You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 24th, 2008.
I didn’t feel like waiting another five-thousand posts to share this.
Abortion is, as always, a big issue for Catholic voters, regardless of how little play it’s getting this cycle. It’s probably the central concern of Culture-of-Lifers such as myself to one extent or another, and thus demands attention. It’s clear as to why; if you believe that abortion is profoundly immoral, that it’s essentially murder, it’s obviously the sort of thing you want to try and stop. The question is how do you do so, and, since the pro-life movement is generally considered a religious phenomenon, in our deliberately-secular government, mto what extent can we do this through legislation?
In other words, to what extent can values be legislated?
Is the purview of government the protection of the innocent or the oiling of the machine of public life? Is the role of government to allow a situation in which people make their own moral choices, or to ensure that evil is not done? There are arguments for both sides, and I’m honestly not sure where I fall with regard to that, which is why abortion generally unsettles me as an issue. I can never be sure what to do.
The spectrum within the pro-life movement itself is immense; there’s people who say abortion should be outlawed, its practitioners punished; people who believe it should be legislated on the state level rather than federally, let alone in the courts; people such as Martin Sheen who maintain the best immediate goal is the reduction in the numbers of abortions, conceding it unlikely to be delegalized anytime soon, and ultimately, people who personally oppose abortion but cannot justify outlawing it on legal and constitutional grounds.
There’s one more group. People who, like Joe Biden, can’t seem to figure out where they stand, can’t seem to find a comfortable position. People who find abortion profoundly immoral but can’t seem to find any legal justification for taking a stance against it, or who believe the Constitution protects it, but doesn’t like that, and so on.
I wrote about Biden back in August.
I can’t really say which group I fall into. I’m not really concerned about how the government handles abortion because, like all moral choices, these have to be handled by individual men and women on a personal and private level, and can only be eliminated through a massive cultural shift, a gigantic conversion to the Gospel of Christ. Far as I can tell, that’s the only way. The best way, too, because it’s a free choice without coercion, without threat of punishment. It’s the embrace of God and of life.
I don’t know if it will ever happen, but the pro-life movement needs to be rooted in personal action. As Shane Claiborne wrote, if I’m going to be pro-life, I need to be willing to take care of a lot of mothers and adopt a lot of babies.
Why We May Be Leaving Iraq Much Sooner Than That!
Again, I raise the possibility: perhaps we have, in fact, already won in Iraq.
