By Dave Andrusko

If you read enough, it's amazing how much relevant collateral stuff you run into. For example, this morning I was reading a couple of  letters to the editor of USA Today criticizing government-run health care. Lo and behold there, across the page, was columnist DeWayne Wickman, writing about "Rev. Jackson's historic runs stand with us, even today."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson

The subject is a tribute paid recently to the Rev. Jesse Jackson on the "25th anniversary of Jackson's 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination." Wickman points out that Jackson's campaign was hardly perfect (he references one of Jackson's most unfortunate slurs), but concludes that in addition to stimulating much greater political participation by African Americans, the doors Jackson opened "made it possible for Obama to achieve Jackson's dream."

I cannot, even today, read about Jackson without wondering what he thinks in his heart of hearts about his "conversion" to the pro-abortion side when he decided to run. It is not just pro-lifers; everybody understands that Jackson made what we consider a pact with the devil, so to speak, by throwing his pro-life convictions overboard in order to be a player in 1984.

I was thinking about going back and re-reading the painfully lame justifications Jackson offered in 1984, but thought better. Instead I re-read an essay he wrote for the January 1977 edition of National Right to Life News.

The headline said it all. "How we respect life is over-riding moral issue." Indeed, it was and it is.

"The question of abortion confronts me in several different ways." Jackson wrote. "First, although I do not profess to be a biologist, I have studied biology and know something about life from the point of view of the natural sciences. Second, I am a minister of the Gospel and therefore feel that abortion has a religious and moral dimension that I must consider. Third, I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor) and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me."

The essay itself runs 1857 words. What an irony (one which I did not notice until today) that it was in 1857 that the Supreme Court issued its infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. It was horrible on any number of grounds but worst of all for concluding that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants--whether they themselves were slaves or freed--could never be citizens of the United States, because they were not protected by the Constitution.

Jackson's essay, by contrast, was inspirational, inclusive, and concludes with a question as searching and telling today as it was when it was written almost 33 years ago. Jackson sets the stage by reminding us that, as a minister of the Gospel, he serves "a forgiving God," and that extends to abortion.

But suppose, he asks, "one is so hard-hearted and so indifferent to life until he assumes that there is nothing for which to be forgiven. What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?

"It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth."

Part One