“America now has both the pope and the antichrist,” stated a meme posted by a person who also posted another saying, “Trump is a POS, second only to Hitler.” Is Trump gassing Jews? Does Trump espouse a Bible-despising worldview like the Nazis did?

It wasn’t long ago when I walked through a hallway plastered with malicious remarks and nasty caricatures, which included the devil masked as a man whose speeches were regarded as nothing but “lumps of imbecility, buffoonery and vulgar malignity.”

Ridiculed as “the weakest man who had ever been elected … vain sterile, [and] hypocritical,” he was likened to a monkey and depicted as Nero fiddling away with America burning up, heading toward “national suicide.”Missing from the vilification was the Hitler label. He wasn’t around yet.

These verbal attacks were all directed at President Abraham Lincoln. The hallway was part of the Lincoln museum in Springfield. Ill.

Did Lincoln burn Christians like torches at garden parties like Nero did in Rome? Did Lincoln have a pagan worldview like Nero? As irrational criticisms at Lincoln went over the top then, are we watching a repeat reel of history?

In another section of the museum, a life-size scene portrayed the sale of a slave. As the slave auctioneer closed the deal, a mother sold and separated from her traumatized young son captured the horror of the evil once legal in America. I thought to myself “How could any man condone and participate in such evil? What person with any common sense could justify it legally, let alone morally?

A quote by Lincoln came to me when he said, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to have it tried on him.”

As hideous as that evil was, an evil worse hit me between the eyes: abortion. Children aren’t just separated from their mothers like the slave auction separated the horrified son from his mother. The children of abortion are eliminated, many of whom – like whips on a slave’s back, feel the tortuous pain mercilessly inflicted on them by cold-hearted individuals and organizations enriching themselves through the abortion-government complex. What human with any heart condones, justifies and participates in the slaughter of defenseless innocent human life by the millions?

To mimic Lincoln’s statement: whenever I hear anyone argue for abortion, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him.

How do you think Gov. Kathy Hochul who is Roman Catholic or Latitia James who is a Baptist would respond to a Lincoln-esque statement like that? It’s not so much the pagans who are the problem but those who are paganized and politicized at the expense of true faith who manifest in modern times the deranged ethics of slavery relegating unborn children to a piece of property like slaves were under Dred Scott.

Obsessed with Trump, the person constantly posting unhinged memes like the two above put one up showing the Statue of Liberty convulsively sobbing over the 2024 election. The interpretation for the statue’s sobs was grossly off base. Far outpacing the numbers of valiant American soldiers killed in war for the sake of freedom, the fatal cruelty of subjecting tens of millions of nameless infants to abortion is deceitfully justified in the name of freedom. The statue grieves over liberty being exploited for evil purposes.

As slavery was then, abortion remains the moral issue of our day.

The Rev. Mel McGinnis is a Frewsburg resident.