Category: Political Matters

Diluting the pro-life message

I think I appreciate the interconnectedness of things as much as anyone. People’s commitments (or values, or whatever you want to call them) tend to come in clusters or constellations if only because people try to live by coherent philosophies (or ideologies, if you prefer).

I long puzzled that the pro-life position was predominately “conservative,” while conservatives simultaneously tended to favor capital punishment and imperial wars. I’m not trying to make a hackneyed point about hypocrisy; I really found it puzzling, because, in the immortal words of Sesame Street, “one of these things was (at least superficially) not like the others.” I had some trouble discerning the coherent philosophy behind such a mixed bag of views. I now suspect that it involved credulity about (a) the guilt of all convicts on death row and (b) the legitimacy of some pretty flimsy causa belli.

And why couldn’t liberals, with their vaunted care for justice, see the injustice of abortion? I’m still not positive, but I think it’s because they have made celebration of the sexual revolution so central a part of their ideology (or philosophy, if you prefer).

I long for the day when abortion will not be a partisan issue because both parties will be pro-life.

And because I long for that day, I resent it when an entire conservative agenda, including some of the dumber talking points, is crammed into an ostensibly pro-life publication — resenting it if only because it is a conversation stopper and increases the likelihood that abortion will remain highly partisan. The GOP has been trying to make the pro-life cause its wholly-owned subsidiary, giving darned little in return, for a good 30 year now, and I hate to see the cause succumbing.

Exhibit A: a recent mailer from Indiana Right to Life. James Bopp, Jr., GOP activist (with a long and distinguished pro-life record as well) editorialized in a “Freedom Manifesto” that occupied one quarter of the mailer. Examples:

  • “President Obama is pursuing a socialist agenda based on … equality of outcomes.”
  • “Mr. Obama’s vision of radical equality … transform[s] our country into a socialist state, where all life’s decisions are subject to control …..”
  • “Taking over the auto and banking industries was only the start of the country’s most audacious power grab.”
  • “Gun control … is about equating law-abiding gun owners with criminals.”
  • “Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is based on moral equivalence and multiculturalism, denying American exceptionalism.”
  • And finally, “This fight is between freedom and a new evil empire of tyranny – previously the Soviet Union, but now it is our own government.”

Forget for a moment how shrill and “on script” some of this is. Why is it in an Indiana Right to Life publication?

I’ll give Bopp credit for not giving the GOP a free pass. He didn’t. He said they were “on probation.”

But why probation? Because Orrin Hatch and others folded on stem-cell research? No. Because it tolerated pro-abortion Republicans like Arlen Specter? No (unless “liberal” is now code for “pro-abortion”). Rather:

[T]he party compromised its position as the champion of conservative values when its “no-new-tax” pledge was abandoned; when elected Republicans failed to stop excessive government spending, earmarks and deficits, and then proposed bailouts; when the party spent millions supporting liberal Republicans in primary and general elections who then switched parties and or endorsed Democrats; and finally when the party nominated for president the media’s favorite Republican, who then voted for a trillion-dollar government bailout. [Bopp supported, by the way, Mitt Romney — a vehement position I never figured out.]

And how can the GOP get off probation?

The Republican Party can reclaim its leadership by recognizing that it is – the party of conservative principles and policies and thus the party of freedom, prosperity and security. But deeds must match words.
A united congressional Republican opposition to Mr. Obama’s socialist agenda is a critical step.
Also key is putting the Republican Party’s money where its mouth is, by engaging in aggressive lobbying against Mr. Obama’s entire socialist agenda, and by making available the party’s financial support to only bona-fide conservative candidates.
And finally, the party should never again remain silent when Republican public officials betray the trust of the American people by abandoning their conservative principles or engaging in unethical conduct. The Republican Party must recognize that it, too, will be held accountable.

Only one brief mention of abortion in the whole Manifesto. No mention of euthanasia. No mention of stem-cell research. Just lots of “power grab” and “socialist” and sundry other horribles.

Did I mention that this was an Indiana Right to Life publication? Doesn’t this kind of ideology dilute the pro-life message as surely as incorporating it into the “seamless web” so beloved of Catholic “social justice” folks? Or even more?

Exhibit B: Indiana Right To Life Political Action Committee announced a few months ago a blanket policy of endorsing no Democrats because, in essence, party pressure makes pro-life Democrats fold. I can defend that decision on its own, but then a few months later we get this “Freedom Manifesto.”

