Ken Ham: Ritual Child Sacrifice Taking Place In America, ‘Hitler Pales In Comparison’
According to the Creation Museum’s Ken Ham, ritual child sacrifice is taking place in America, with thousands of children per day being murdered. He goes on to explain that these children are being killed in the name of a widely worshiped god, and to compare the destruction to the Holocaust.
If these particular talking points sound familiar to you, you may have already guessed what Ken Ham is talking about: abortion.
He’s far from the first conservative to compare abortion to the murder of millions by the Nazi regime. As far as that goes, Ham is one voice in a large crowd. Two members of the Duggar family (reality TV stars) were criticized for the same assertion last year — Ben Seewald and his wife, Jessa.
In 2013, RHRealityCheck even reported on a group of protesters, who took their protests to a Holocaust museum, because they, like Ham, were relying on an assertion that abortion and the Holocaust were comparable.
Ken Ham took his argument a step beyond, though, not only comparing abortion to the acts perpetrated under Adolf Hitlers rule, but actually pronouncing a conclusion that the Holocaust was less monstrous than legalized abortion in America. (How often does one actually make a comparison and find Hitler the favorable of the two atrocities in question?)
“In America alone there is so much child sacrifice that it makes what Hitler did during the Holocaust pale by comparison.”
Ham loves to insist that secularism (literally, the belief that religion shouldn’t be a part of government, according to Merriam-Webster) is, itself, a religion. He says it’s the religion in which school children are daily indoctrinated, and the only religion that legislators aren’t trying to kick out of schools.
In the same vein, Ham’s assertion about abortion as ritual human sacrifice includes the claim of a secular god — the god, he says, “of self.”
Now, to whom are these children today being sacrificed? To the god of self!
So far, Ken Ham has asserted that abortion is more brutal than the Holocaust, and that it is a ritual sacrifice to a secular god. He isn’t done.
He goes on to suggest that President Obama has called on this purported secular god to bless Planned Parenthood for all of this ritual sacrifice.
“As [Obama] says “God bless you,” he cannot be talking about the God of the Bible. No, the only god he can be referring to is the god of self! Is he not in reality saying, ‘may the god of self bless you for sacrificing so many children’?”
Ham closes by warning that abortion is one step on the “slippery slope” of immorality, and that euthanasia is assuredly next.
Abortion is, of course, a hot topic at all times, and has been especially contentious of late, with the release by a conservative group of a number of edited videos and the claims that Planned Parenthood is selling parts of unborn babies. (The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform could find no evidence the organization had broken any laws.)
One thing in Ken Ham’s post has some support from statistics, though: his numbers. When he says that “thousands” of abortions are performed daily, his numbers do technically reflect the CDC statistics….sort of.
The CDC reports 730,322 legal abortions in 2011, which averages out to almost exactly 2000 per day. Thus, “thousands per day” is at least not a mathematical or statistical fiction. This number includes the termination of nonviable pregnancies, such as those in which implantation occurred outside the womb.
However, despite Ham’s insistence that abortion is permitted up to the moment of birth, more than 90 percent of these abortions occurred before 13 weeks gestation, and only about a tenth of a percent took place after 21 weeks gestation. Furthermore, the Guttmacher Institute’s survey of state laws (PDF) negates Ham’s suggestion that an abortion can be obtained at any point in pregnancy — almost every U.S. state has passed laws preventing abortion after a certain point, ranging from fetal viability to 24 weeks.
One more key detail on Ken Ham’s “ritual child sacrifice” from the CDC’s numbers — that “thousands per day” figure for 2011 is the lowest number the U.S. has seen reported in the decade covered in the report, and part of an overall downward trend.
[Photo by Mark Lyons/Getty Images]
