Thanks again for the comments, even though they have nothing to do with the Europe trip. I am thinking about Fr. Daren's comment. People still smoke. It still kills people everyday. I do believe things are starting to shift and making it so hard for people to smoke that they are losing interest. If we know the media is pro-choice and you don't think grassroots have worked, what is your suggestion, because I don't believe a strict automatic ban would work or ever happen? (This isn't coming out the best, just typing while thinking.)
I am afraid (and this is going to come out bad) I don't know if the canyon can be crossed. Something is really going to have to shift in order for that to happen. The problem is not that people think abortion is bad or ugly. The problem is the definition of when life starts. That may be stating the obvious, but let me try to get this all out. Here is the hurdle I can't seem to get around and it bothers me still.
This country and or system of government does not allow me to force my religious beliefs on the rest of the country. Forcing our definition of life on the rest of the country is against our American Freedom of religion. We can believe what we want and we can tell others what we believe, we can tell them and convince them to believe what we believe, but the is a bright line, a brick wall, an iron curtain, that stops us from forcing our beliefs on others. That's the way it is in this country. If you say that isn't right, that babies are dying, that it needs to stop now, to hell with the consequences, you need to look at the freedoms that we take for granted because it is a slippery slope, all down hill, when we chip away at a freedom here and a freedom there.
After thinking about all that, I two points. First, it is going to take time. Fr. Daren, I am sorry, but grassroots is going to have to work. It is going to take time. It is going to take people that are persistent and un-wavering and patient, because things in this country don’t change quickly. Ask those involved in the Civil Rights movement. Look at Suffrage. Even our own independence to years and 2 Constitutions (one was called the Article of Confederation). Things that happen over-night, tend not to last and if you are looking for a change that works and last, it is going to take time.
Second, before I commented about being worried about what the Religious Bush Backers have done with the credibility of religious people in general. Now I worry about what Bush’s Homeland Security and stripping freedom in order to protect policy has done to the ability to chip away at abortion. I think we were on the right track. I think the momentum was shifting, but now, civil liberties are being fought for even harder on every front and I believe the fight to end abortion has taken some steps backward. I think things will change. I believe things will get better. But not overnight. Don’t give up, even if it takes another 30.
posted by MILK @ 9:06 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
My Friend,
Forget Bush. In this debate he's a red herring. The abortion debate is not about him or his politics or whether or not we like him. It's about the unborn.
"Forcing our definition of life on the rest of the country is against our American Freedom of religion."
I very strongly disagree. Religious freedom entails the right to worship, and to some degree, the right to maintain your own moral standards as long as it does not conflict with another citizen's rights We all agree that I do not have the right to murder my neighbor, no matter what I believe. Then why could I legally murder my unborn child if I felt it was somehow justified?
If our society were fair, couldn't I then legally murder my neighbor as well? So you see, somebody's moral standard must be enforced if our society is to remain in any way civilized; otherwise, he with the biggest gun wins. (That moral standard, by the way, used to be the natural moral law; but we've done away with that basis of civilisation by allowing abortions, and believe me, all moral hell has and will break loose).
If our society were to say that a certain race (say, Jews) were less than human, then wouldn't we have the right to attempt, without violence, a change in law that would "force" our view that Jews are human and therefore cannot be legitimately eliminated on others?
Let's go back to a first principle we as Catholics can all agree on: an unborn child, no matter how old, is a human being. Therefore, all rights due to a human being are due to that child.
When a nation attempted to eliminate the Jews based on their race, that was genocide and is now almost universally recognized as a heinous act, an act that cried out for immediate cessation. When millions of unborn human beings are being eliminated because of their age, how can we assert that such an unspeakable thing should continue to be allowed in our society, for any length of time?
Regarding your assertion that we are on a slippery slope toward losing our rights, I quite agree; only the slope is facing the opposite direction than the one you suppose. Here's an excerpt from a humanist journal I recently commented on in my blog:
"The debate about the rights of the embryo is often framed as the question of whether or not it's a person....Dictionary definitions of "person" include: "a living human," "human," "individual," and "a man, woman, or child." Since a newly fertilized, microscopic human zygote is living and human, then according to at least some of these definitions it counts as a person." Then why can we kill it?
He continues: "Since the zygote has no sentience or self-represented interests, its secular value only derives from how adult persons such as ourselves value it on the basis of what we agree are shared, this-world, secular concerns."
That is to say, since the unborn child is not conscious of its own existence, it may be gratuitously eradicated based solely on how much you or I value it. Now I ask you, what is the natural extension of this line of thinking? First, willing euthanasia. Then, euthanizing all severely retarded persons, with permissions of families; then forcibly euthanizing severely retarded persons; then the helpless elderly; then whoever is opposed to the "peaceful order" of this wonderfully free society will be reeducated; then all those not valued by the elite society will be, in one way or another, disposed of. It doesn't have to happen and I pray it does not; but it can happen here, in the USA. If we keep abortion as a permanent feature of our landscape and therefore decide once and for all that human life is not worth much, then I cannot see how it can fail to happen here.
The unborn have no voice. Auschwitz is here, right in our own back yards. The helpless demand defenders, and we must defend them with all non-violent means at our disposal, which certainly includes attempts at legislation.
Besides, if we don't defend them with all, who will want to defend us when it's our turn? Will someone one day say of us, "I'm against the forced re-education of Catholics and the execution of priests, but I have no right to force my personal beliefs on society?"
Food for thought.
The real problem comes down to a matter of the extreme focus we have on individualization. The unborn child is considered a human being if the mother wants it to be. This is a most curious way to define human life.
A human being exists when when I want it to. Life then is not objective but subjectivity. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
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