I live in the country, near a small city. Some people, out where I live, sleep with the windows open and night and don’t bother locking the doors when they go for a walk. But not far from here, just a few days ago, a high-school student and three accomplices robbed a man at gunpoint, took him to a nearby lake, shot him in the back of the head, and left his body there on the beach. Just another senseless act of violence. You can probably find one very much like it in your local paper.

It would have been just another mysterious homicide except for what followed. The killer took a friend or two from school out to the lake to show them the body. These friends told other friends, who then went out to see the body, and so on. In all, over a dozen students had seen the body, and many more at the school had heard the story of the killing. Yet, not one reported it to the authorities—until one anguished student who had heard the tale reported it—four days later.

What’s wrong with this picture? The school district has a good reputation. It’s not a bad community, at all. But the local prosecutor said this, It is stunning that we have a society so deviant that people would treat a body like a tourist attraction. I know that some will argue that allowing millions of abortions in this country has so cheapened life that these kids didn’t really think of this man as a life. But abortion laws didn’t cause this. They are another symptom of the same disease. So what brought us to this coarsening of our attitude towards human life?