A Seat at the Table?

Abortions, our liberal friends insist, ought to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Safety is, at best, a comparative term. As for legality, that is firmly established in this country, much to our shame. But rare? Alas, we have one of the highest abortion rates in the world. I bring this up in light of an initiative by the Obama Transition Team to solicit public comment on issues for the new administration. The transition team has set up a website, Change.gov, which allows the public to view policy documents which are being submitted by outside groups and to comment on them.

One of these documents has been submitted by a coalition of left-wing of feminist groups which calls for, among other things, increased access to—and public funding off—abortion and contraceptives. The proposal even goes beyond the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).” All of the usual suspects are have signed the document, Planned Parenthood, Catholics for Free Choice, The Guttmacher Institute, The National Abortion Rights Action League, etc. The proposal goes beyond just calling for federal funds for abortion, but will force private institutions that receive government support, such as colleges and hospitals, to provide abortions even in violation of their own consciences.

I believe that we should all protest this document, and let the Obama administration know the depth of the opposition to such radical pro-abortion policies, policies that would not only commit tax dollars to immoral policies, but which would force private citizens to subsidize abortions from their own funds. It is inconsistent for the left to treat this as a matter of conscience and then outlaw any dissent, which is what this document calls for.

But what should be our response? Obviously, what we would like is that all abortions be banned and all children be cared for. However, this is possible even with a Republican administration. According to a Fox News Poll, only 9% of Republicans consider abortion as an important issue. Indeed, according to a poll done for the Knights of Columbus, 50% of nominal Catholics consider themselves to be pro-abortion. And it is simply unreasonable to think that a Democratic administration would even consider outlawing abortion. Indeed, mild limitations on abortion failed in the last election in the Red State of South Dakota. So even among Republicans in Republican states, there is little chance of getting abortion outlawed.

However the President-elect has promised to be “the president of all the people” and pledged to listen to those who disagree with him even more closely than those who do agree. And while all politicians make similar claims, we should at least take him at his word on this and register both our objections and present alternative policies. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for a considered response to this proposal.

• While most people support limited rights to abortion, almost 84% want some restrictions. This proposal is undemocratic in that it ignores the will of the people by making abortion an unrestricted right.

• This proposal forces the government to fund all abortions, which is bad, but also forces institutions which oppose abortions to violate their own consciences; this is, self-evidently, unconscionable, and a misuse use—a tyrannical misuse—of government power.

• Abortion, whether one supports it or not, should always be considered a tragedy; and as with any tragedy, we should do our best to limit it. Instead, we have one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

• The problem is not a limit in access to contraceptives, as the document claims, since they are freely available, and carry no social stigma.

• If these policy recommendations are put in place, the rate of abortions, already one of the highest rates in the world, will increase. This is contrary to the President-elect's stated policy of reducing abortions.

• The culture of death implied by such a high rate of abortions cheapens life and cheapens the unique role of women; indeed, it is not merely anti-life, it is anti-women. If abortion really is a women's choice, something she can freely refuse, then it is difficult not to put the blame on women entirely if they choose to carry a baby to term. This creates social pressures on women to have abortions were the father does not wish to contribute to support of the children.

• The proper response to a culture of death is a culture of life. At a minimum, this means:

  • All children are welcome in the world

  • Women who find themselves “in a family way” should be supported. Currently, a poor women has a choice between inadequate pre-natal care, expenses that run between $30,000 and $50,000 dollars for carrying a child and delivering it, or a $1,000 operation that relieves them of all of these burdens. Economics alone favor abortion. This should not be.

  • There should be welcoming institutions for children, such as orphanages and adoption agencies. It is a strange phenomenon that we adopt so many children out of China while we abort so many children at home.

This is just my initial reaction. I am sure that the readers of this review can come up with more objections, objections that will be meaningful even to the new administration, and some more positive policy suggestions. What I suggest is that readers go the the “A Seat at the Table” section of Change.gov, review this terrible document, and post their suggestions here so that we can come up with responses that we can all share in drafting our own. I would hope that the transition team gets at least 100,000 responses from pro-life supporters. This would let them know how serious we are about working on this issue, and how much we intend to hold the President-elect to his pledges.

There are those on the left who do oppose abortion, however, they are a distinct minority. Nevertheless, we do agree with the nominal goal of the left that abortions ought to be rare. While this goal may be no more than a publicity stunt, we should hold them to account. While the public does not yet agree with us on outlawing abortion, they do agree with us on restricting abortions, and this we must re-iterate over and over again. Let us take our “seat at the table,” and even do a little table-pounding.

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Remembrance of Things Past

Conservatism is, in large part, about memory; you cannot conserve values if you do not remember them, if you do not remember the time when values where embedded into active and functioning social systems. There are powerful weapons turned against memory these days, including ideologies of “creative destruction” whose main function is to constantly destroy the past and the values associated with the past. But when we destroy the past, we also destroy the future, and that is a process that is becoming painfully apparent today. Politically, both the right and the left have become ideologies of destruction; the right for commercial reasons and the left for cultural (or “multi-cultural”) reasons.

