With “election season” (which actually started with the end of the last one) officially upon us, we need to stop and consider the biggest mess the Republican Party finds itself in: the hard pushback against making abortion illegal in any stage of pregnancy. With the Dobbs decision, I’m sure that many in the pro-life movement thought that the war was basically over and moving forward we simply had a mopping-up operation in the states, with a federal prohibition on abortion to follow.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Batting zero at the state level, facing more defeats in November, and with the standard bearer waffling in a major way on the subject, pro-life people are bewildered at the result. How could this happen in the shining city on the hill, this righteous nation we’ve been taught about for the last half-century or so?
The answer to that question is simple: in classic American fashion, the pro-life movement has been fighting an asymmetric war without really coming to grips with what that means. For the pro-life movement, this whole thing has come down to one thing: saving the babies. And objectively that’s what this is all about. Unfortunately a good portion of the population doesn’t see it that way, and that’s why we’re in a mess on this issue.
The basic problem is that, for the last fifty years or more (it’s getting to be sixty now) Americans have had drilled into their skulls that it is impossible to be authentically human without being sexually active. In this scenario abortion is a necessary tool in the toolbox. Buttressed by the fact that SCOTUS made it a “right” in Roe vs. Wade, large segments of the population have gone into panic mode at Dobbs and we have the result we’re getting.
The pro-choice people are likewise in a state of denial. The transgender movement is implicit proof that the sexual revolution has failed to bring the secular nirvana it was supposed to. We’ve shifted from good sex to real identity. Pro-choice people also don’t realise that they’re really no different than Chesterton’s Carthaginians. That basically makes the United States a business deal rather than a shining city on a hill, which in turn may explain why the party of George McGovern is letting the neocons lead them around by the nose. (The idea that this country is a business deal was set forth by Charles and Mary Beard, and they were cancelled for it.)
If the pro-life movement ever wants a chance of getting off the backfoot in American life, they need to go to the root cause of the opposition and convince people that there’s a better way. That’s going to take a lot of education, which in turn takes time. We’ve lost a half century of “classroom” time and it’s not coming back. Evangelicals can’t make up their mind whether they want to promote the Christian sexual ethic in a meaningful way or do their usual “moving up” routine with the compromise it entails. Catholics, lost in post-Vatican II amnesia, have forgotten that they won the Roman Empire with an austere sexual ethic with the renunciation of sex at its monastic centre.
As for me, I think we’ve lost too much time and don’t have enough left to reverse our strategic errors. Pretty soon we will find out that the warning of the Persian “King of Kings” Cyrus is our own: that we who chose to cultivate rich plains (literal and metaphorical) will be subject to others.
Positive Infinity 
One Reply to “”