I wish Sarah Palin’s youngest son Trig — afflicted with Down’s Syndrome — the best life possible to him. Yet based on my experience working with a man with Down’s Syndrome in a high school job at a movie theater, I regard his life as inherently tragic and likely quite miserable. I also wholeheartedly support the vast majority of women who choose to abort a Down’s Syndrome fetus rather than saddle themselves with a perpetually dependent child.

Most of all, however, I’m disgusted by the the worship of retardation exhibited by Christians in response to Trig’s rise to national prominence, as in this National Review article by Michael Franc:

“Children with special needs,” Gov. Sarah Palin said during her acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “inspire a special love.” As someone who grew up alongside a brother with Down Syndrome, I can attest to that observation.

But these special children, and the special adults they grow up to be, inspire something else of equal importance. When these little, unexpected ambassadors of God enter our lives, they offer us the opportunity to rise to that greatest of all challenges — to treat others as we would want to be treated. Their presence, in short, elevates all of us.

That’s a good expression of the mind-set of so many of today’s devout Christians. They are not content to limit reason to make room for faith. They go further: they laud retardation as a virtue. In the process, they must — and do — disparage normal human intelligence as a vice.

Such people are not motivated by a soft heart. If they were, they would adamantly defend abortion as a moral means of freeing parents from the prospect of endless sacrifice to a retarded child. They would regard abortion as a moral way to prevent the infliction of a miserable, degraded life on the person that will emerge from the womb. Instead, they want to create more mentally defective and perpetually dependent children by outlawing abortion.

The people who worship retardation reject human reason as a value. They’re as anti-man as the deep ecologists who regard mankind as a cancer on the earth.

Frankly, one wonders why such people don’t lobotomize themselves, if retardation is such a boon to their fellow man.

(Via Thomas.)