ensure that American babies can be killed by the chemical weapon of a saline abortion, in which a woman’s uterus is filled with a saline solution that eats away at the inside and outside of the baby until it is burned to death in utero. Wasserman Schultz also works to ensure that other babies can be killed by the RU-486 chemical abortion, in which the mother ingests a pill that cuts off her baby’s food supply and starves it to death, before ingesting another pill that makes her uterus contract to expel the dead baby into toilet water, to be flushed out of existence. No one gently dresses these fatally-wounded children in white shrouds, lining them up that we may see and mourn for them, and honor their lives. They are flushed, tossed, and ground out of existence.
And yet, the congresswoman rallies for America to go to the aid of a country that is suspected of using chemical weapons on a much smaller scale than that of America’s chemical abortion practice. Human morality demands action in the face of injustice. It also demands consistency in these actions: there are unconnected dots in the congresswoman’s argument that America should rally to aid Syria while simultaneously continuing to snuff out the lives of its own children.
