I wanted to write this column a few months ago, when a Facebook post by now-President-elect Donald Trump caught my eye.
The Facebook post was about a Trump headquarters location that had been burned by arsonists. The photo was terrible and the alleged crime itself was contemptible.
But what caught my eye was first word of the post: “Animals.”
As in, “Animals representing Hillary Clinton… just firebombed our office…”
I didn’t write this column back in October because I didn’t want to write a political post about Donald Trump or appear to be downplaying the seriousness of the alleged firebombing.
But that word has always stayed somehow in the back of my mind: Animals.
It rang in my ears like a reminder of the language of our culture. How it still, subtly at times, devalues and degrades human life.
I became a pro-life Republican when I was thirteen years old and first held my youngest sister, newly born, in my arms. I was struck with the inherent value of human life, with its precious beauty and vulnerability.
For years after that, in columns and in my work with pro-life advocacy groups, I harped on the sanctity of each human life, from conception to natural death.
I am pro-life because I believe that your value as a person comes from God, and it cannot be taken away from you, no matter what you do or what people do to you.
I have come to realize, after years of political involvement and two years into working in the criminal justice system, that the fight for the sanctity of life is not limited to the abortion debate.
It is a wider, more philosophical fight to recognize the inherent value of our humanness in a culture determined to devalue it.
It can be easy, at times, to stop seeing people as people.
To refer to people who commit crimes as animals. To call someone “a waste of space.” To infer that the death of a drunk driver is one less drunk driver to worry about. Or that a fatal drug overdose was a long time coming.
But the painful paradox is this: When we dehumanize others, we dehumanize ourselves.
If the humanness in those we despise is no longer worth recognizing, what is the value of the humanness in us?
We all choose how we live our lives, and we must face the consequences of our choices, as dire as they may be.
But we don’t get to choose this wonderful truth: that God has invested in each of us an immense and untouchable value, just by making us humans.
This column is not about Donald Trump.
It’s about how we talk about the least of these in our society – whether that be an unborn child, a prisoner convicted of a crime, an illegal immigrant, or simply a person with whom we disagree.
When we call them animals, when we infer they’d be better off dead, when we laugh at the bad things that happen to them, we only succeed in degrading our own humanity.
In his best-selling book Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson wrote that “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
We are more because we are humans, and that alone should be enough.