April 5, 2021
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The “Trump-era” human rights policy had, under former Sec. Mike Pompeo, tried to prioritize human rights in line with U.S. founding principles, including religious freedoms.
Blinken said, “All people are entitled to [human] rights, no matter where they are born, what they believe, whom they love, or any other characteristic. Human rights are also co-equal; there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.” He also stated that the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices would include “addendums added later in the year” that provide information about “maternal mortality, discrimination against women in accessing sexual and reproductive health care, and government policies about access to contraception and healthcare during pregnancy and childbirth.”
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken makes it obvious why we need good philosophy in age where public policy is so often used to justify some of the worst of evils,” said Dr. Bernard James Mauser, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES, www.ses.edu). “Blinken justifies the administration’s decision to support what is deemed a woman’s right to choose both nationally and internationally. As he discusses rights, he fails to recognize that certain rights are limited when they harm another.
“Just as a mother does not have the right to kill her toddler, so too a woman should not have the right to kill her unborn child, as this assumes the unborn is not a valuable human. We all know if a child asks, ‘Daddy, can I kill this?’ and you don’t know what they are referring to, then you better check out what it is they are asking to kill. If it is a mosquito, kill it. If it is your brother, no way!
“Science tells us the unborn are human from conception, confirmed in every embryology textbook. They are valuable regardless of their size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency. Each of these is irrelevant in deciding whether a human is valuable. The policy that Blinken endorses uses government funds to pay for large-scale murder of the most vulnerable among us, our unborn. This is morally repugnant and philosophically untenable given even a little reflection about basic science, philosophy, and ethics.”
In 2019, Pompeo established the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which reviewed the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy. The commission came at a time when growing concern from conservatives regarding the “talk of human rights at home and abroad was less about fundamental rights and more about certain economic or social rights.”
In May 2021, Dr. Mauser will be teaching a Certificate in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) at SES. The course is an introduction to the philosophical concepts behind modern government and economics. SES will be specifically examining the American experience, the debates between different schools of economic thought, and the consequences. This course attempts to blend aspects of Thomistic natural law ethics with Austrian economics. The survey of different matters related to the founding of America and the explanation of how policy decisions make a difference in the real world will be unpacked in the time spent in this class.
SES offers the 15-hour Certificate in PPE.The PPE can also be used as a concentration within most master’s degrees (excluding Master of Arts in Religion). SES believes that one must minister to the present generation according to its needs, and to do so with truth and power, its students need training in the ethical, political, and economic implications of the unchanging Faith “once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). This combination of PPE training and classical seminary education can be a potent one in combating the new heresies and false doctrines rooted in a secularist, progressivist worldview.
For more information on SES, visit its website at www.ses.edu or its Facebook page, follow the SES Twitter feed, @sesapologetics, or call (704) 847-5600.
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To interview Dr. Bernard James Mauser of Southern Evangelical Seminary, contact Hamilton Strategies, Media@HamiltonStrategies.com, Jeff Tolson, 610.584.1096, ext. 108, or ext. 102.
