Christians’ beliefs should be respected

Dear President Barack Obama: Contrary to your articulated beliefs, there is a right to life for every person, which means the inviolability of human life in all its phases. Under your leadership, increasingly serious holes are being torn in this right.

Where abortion is considered a right inherent in human freedom, this means that the freedom of one person is given priority over another's right to life. Where experiments on unborn human beings are demanded in the name of science, the dignity of man is denied and trampled on precisely in those who are most defenseless. It is here that the concepts of freedom and science must be re-examined if we are not to lose the foundations of all law: respect for man and for his dignity.

Under your example has come the freedom to scorn what other people regard as holy. We can be grateful that it is unacceptable for one to permit himself to mock that which is holy to Jews or Muslims. But many have come to view as one of the basic rights of freedom the right to pull down from its pedestal what Christians regard as holy and heap it with ridicule.

Roger W. Smith

Waterloo