But without remembering our past, we cannot rebuild our future. The memory of the past comes not so much from histories and essays; the main tools of memory were song and story. Today our stories are more likely to be about science fiction, about a future that never arrives, and our songs are not anything we actually sing. Indeed, we don't even share our songs, but listen to them plugged into a tiny box, where no one else can even here them.

R. R. Reno of First Things has brought to our attention some songs that do recover the past, that are worth singing and worth sharing. They are from the English group, Show of Hands. Writes Reno:

The background for the song is the post-Thatcher boom in England that has transformed social patterns. Whatever was left of nineteenth-century industrial society has been swept away. Global agricultural markets have changed farming. The explosive growth of wealth, almost entirely focused in London, has created a large class of the well-to-do. The end result for a great deal of southern England: failing village economies now sustained by money infused by London weekenders, many of whom have bought charming cottages as second homes.

Our free-market friends like to remind us that this is all part of the process of creative destruction. And anyway, aren’t those country folks making their own decisions to sell out and pocket the cash? All good and well, but Show of Hands sings of a different, existential truth: “Redbrick cottage where I was born / Is the empty shell of a holiday home. / Most of year there’s no one there. / The village is dead and they don’t care.” The kitchens have been redone tastefully, but the village empties during the week.

If “Country Life” gives you a Chestertonian tingle, then strap on your seat belt and click over to “Roots.” This song crashes onto the shore of contemporary multiculturalism like a Cornish storm surge.

The major premise of “Roots” is simple: “Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?” The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory. The conclusion: an urgent imperative of cultural renewal that gives this song extraordinary emotional power.

Like last year's hit, Dégénération from the French Canadian group Mes Aïeux, these songs remind of us where we came from and what we have lost. And until we recover our past, we cannot rebuild our future.

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The Culture of (Cyber) Death

John Paul II in Evangelicum Vitae (The Gospel of Life) warned about a growing culture of death, and that

with the new prospects opened up by scientific and technological progress there arises new forms of attacks on the dignity of the human being. At the same time a new cultural climate is developing and taking hold, which gives crimes against life a new and--if possible--even more sinister character.

The Pope's encyclical was written in 1995, just as the internet revolution was getting started. But he foresaw how this would go down. And it has gone very far down indeed. In recent years, this new culture of death has taken the form of video games (ostensibly for adults, but widely available for children) with the theme of sex, violence, and crime. These games represent the real education that we give our children, for no school can (or should) compete with such advanced pedagogical techniques. As Andrew Tuplin writes in Adbusters:

Although Grand Theft Auto IV allows you to kill anything that walks, you cannot (yet) sex anything that walks. Sex in the game is restricted to prostitutes who willingly engage. This design choice has allowed the game maker, Rockstar Games, to negate some particularly unsettling in-game situations such as virtual rape or virtual pedophilia. Though I believe there would be a public outcry if such morally repellent things were included in the game, explaining exactly why virtual sex and murder are acceptable – while virtual rape is not – is a difficult argument.

Indeed. Though marketing considerations may prevent virtual rape, the logic of the game permits, or even encourages it. Of course, these games have the power to form our minds--and our souls--in ways that real life could not. The virtual replaces the real in the formation of habits. After all, a real murder might sicken us and present us with unpleasant consequences; but we can practice a virtual murder an infinite number of times. One can get into the habit of murder without even exercising the courage that a real murderer might have to exercise. Reality at least imposes some limits, even on the murderer or the rapist. But in virtual (non)reality, our avatars do our killing for us, and can do so infinitely.

The first commentator to recognize the dangers of this virtual reality did so long before anyone had imagined the computer. In fact, he warned us of the problem 2,000 years before the computer. As Andrew Tulpin notes:

When Jesus began teaching and interpreting the moral code of the day, he radically redefined adultery, translocating the sin from the physical realm of actions and words to the virtual world of the mind and imagination. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “You have heard the commandment that says, ‘You must not commit adultery.’ But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” What Jesus teaches is that God is concerned not only with what plays out in the physical world of actions (reality), but also with what takes place in the virtual world of our minds. A sociological approach to morality judges murder wrong because it harms an innocent person. A theological approach to morality finds murder sinful not only because of the physical act, but also because God is offended by an angry mind as well as violent hands. The humanist or secular view of morality is concerned only with what we do. True religious morality is concerned not only with what we do, but with who we are, with what we desire to do.

More and more, we have abandoned real education for virtual education, an education death, greed, lust, and vice. Yet soon, our civilization will need all the courage and prudence we can must to survive the troubles that lay in store for us. The task, I suspect, will fall to a remnant as it always does. But no remnant in history has faced not only such a depraved population, but such a population so well-schooled in depravity. Had I the foresight and wisdom, I would have loved and encouraged my children more than I did to strengthen them to deal with the world we have left them.

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