Virtually every Sunday, we sing from the Psalms “Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth. On that very day his plans perish.” I’m not very trustful of interest groups, either, and nothing about this newsletter raised my trust in the judgment of IRTL.

Am I nuts to say this? Am I just being petulant? No, this sort of thing is a pretty settled conviction with me these days. See here and here.

The Biggest Earmark is Empire

Second of two links this morning, posted this time because I totally agree with the point of this video. Maybe I should make that “totally agree with what I (perhaps) deconstruct this video to intend.”

What this video means to me (he wrote, self-mockingly) is that Empire must be “on the table.” Our efforts to police the world are hugely expensive, and the rationales uttered publicly are so hubristic that one must question the sanity of the utterers. I strongly suspect something that the video didn’t seem to suggest: the world might hate us less if we weren’t so full our vaunted exceptionalism and indispensability.

Right diagnosis, wrong prescription

I often like Dennis Prager’s syndicated columns, and there’s some things to like about a recent one titled “The World is a Cruel Place and if America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler.”

Prager first, and pretty fairly, defends Christianity against today’s common calumnies. Then he realistically rehearses the woes of much of the world today, including the oddity that Russia, while remaining fiercely Orthodox in many ways, nevertheless lost its moral compass during 70 years of Communist tyranny and hasn’t regained it, functioning today as a nihilistic thugocracy.

Then he proposes that Lincoln’s America — “The Last Best Hope of Earth” — is the balm for the world’s woes — if only we can get the left out of power,  because the left thinks of America in post-Christian, Christendom-hating ways that render America impotent.

But there’s an odd asymmetry to that argument. It seems to presume that if we only get rid of left-leaning leaders, America will resume its role as the modern realization of Christendom rather than another nation rapidly becoming post-Christian. Although we’re lagging Europe in explicit secularization, we are implicitly secular right down to the pews of most Churches (see here for a long and evocative essay by Father Stephen, and here for a shorter piece explaining that “The default position of America is secular protestantism”).

Our foreign policy as carried out by both parties promotes our imperial goals, not Christianity, and muscular Krustian foreign policy will only make us more odious in the eyes of the world.

Sorry, Dennis: I’m not sure even you believe this one. If you want to make a case for voting out the Democrats and voting in Republicans, you’ll need to do better.

Is abortion the seed or the flower of Culture Wars?

The buzz about the new book Red Families, Blue Families continues with a conservative columnist I greatly respect, Maggie Gallagher.

Maggie, author of The Abolition of Marriage and a tireless advocate of traditional western marriage, thinks the culture wars start with different views about abortion and those different views ramify in earlier marriage versus later, out-of-wedlock birth rates, etc., rather than the latter ending in controversy over abortion (the quintessential Culture War issue).

It would be interesting in this regard to test how much the “red state, blue state” differences were shaping up before Roe v. Wade, and (if reliable data is available – very unlikely), how the blue states and red states stacked up on abortion rates, legal and illegal, before the Supreme Court basically gave us one, utterly permissive national abortion law.

Tactical shift coming in Supreme Court confirmation fight?

Since Roe v. Wade was imposed on us by the Supremes 37 years ago, there has been a pervasive “abortion distortion factor”:

The “Abortion distortion factor” is that phenomenon whereby when established rules of law encounter the abortion right, the established rule is bent to accomodate the abortion right.

(Bopp, James, in A Passion for Justice – A Pro-life Review of 1987 and a Look ahead to 1988, at page 80) That factor has been huge in most Supreme Court appointment battles since 1980 – generally couched in code words and litmus tests that fooled no observant observer.

The successor for Justice Stevens may face a significantly different constellation of questions, centering on “Obamacare” partly because that issue works to the benefit of the Republicans though so pervasive is the Abortion Distortion Factor that it won’t be entirely out of play:

Another set of questions could prove embarrassing for Democrats who have lauded Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade for creating a right to privacy that includes contraception and abortion. “How can the freedom to make such choices with your doctor be protected and not freedom to choose a hip replacement or a Caesarean section?” asks former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey in The Wall Street Journal. “Either your body is protected from government interference or it’s not.”

McCaughey also notes that in 2006 the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon ruled that the federal government couldn’t set standards for doctors to administer lethal drugs to terminally ill patients under Oregon’s death with dignity act. So does the Constitution empower the feds to regulate non-lethal drugs in contravention of other state laws?

Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago, when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.