If the Gosnell and Castro sagas teach us anything, and there are lessons to be learned, please let us remember that the lives of human beings are hanging in the balance of what comes next.

In a letter from the Apostle Paul, the Bible tells us this:

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.”

It’s the interests of those who are unwanted, unseen, and forgotten that we must learn to look out for. It’s the command to love our neighbors as we love ourselves that we must learn to obey.

Agape Love can ultimately redeem America and restore life. We just have to get past human depravity, such as has been depicted with Gosnell and Castro. Through their horrible and heinous deeds, we learn that humankind’s deprived nature is saturated in selfishness.

Selfishness blocks out love. It causes people to serve their own desires without consideration for others. It causes people to see others not as equals, but as useful pawns or obstacles to be eliminated.

A look at this week’s news tells us that mankind is capable of all kinds of rationalizations for treating others as less than human.

Castro is accused of using his fists to abort his own children. Gosnell ripped and snipped away the lives of thousands of babies, and even caused unspeakable pain and in some cases death to women.

These men not only regarded women as disposable chattel, and in Castro as his slaves; they also dehumanized their victims in unimaginable ways. One child Castro allowed to grow up bound in a dungeon; his other babies he killed by beating their mother and causing miscarriages.

America is being challenged to learn that situations like abortion and human trafficking are all part of a greater over-arching problem that’s been plaguing our world since the beginning of time – our selfish tendency to dehumanize those whose humanity is in the way of what we want.

In my lifetime, I have seen how our culture embraces dehumanization in various forms. I see very plainly that there are common threads in these manifestations.

When I was growing up, some of my schoolmates were killed by a bomb blast. Some white folk thought that people like me and my friends were somehow less than fully human.

My house was firebombed because my daddy worked for the basic human rights that were denied to people because of the color of their skin. My daddy, the Reverend A.D. King, later died under very suspicious circumstances – and many believe he died because of his civil rights leadership.

My uncle, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated because he refused to accept the dehumanization of African Americans.

Countless others were beaten with pipes and baseball bats, fire hosed, jailed, and lynched just for the color of their skin.

African Americans were regarded as inferior because we had been treated as less than human for hundreds of years.

When you’re treated as less than human, it’s easy to appear that way in people’s eyes. If people see you being abused for decade after decade, your mistreatment becomes, in a sense, the natural order of things.

All of this makes human mistreatment somehow palatable if not acceptable; and thereby the lives of those who oppress the most vulnerable easier. If the American public learns to accept everyone from natural conception or fertilization to natural death as brothers and sisters, the exploitation of all human beings would become much more difficult to justify.

Those who exploit and oppress fellow human beings under the cloak of racism, reproductive genocide or human trafficking are motivated by selfishness, greed, hunger for power, and the plain old bigotry that comes from pride and fear. All too many people take cover in denial that these problems exist, not wanting to look or care. Out of sight, out of mind is a much too familiar mantra.

Friends, we are dealing with a three headed monster; one that devours the weakest of our society. The thing about such a beast is that you must sever its source of power by eliminating all three heads; racism, reproductive genocide which breeds abortion and sexual perversion which breeds human trafficking. Cut off the heads and the monster will die.

One of the defining moments of the Civil Rights movement came when national newspapers and magazines showed pictures of peaceful demonstrators being clubbed and beaten. For the first time for many white people, racial discrimination and oppression were not just concepts. Americans in every part of the country saw segregation as the dehumanizing force that it was.

They saw the faces of its victims.

Surely the Kermit Gosnell trial, which is a tip of the iceberg by the way, is a defining moment in the 21st Century civil rights movement to defend the humanity of unborn babies and the dignity of their mothers. Because Gosnell did his killing outside the womb instead of inside it, America, at least that part of America that has seen news reports about the Gosnell case, has now seen some of the victims of abortion.

The rescue of the three girls in Cleveland who just escaped their prison of depravity is another tip of the iceberg situation, reminding America that young and vulnerable women are at risk of being secreted away in broad daylight to become abused and misused in a form of human trafficking in their own communities. This too is a defining moment where we can charge ahead with awareness campaigns to stop this inhumane victimization.

We cannot save the victims of abortion or human trafficking or prevent innocents from becoming new victims of other nefarious deeds without public awareness. Public awareness only happens if the public cares. And the public will only care when it loves the unwanted.

With love, children are adopted, not aborted. With love, children are cherished, not abused. With love, there is less room for the human trafficker because his hunting grounds are smaller.

There is much to be done to set the captives of human trafficking free. But if we can help create a culture that values others, we will have begun to break the captives’ chains. We must learn this lesson, then we will win this battle to redeem America using the weapons of truth and love because truth liberates and love never fails!