Barack Obama: Neo-Spartan

If there’s one thing every person who’s ever heard of the Spartan’s remembers about them, it’s their heavy reliance on infanticide:

When a Spartan baby was born, soldiers came to the house and examined it carefully to determine its strength.The baby was bathed in wine rather than water, to see its reaction. If a baby was weak, the Spartans exposed it on the hillside or took it away to become a slave (helot). Infanticide was common in ancient cultures, but the Spartans were particularly picky about their children. It was not just a matter of the family, the city-state decided the fate of the child.

What’s emerging is that Barack Obama — this “new” kind of politician — would have been completely at home with this ancient practice:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIdbYjmbFzo[/youtube]

I have just a couple of comments.  As I always say, I am not a hardcore pro-Life person.  I can envision situations in which abortion is acceptable.  My position on abortion, however, is completely irrelevant, since what Stanek describes is not abortionit’s murder.  This is the death of a living being that is no longer connected to the woman. As Stanek said, even NARAL didn’t pretend to defend this practice.

The other thing you need to keep in mind as you think about Obama’s resolute defense of a barbaric practice that was even seen as anomalous in the ancient world (since most of the cultures surrounding Sparta were revolted by its habitual infanticide) is that Obama already had children when he voted against the Act.  That is, he didn’t have the defense that infants were abstractions to him.  I know that my views about abortion changed fairly drastically when a fetus morphed from being a political abstraction into being the little lives carried in my own body that emerged to become my children.  Obama seems to believe that his live-birth children deserve love and care, but that other, defective children don’t — again bringing him in line with Sparta.

Obama isn’t a new kind of politician.  His kind of politics has its roots thousands of years ago, and is as distasteful now as it was then.

Hat tip:  American Thinker