Discrimination: The Most Hated People Group in America (1 of 3)

Americans are obsessed with identifying discrimination. Race, gender, disability, age, religion, and any number of other classifications are constantly under the media’s microscope, as we carefully and aggressively search for signs of anyone being treated unfairly.

News programs are replete with pundits and politicians debating race relations and injustices in the U.S.

Every year, numerous stories are published about unequal pay for women in the marketplace. Activists cite gender discrimination as the root cause of the reported inequality.

Sex trafficking of minors causes righteous anger in most Americans, who rightly see the vile practice as horrible discrimination against children.

ISIS continues to kill Christians in various countries for no other reason than they follow Christ. The discrimination of ISIS is murderous.

The general definition of the word discrimination simply means to make a distinction. If someone likes the finer things in life, we say they have “discriminating tastes.” They make distinctions between things that are high quality and those that aren’t.

In terms of social justice, the word takes on a harsher, more nefarious meaning.

Discrimination is the treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which the person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit. (Dictionary.com)

Unjust discrimination is rooted in selfishness and conceit, so we must be careful to properly contrast discrimination with healthy, beneficial distinctions or judgments.

We often make distinctions that benefit everyone. Women’s suffrage, for example, was a movement of one people group influencing another for the greater good of all. The American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, and William Wilberforce’s campaign to end slavery are all examples of one group making distinctions to everyone’s benefit, often bringing justice and protection to a persecuted people group.

In recent American history, discrimination has carried a negative connotation where one people group uses or abuses another people group for their own gain or pleasure. Racial discrimination is driven by one race exercising control over another. Gender discrimination is driven by (typically) men attempting to retain their rights or take rights from women. Adults using children for their own twisted, immoral pleasure and financial gain drive the child sex-trafficking industry, an extreme form of child discrimination.

A group who discriminates must, by definition, make a value judgment. One group (the Power Group) determines itself to be more valuable than another (the Victim Group). This is what gives one group the fabricated right to treat the Victim Group as property, for their own purposes or for their convenience.

The more one group devalues another, the worse the treatment and the stronger the negative emotion toward the victimized group.

Men opposed to women’s suffrage devalued women. They viewed women as less informed, less educated, or less intelligent—at least in the political realm. It’s difficult to determine what emotion anti-suffrage men might have felt toward women, but it may have ranged from subtle indifference to dislike.

A person who engages in sex trafficking devalues his victims because he uses them for his own narcissistic pleasure or financial gain. He sees his victims as property.

ISIS hates Christians, and their hatred and discrimination is murderous. This is the extreme—discrimination so severe that it results in the killing of innocent victims.

History is unfortunately replete with grim examples of fatal discrimination—one Power Group completely dehumanizing another, resulting in slavery, attempted genocide, or unjust war. Whether it’s the killing fields of Pol Pot, the tens of millions of dead souls murdered by Communism in the 20th century, or race-driven shootings in cities today, the most grievous form of discrimination results in death.

Once the Power Group reduces the Victim Group’s value to zero, the Victim Group can be used, abused, or killed at will. The hatred is so insidious, so deep, that the Victim Group is no longer equal in their humanity, if they are considered human at all.

Consider the 1857 Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in writing for the majority, remarked:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument….They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. (www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393)

The Supreme Court ruled that blacks had no rights because they were not equal in value to whites. In fact, they weren’t considered to be in the same class of persons.

Of the Jewish people, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

He also wrote, “Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” (Hitler, by Joachim Fest, Vintage Books Edition, 1974, pp. 679–680)

This is the Power Group’s primary weapon—to convince the populace that the Victim Group isn’t equal, that they are worthless, that they aren’t even human.

Sometimes the discrimination isn’t informed, and sometimes the hatred isn’t conscious. Ignorance, misinformation, and malicious social conditioning can heavily contribute to fatal discrimination. There are dozens of articles and books about soldiers inflicting pain, torture, and death on innocent populations for no rational reason. The soldiers succumb to a mob mentality combined with the effective spreading of lies about the victimized population.

Yet even if people in the Power Group kill innocents out of ignorance, fear, or blind faith, underlying hatred drives the killing. That hatred may be originated and instilled by a subset of the Power Group, but their influence and messaging infects the entire populace.

Numbers of victims are instructive here. Even small numbers of victims stir our righteous indignation. Terrorists captured 276 Nigerian schoolgirls a year ago, and the entire world took notice, many decrying this brazen, brutal act of discrimination.

Almost 3,000 innocent Americans lost their lives on 9/11 at the hands of terrorists. These terrorists were so convinced their victims’ lives had no value, they were willing to kill themselves in the terrorist act.

When we try to contemplate 6 million dead Jews at the hands of the Nazis, our minds fail to comprehend the extent of death and destruction. Many agree the Holocaust is the 20th century’s most severe, most tragic form of racial discrimination.

The task of determining which American people group is the victim of the harshest discrimination—and thus the most hated—is a grim one.

But if we look at the sheer number of deaths, the answer is clear: Preborn human beings are, by a ruthlessly wide margin, the most hated people group in America.

An estimated 57 million preborn human beings have been killed in America in just the last 42 years. That’s roughly 1.3 million a year, 108,000 per month, 3,600 per day, or 2.5 human beings per minute.

There is no other victimized people group that even comes close to those numbers.

Join me next week when I conclude my discussion about the extreme discrimination of the preborn in America. And then be on the lookout for a follow-up email inviting you to get involved in our fight to bring justice and liberty for all—including our fellow citizens who have not yet been born.