"But war and torture are okay with you?"
In other words, if I am voting against Obama this November because he supports abortion (and protects infanticide, which should be chilling to anyone who hears of it), then (in this individual's logic) I must be voting for "war and torture," whatever that means. (I think it was supposed to be a sweeping indictment of President Bush, but it's a little vague, even for a non sequitir.)
As an aside, I don't think anyone is for "war," in the abstract, unless they delight in death and destruction (which some truly evil people might). I do think America needs to keep its promise to the Iraqi people and preserve the gains made there, especially over the past several months as the situation has turned with the surge. But that's really neither here nor there.
That's right. Your position on the war, whatever it may be, isn't really my concern here. What's going on in our country, the the slaughter of millions of children and the destruction of the same number of women, is evil on a massive scale. I don't know of any theologian who ever came up with a "just abortion" theory, because abortion is not like war. The nuance of fighting wars and grappling with issues of international justice and peace do not translate to the systematic murder of millions of innocent lives. That these are the weakest and most vulnerable members of society -- mothers and children, both -- doesn't seem to occur to many people in this debate. That class warfare begins in the womb, where minorities and the poor are aborted in far greater numbers, also gets lost in the bumper sticker rhetoric of Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
I am puzzled as to why it's awesome when Bono claims that our response to the AIDS crisis in Africa is a moral issue for Christians in America (which I believe it is, btw), but the community of Christians around me sits idly by saying NOTHING about abortion. Nothing. We can save the planet (and we should be good stewards, please don't get me wrong), but we don't care to stop infanticide.
Something is wrong.
Where is our moral courage? Why does it seem like no one cares about the unborn? Is it the prevailing cultural vanity that we're so beholden to?
Wesley J. Smith once said that the right likes to argue facts, the left likes to argue narrative, and the middle likes to argue style. "Don't talk about abortion," they tell us, "it's so... gauche." It's distasteful, you see, bringing up something as unpleasant as the killing of abandoned children. That's so 1988. It's much more fashionable to discuss your support for universal health care and alternative energy sources. That's where the classy people are going...
Meanwhile, how will we approximate justice this November? "Of course, abortion is wrong," my friends say, "but so is war/not providing health care to children/global warming/insert socially acceptable cause here. It just doesn't matter as much to me."
My friends are missing something here, which Bishop Chaput addressed in response to Roman Catholics for Obama:
But [Catholics who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a “proportionate” reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life—which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.I don't know about you, but I can't think of a single reason I would be able to give to an aborted child.
