01/28/2026
How have we arrived at a place where violence is excused or even applauded in our politics? This did not appear out of nowhere. This did not happen overnight. It reflects a long-term shift in how human life is valued, or rather, devalued in our culture.
Mother Teresa warned about this decades ago when she said: “Abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace.” Her point was not only about abortion itself, but about what happens to a society when it decides that some lives are expendable. When life is no longer sacred at its most vulnerable stage, the moral guardrails weaken everywhere else.
Pope John Paul II echoed this concern in a broader way: “A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.” That judgment is not abstract. It shows up in our rhetoric, our humor, and our political discourse. When opponents are dehumanized, when death is joked about, when violence is minimized depending on who the target is, we are seeing the downstream effects of a culture that has disconnected human worth from human existence. Once life becomes negotiable, everything else follows.
For decades, abortion has been framed as a moral good, a social necessity, and even a core political identity. When a society accepts the idea that innocent human life can be intentionally ended for convenience, autonomy, or ideology, it inevitably reshapes how people think about violence more broadly. Once life becomes negotiable, everything else follows.
What’s especially troubling today is how so many political voices on the left side of the political aisle openly dehumanize their opponents. Conservatives are not debated; they are portrayed as evil, subhuman, or deserving of harm. Calls for violence are dismissed as “dark humor,” the murder of a political opponent is justified, and assassination attempts are met with comments expressing disappointment that it wasn’t successful rather than horror. Even when specific individuals are not actually harmed, the willingness to joke about or wish for death reveals how far the culture has drifted.
This is why the normalization of abortion as a moral good matters far beyond the policy itself. It trains people to see life as conditional, dignity as optional, and violence as justifiable when the cause feels righteous. Over time, outrage becomes selective and empathy collapses.
A healthier society comes about by recovering a consistent ethic of life, one that recognizes the inherent value of every human being, regardless of age, ability, or political alignment. When life is defended at its weakest, peace becomes possible everywhere else. A society that wants less violence must first relearn how to value life.
