America’s Moral Foundation

[Geee]

Free Beacon:

The Civil War was a turning point in the moral history of the United States. Previously the country had tolerated slavery, a direct affront to the founding proposition, contained in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The Civil War purged this moral blight from the country by ending the enslavement of some men by others.

 

But the blight may have reappeared. As Justin Buckley Dyer shows in Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2013), disturbing parallels exist between the debate over slavery before the Civil War and the debate over abortion now.

 

Dyer, an assistant professor in political science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, begins his book by observing that both proponents and opponents of abortion invoke America’s legacy of slavery to bolster their arguments. This invocation often takes place in a politically heated environment, however, and Dyer sets out to examine the analogy with scholarly rigor. The result is a short, but dense and challenging book.