Anybody nowadays would be outraged with this kind of morality, yet that is exactly what was going on in 1787 when our representatives met at The Philadelphia Convention to structure and adopt our Constitution. More specifically, for the purposes of counting population in each state our government deemed that each Black slave would be equivalent to 3/5 of a nonslave citizen. This rule became the law of the land in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution on September 17, 1787, and was ratified by all the states current at that time. As terrible as that sounds, being 3/5 of a person may have been a step up since slaves at that time were considered property of their masters, and were not really seen as persons with rights.
It is easy to now look back with revulsion when our society functioned in that manner, but we can lose valuable perspective if we don’t highlight some relevant points. This 3/5 rule was implemented democratically by our elected officials at The Convention, and it was ratified by the legislatures of ALL the states. No dictator forced it upon us. We, The People, through our elected officials, made it the law of the land. The citizens felt it was natural to own slaves. No, these slave masters were not heinous and vicious criminals with no morals. They were not breaking the law by owning Black people—they were normal fathers and mothers who felt it was their right to own Black slaves. At the time it was normal, it was natural, it was an entitlement, it was a right.
So what’s the point? Well, some will say we finally saw the light and we made moral progress in this area so now we do not have slaves and have made great strides in human rights. We learned a moral lesson, some will say! Really? Well, being the cynic that I am I see it differently. The real lesson here is that we did not learn the lesson. Yes, we did away with slavery and we granted Blacks rights including the right to vote. But guess what? A great portion of the American people now have a new target of convenience whose human value they deny: unborn children. Yes, these babies are deemed to be worth less than 3/5 of a person—in fact, they are worth zero. A hamster at a pet shop is worth more than an unborn baby about to be discarded. And because unborn children are the property of the woman who carries them they can be ejected at will and burned in an incinerator. Even our erudite and learned judges sitting high on our U.S. Supreme Court have declared (Roe v. Wade, 1973) that a woman’s rights to her own body includes doing as she pleases with the baby growing within her—her own body is her property, her unborn child is her property. It is easy to see it that way because the unborn child is not considered a person—it has no value as a human being. {I suspect that soon enough some liberal medical entrepreneur will get the idea that not all of the baby’s dismembered cadaver should go into the trashcan; gosh, maybe we can salvage the liver or at least one kidney.} One will notice how natural and ethical it feels to many people to consider an unborn child just a worthless blob—well, an inconvenience for the woman, really. “It’s my body and I can do with it whatever I please. It’s my right!” With no second thoughts doctors routinely will use a powerful vacuum to suck out the brains of the baby in the womb. That way it won’t struggle too much as its tiny limbs are amputated and suctioned out one at a time. About 1 million unborn babies per year are aspirated in pieces from their mother’s womb here in America; 50 million have met that fate since 1973. Kinda makes the 1939-45 Jewish holocaust—at 6 million—seem small by comparison.
So really, we should not feel too superior to the slave-owning Americans of 1787 who conceived of and approved the 3/5 rule codifying the value of Black slaves . It just makes us feel better that we no longer treat Blacks as white Americans did in colonial times, but that is just an ego trip to show how wonderful we really are. Deep inside the bowels of our soul we still have it in us to use and destroy human beings who stand in our way when we search for convenience, power, and self-defined happiness. And we do it with eloquence by defining our despicable behaviors in lofty ethical terms and the “privacy clause” of our Constitution. At one point Blacks legally were not persons, they were property to be used and deployed. Now it is the unborn babies who are not considered human or persons, for they are obnoxious blobs of cells awaiting medical removal, as one would remove an invasive uterine cyst, perhaps. Let’s put it in perspective: dogs, turtle eggs, and lizards have more rights than an unborn baby. Maybe 200 years from now American citizens will look back at us with the same revulsion we currently reserve for slave-owners, and they will find it very hard to understand just how we naturally and willfully assigned a human value of zero to an unborn baby. But, we will still continue to believe in the pervasive and ruinous delusion that our civilization grows ever more moral with each passing generation.
