On the value of the lives of the single and childless

This is not a post about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but it was prompted by the social media responses I’ve seen about the assassination. I think it goes without saying that even people with terrible views don’t deserve to be murdered. The penalty for being a racist, a misogynist, and a homophobe should be criticism, not death.

That said, I’ve seen far too many posts in my news feed that contain comments like “Even if he said things I don’t agree with, he was a husband and a father, and we need to remember that.”

Why do we need to remember that?

I work in the legal profession, and one thing that infuriates me is that if two otherwise identical people suffer the exact same injury, and one of them has children and the other one doesn’t, the one with children receives more money. The system literally values the first person more. Apparently the self-evident truth that we’re all created equal isn’t so self-evident after all.

Bigotry against the single and the childless is one of the last acceptable bigotries in society. The vilest of racists will still fall all over themselves to explain why whatever they’re saying isn’t racist, because we’ve collectively agreed that racism is repugnant. Sir Patriarch will try to hide his sexism under the veil of “oh, but I just respect women so much” – because we know sexism is evil.

I got blocked in a Mormon feminist Facebook group for saying that single and childless people deserve work/life balance just as much as married people and parents. Jokes about cat ladies are told in polite society, and vile and exclusionary rhetoric about single women comes straight from even the Vice President of the United States.

We pay more in taxes. We stay late at work so you can go to your kid’s soccer games, even though we know nobody will return the favor when we need to leave early. And the thanks we get comes in the form of a thousand little digs about how it’s bad to murder someone because he has kids, leaving the subtle implication that people without kids are therefore murderable.

In the church, this rhetoric goes even further. When single people at church point out how terribly the church treats us, we get placated with “Don’t worry; you’ll get a chance for a spouse after you die.” With the implication that our lives are meaningless now, so hurry up and get to the afterlife where existence will have meaning.

I am a person. I am created in the image of God. And my existence has the same value as any other person. Independently, and regardless of my relationship to other people. If I marry and have children someday, I will not attain any more inherent worth than I already have, because the worth of a human soul is infinite.