LITTLE INNOCENTS (A Civil Rights Song)
(Vin Garbutt)

In Roman days the law outlawed compassion
A word so rarely heard now with the unborn people’s plight,
Misguided ways set hearts ablaze with passion,
And Romans roared as lions gnawed their problems out of sight.
And again not quite so long ago it happened,
The Jewish Race were faced with an extermination plot,
Men swore and slammed the oven door behind them,
‘We’ve the right to prove we’ve the right to choose who’s human and who’s not.’

An unfamiliar freedom now belongs to common man,
It’s hard for us to say ‘No thanks’, we’re told, ‘You can, you can’.
We’ve even won the right that evil rich men always had,
It seems true forbidden fruit is priceless even when it’s bad.
So let’s scrutinise the package deals we’re offered,
Like anti-nuclear, save the whale, abortion on demand,
We may feel we’re so liberal and enlightened,
Like him who to defend his rights did napalm Vietnam.

One time when starving children stole, the law cut off a hand,
In desperation they’d ignore the strict laws of the land.
Oh, you wouldn’t change the law to make it legal for to steal,
No, you’d change the sensibilities of folk to make them feel.
But now those sensibilities are numbing once again,
Society has changed the law but not the hearts of men,
Yet only love and care can ease a troubled mother’s strife,
In a world that bids a doctor use a back street butcher’s knife.

Oh, the unborn child might be ill-treated, he might become a thief,
I’m told he might grow up unloved, might suffer untold grief,
Ah, but I might die of cancer in, say, ten or twenty years,
Would their misguided compassion kill me now to ease my fears?
No, they wouldn’t, ‘cos they’ve met me and society says no,
But the unborn child we’ve never met, his friendships never grown.
Oh, why must we at the friends we’ve never met point nuclear shells?
Oh, destroy the unmet friend, my friends, and we destroy ourselves.
Sure, there’s ifs and buts and possibles but they’re just not good enough,
With lives at stake you just can’t say smooth waters might turn rough.
Such ill-advice turns hearts to ice to freeze a poor girl’s hope,
We must change the world that would kill her child and steal her will to cope.
Oh, I know I’m just a man, I cannot share that mother’s fate,
And though I can’t apologise for Mother Nature’s own dictate,
I have to do my bit, I cannot bear those fascist views,
And I’ll defend the baby boy or baby girl whose death they’d choose.

When Martin Luther King said to the world, ‘I have a dream’,
That ignorance and prejudice would never more be seen,
The world stood up in praise but too few people understood
That colour, creed nor size can change the crimson of your blood.
Still they tell me we’ve the right to remain selfish if we please,
They ask me to respect that point of view and not be blind,
But I see the rights they claim have slaughtered countless Luther Kings,
And in Belfast shot a bullet in an unborn baby’s spine.
Ah, then, they say a foetus isn’t quite a baby,
But a baby isn’t quite a ten-year-old, it’s my belief,
And an adolescent isn’t quite a grown man,
But you just can’t choose to kill a man no matter what relief.
Without the right to life you couldn’t grow to make a choice,
Before you’re born you haven’t got a voice,
And innocents are silenced by good folk who live a lie,
With the might to prove they’ve the right to choose
who’ll live and who will die.
When Hitler changed the word from ‘kill’ to ‘exterminate’ the Jews,
The word was changed but it meant the same,
ANOTHER’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE.

CHORUS
Oh, cruel world, you try to make a beast of honest men,
You hand out rosy spectacles and then
You slaughter little innocents whose own lives can’t defend,
If you’d the right to choose would you do it to Jesus again?
(after last chorus:)
If you’d the right to choose would you end Luther King once again?
If you’d the right to choose would you push Steve Biko again?
If you’d the right to choose would you terminate Jesus again?
Like King Herod of old are we looking for Jesus again?

Source: https://www.topicrecords.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/TSDL428.pdf

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8r1LGmTsL4