"Culture of Death" is alive and well.

After 15-year-old Danny Rohrbough was killed in the Columbine High School shooting 7 ½ years ago, he was fondly remembered at his memorial service.


"You know, he might have lived," Grace Presbyterian Church pastor Dwight R. Blackstock told the crowd of more than 1,500 that overflowed the sanctuary and fellowship room and spread to folding chairs outside. "He might have lived if he'd have made a little different choice.

"Yet he chose to stay there and hold the door for others so that they might go out before him and make their way to safety. They made it and Danny didn't."

Blackstock said the 15-year-old's heroic act, "in the last few moments of his life on this Earth, was the kind of thing Jesus holds up as an example to us all. Jesus said, 'Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.'

"That's what Danny did."

Rohrbough was one of the first killed in the rampage, and the boy in the green shirt crumpled on the pavement was the first sure sign of the seriousness of the shooting to a nation watching live television.


On Monday evening Danny’s father, Brian, was asked to be a guest commentator on the CBS Evening News segment “Free Speech.” Mr. Rohrbough spoke frankly of the moral bankruptcy that is occurring in America.


This country is in a moral free-fall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value.

We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.

Suicide has become an acceptable action and has further emboldened these criminals. And we are seeing an epidemic increase in murder-suicide attacks on our children.

Sadly, our schools are not safe. In fact, we now witness that within our schools. Our children have become a target of terrorists from within the United States.


Needless to say, this sent the radical left wingers into absolute frothing-at-mouth hysterics. This is the part I find most curious and borderline amusing. Many in this same crowd chastised those of us who dared take exception to Cindy Sheehan’s anti-American rhetoric after losing her son, Casey, in the Iraq war.

Ever since that tragic event in her life, Mrs. Sheehan has made it her life’s work to continually slander the Bush administration and the United States. From calling the murderous Iraqi insurgents “Freedom Fighters” to saying she would prefer to live under the Hugo Chavez regime as opposed to the George W. Bush presidency, Sheehan herself has created a firestorm of controversy. Yet, according to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, we don’t dare criticize Mrs. Sheehan because “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

There continues to be a debate over whether or not the Iraq war is a just conflict. I would venture to say that many Americans believe it is an unjust war resulting in their perspective that every life lost is a senseless death. While I reject that premise, for the sake of argument I will grant it here.

Can anyone think of a more senseless death than an innocent 15-year-old boy getting shot by two misguided youths? Danny Rohrbough could not even begin to fathom that his decision to attend school one morning would result in his demise. On the other hand, Casey Sheehan had to know that his enlistment in the military could very well result in him seeing combat, possibly resulting in his death.

Upon hearing the absolute frenzy caused by Brian Rohrbough’s comments, I get the feeling he doesn’t have the same “absolute moral authority” that has been granted Cindy Sheehan.

There’s a connection here. Sheehan seems to support the Iraqi insurgency. It is these insurgents who have a tendency to strap explosive devices to infants in an effort to wipe out their opponents. Meanwhile, the folks who are most likely to defend Sheehan’s pro-insurgency stance assuredly took exception to Mr. Rohrbough’s view on abortion.

Once again, the culture of death has made its members known.