Here in the "Great State of Oklahoma" we are supposedly at the heart of the "Bible Belt."  We have traditionally been a red state upholding Christian values and standards.  In the past I have been under the belief that Oklahoma would never elect a Democrat as governor and that Oklahoma would never, ever support abortion if it could help it.  Well, if we're at the heart of the "Bible Belt" now, the country has its pants around its ankles.  Our state legislators took the opportunity passed down by the Supreme Court ruling on partial birth abortions by passing legislation making the act illegal in our state.  It passed both the State House and Senate and was placed on Brad Henry's desk where he promptly vetoed the bill.  He made the statement that the language did not make exemptions for rape, incest or fatal birth defects.  This is the same old pro-abortion, pro-death arguments that are used time and time again to garner sympathy for the visible mother.  We do not draw the picture of a baby's body being delivered to the head and then brutally killed by a "Doctor" who inserts an instrument  into the baby's skull and sucks out his/her brains.  Brad Henry needs to be educated on exactly how many reported rape cases result in pregnancy, less than 1%.  He needs to be educated as to how many mothers actually abort their children in the case of rape, even fewer, the assumption is that all women who suffer the crime want to kill the child.  The statistics are even lower among incest cases.  Brad Henry should also be humbled to the fact that he and others with his opinion are not God and do not have the right to decide when a "defective" baby is to be killed in the womb.  Some of the most amazing people have lived short lives, but these same people have been known to make a more significant impact than even Brad Henry could make in his own lifetime or even in the current position that he occupies.  Are we to say what God has planned for that PERSON whom the government has deemed moral to rip from a mother's womb and destroy? 

There have been other cultures in our past that have devalued human life in such a manner.  In Leviticus 20:2 God tells His people that anyone who gives his children to Molech is to be put to death, the people in the community are to stone him.  Molech was a god of the Ammonites in which these people would sacrifice their live children in ovens, burning them alive to appease this detestable, false god.  Other societies have followed suit with the Ammonites, a similar god, Moloch, was worshiped by Carthaginians.  This was a highly civilized culture who would roast their children alive in the same manner as the followers of Molech and Baal.  Does it make it anymore palatable that we can have a procedure done in the privacy of a doctor's office instead of before worshipers?  At least the cultures of old had the common decency to wait for the baby to be born before brutalizing it.  We live in a decadent age of narcissistic adolescents.  As G.K. Chesterton so profoundly stated in his book, The Everlasting Man, "For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children."