THE WANDERER, MAY 3, 2007
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Abortion and Evasion
In any normal week, with no spectacular crime
usurping the headlines, the big news would have been the
U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that Congress has the
constitutional power to outlaw late-term abortions, the
grisly "procedures" that everyone knows are really
infanticides.
Shocking as the Virginia Tech story was, I could
dimly understand it; but I still find it hard to believe
that anyone, particularly a doctor trained in the healing
arts, could be inhuman enough to perform these barbaric
crimes. Yet Bill Clinton, among others, still defends
them. Take a bow, Satan. You've done wonders with the
American conscience.
The Court's 5-to-4 ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart
should have been an important political victory for
opponents of feticide. Yet I wonder. The pro-abortion
Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion, in which he was
joined by the "Catholic bloc" for the first time I can
recall, stopped far short of reversing Roe v. Wade, and
stressed that it did not do so. In a concurrent opinion,
Clarence Thomas, joined by Antonin Scalia, called for
such a reversal, but the prospects are bleak.
The Democrats, the fanatical party of abortion,
control Congress. The next president, probably a Democrat
or (even worse) Rudy Giuliani, will very likely be
pro-abortion and may name as many as three new justices to
the Court. Given these basic facts, what are the odds
that any new justice will be not only (a) anti-Roe, but
also (b) confirmed by the Senate?
This is George W. Bush's legacy. He vaguely dislikes
abortion, but it doesn't seem to horrify him, and he has
subordinated whatever misgivings he has about it to the
war he wanted to be -- and assuredly will be --
remembered for. If Roe should ever be overturned, he
won't get much credit for it, even if he miraculously
wins his war. How sad.
Not that Bush is the only conservative to lose his
head over such distractions. Rare is the man whose
conscience has not become more or less callous about so
many horrors in our popular and political culture:
abortion, pornography, sodomy, nuclear weapons, war
itself.
Consider contraception. A friend of mine once
startled me by telling me he considered it even worse
than abortion; it took me awhile, and some meditation, to
see his point.
Within the lifetimes of many now alive, virtually
all Christians regarded contraception as sinful. But the
1931 Lambeth Conference of the Church of England, while
not denying the essential evil, made a fatal exception
for couples (married and faithful, it went without
saying) for whom an additional child would be a severe
hardship. Even those who practiced contraception were
expected to do so chastely, as it were.
But it didn't take long for what was meant to be the
rare "exception" to become the norm. By the time the
birth control pill came along in the 1960s, we were
speaking with a fatal casualness, and a kind of eloquent
confusion, of "the sexual revolution" and "the new
morality."
This "new" morality was supposed to be a limited
thing, applying to sexual pleasure but not, of course, to
burglary, say, or gluttony, or calumny, or revenge, or
murder; that would have seemed too obviously absurd, like
a "new" morality of picking pockets or vandalizing
churches. But as contraception became a norm (all the
experts assured us that we faced a "crisis of
overpopulation" in those days), it became a duty (when my
fourth child was born, a well-meaning nurse urged me to
consider vasectomy, sensing nothing presumptuous in the
suggestion; I felt like urging her to consider having her
tongue cut out), and somehow even murder had to be
redefined. And sure enough, it soon was.
This, in turn, necessitated speaking of abortion in
the hypocritical circumlocutions to which we have now
become inured. The monkey pounding the typewriter will
sooner or later, by blind chance, spell the word that
will never appear in a NEW YORK TIMES editorial about
feticide: "kill." Babies aren't killed in the womb;
pregnancies are "terminated." (Pregnancies used to be
terminated by birth.)
And now, babies don't have their skulls crushed and
their brains sucked out; the editorialists have learned
to refer delicately to "a certain procedure" (or
"method") which its "opponents," for some reason,
distastefully call "partial-birth abortion."
Can you not read the signs of the times? Barack
Obama, the sensitive young (he's only 45) presidential
hopeful, deploring the Virginia Tech slaughter, compares
it to the "verbal violence" of Don Imus's jokes and to
the outsourcing of American jobs. Can you think of
anything else, senator? A more literal and everyday form
of violence? Think hard! But if you want your party's
nomination next year, watch your step.
In the party of Hillary, Harry, and Nancy, Obama
can't even afford to lie as brazenly as Rudy ("I hate
abortion") Giuliani, who at least has to try to placate
an anti-abortion faction in =his= party. He merely has to
dodge the whole subject until it's forced on him, and
then he can drone the "personally opposed" but
"pro-choice" platitudes we are so familiar with.
Making allowances for his good marital behavior, I
am reminded by Obama of nobody so much as Slick Willie
Clinton back in 1992, another ingratiating young man
whose tongue could deftly slither around specifics that
might snap the spell of his charm. Clinton too oozed a
deceitful "moderation," to the delight of the liberal
media that are now swooning over Obama, the very
personification of pro-abortion "diversity."
(As Bill used to say -- daily -- "Diversity is our
greatest strength." Why must diversity be so monotonous?)
Bravo!
Amid all this prevarication and equivocation, leave
it to David Brooks, the neoconservative columnist of THE
NEW YORK TIMES, to write about the real subject with an
admirable candor unprecedented in the Paper of Record. I
could hardly believe my eyes. Brooks demolished the
notion that a fetus is a mere clump of cells; he
described the development of a personality in the womb,
reacting to light and to its mother's voice and moods,
even beginning to control its own movements and learn
language, as it displays definite individual traits and
tendencies that will perdure "later in life."
And he spoke of "revulsion" at "killing late-term
fetuses," of doctors who "poison and dismember" the
victim, and of "howling protests" at the Court's new
ruling by "people who can't face the central concern."
Bravo! What a happy shock to anyone accustomed, and
resigned, to the moral amnesia of our liberal culture.
And some TIMES readers reacted with "howling protests,"
all right; but none could accuse Brooks of getting his
facts wrong.
Even so, I've often noticed that the bitterest
quarrels break out not when people disagree, but when
they are forced, against their will, to agree.
+ + +
"When you habitually violate your principles, you
don't just harden your conscience; you may even wind up
forgetting what your principles used to be." REGIME
CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME -- a new selection of my
Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian -- will provoke
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--- Joseph Sobran
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