A listener to my Radio Derb podcast had this to say:<\/p>\n
Why you won’t ever be Rush [Limbaugh] is, I think, pretty simple; you are not “pro-life.” I just don’t think the Right Over\u00a0Here is willing to make room for you. As a Christian, I think the movement to outlaw the death penalty in conjunction with the movement to kill\u00a0pre-born children (yes, including embryos), is the surest evidence that “The West” is finished. Without a firm popular regard for\u00a0justice\u00a0\u2014 meaning in-kind punishment for the guilty and protection of the innocent\u00a0\u2014 civilization, as we “knew it” is\u00a0dead. I know you don’t agree with this, but I certainly hope that my simple analysis of your place in the conservative pantheon is incorrect. In my\u00a0view, one of the true marks of the Right\u00a0\u2026 \u00a0is the freedom to disagree with your allies\u00a0\u2014 something missing from all\u00a0totalitarian dogmas, such as modern “liberalism.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The first part is correct, I think. The whole “right to life” business is over my head. I don’t even understand what it means. If I\u00a0fall down the basement steps and break my neck tomorrow, what happened to my “right to life”? I do of course have the legal<\/em> right\u00a0to expect that, if somebody wilfully kills me, he will be punished (by the death penalty, if it’s up to me\u00a0\u2014 no inconsistency here!) I’d\u00a0extend the same privilege\u00a0to a new-born baby. Back beyond that\u00a0\u2014 five minutes, or five months before the baby is born\u00a0\u2014 the mother is rather intimately\u00a0involved (and the father somewhat less so), and you are in a different situation.<\/p>\n
I have no patience with the angels-on-pin-heads logic-chopping about “when life begins.” (Though I like the answer a biologist friend\u00a0once gave: “Life begins in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch<\/a>\u00a0\u2026” You have to think\u00a0about it a minute.) Without a moral metaphysic and\u00a0a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.<\/p>\n
The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting\u00a0to normal people, including me. As with other such acts\u00a0\u2014 the eating of corpses, for example\u00a0\u2014 an organized society needs some\u00a0consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing\u00a0but those widespread common emotions\u00a0\u2014 disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for\u00a0unconditional abortion\u00a0up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the\u00a0laws.<\/p>\n
I disagree with my reader’s fourth sentence, though. (“Without a firm popular regard” etc.) Worthy and admirable civilizations can\u00a0co-exist with all sorts of attitudes to fetuses, and even to newborns. The ancient Athenians exposed unwanted babies on the Acropolis. Were\u00a0they<\/em> not civilized? Abortion has been a human universal everywhere, among civilizations high and low, and also among primitives.\u00a0(Geoff Blainey<\/a> notes it in his history of the Aborigines.)<\/p>\n
And what do the right-to-lifers want? A total nationwide ban on all abortions, at any time? Yes, that seems to be what they want. Do they\u00a0really imagine that’s going to happen? What a waste of political energy!<\/p>\n
My reader is correct, though. If you’re not in lockstep with the right-to-lifers, you’re never really quite the thing in U.S. conservative circles.\u00a0It’s a marker of acceptability. I was phone-in guest on a radio show recently. Waiting for the on-air, some glitch allowed me to overhear the two\u00a0hosts talking behind the commercial break. “Funny sort of conservative,” said one. “I mean, he’s OK with\u00a0abortion\u00a0\u2026?” Yep, I’m OK with it. Sorry, guy.<\/p>\n
I doubt there’s anything that can be done about this. I wish, though, that some of the time and energy that conservatives give to thinking about\u00a0fetuses could be diverted to real problems of governance. As a political prospect, the anti-abortion crusade is just Prohibition redux; as a social\u00a0phenomenon, it’s off-puttingly cultish (to me, and to a lot of people who might otherwise be more sympathetic to conservatism); as an intellectual construct, it loses most of its point once you drop ensoulment. Yes, I know the arguments to the\u00a0contrary. I never heard a non-believer make them, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A listener to my Radio Derb podcast had this to say: Why you won’t ever be Rush [Limbaugh] is, I think, pretty simple; you are not “pro-life.” I just don’t think the Right Over\u00a0Here is willing to make room for … Continue reading