We celebrate liberty around here quite a bit. Heaven knows I shout it out as a Patrick Henry up to five nights a week in the Hawk's Head Public House. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War Adventure, most kids can still sing "My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.." If you've read the farm journal for any length of time, you know how hostile I am to encroachments on constitutional freedoms. Liberty doesn't really need to be sold or marketed. It's the native, universally-recognized objective of all people, everywhere.
But it's interesting that Jefferson and friends did not write: men "are endowed by their Creator with freedom to do anything they please." Fully aware of man's native depravity, and the chaos that would result from lawlessness, they wrote, "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...."
Catch that? Certain unalienable rights. Not infinite and indiscriminate and promiscuous rights, but certain unalienable rights. Those rights, as the founders saw them, could never be indiscriminate, without limiting the freedom of others, and they began, at the base minimum with the right to life.
Indeed, Western Civilization--carrying along with it the banner of a sovereign God, immutable truth, and a scriptural canon--didn't engage in gentle conflict-resolution and anger-management with native cultures. You can't imagine this scene between Cortez and the conquered Aztecs:
AZTEC PRIEST
We would like to keep cutting the
hearts out of our sacrificial human
victims.
CORTEZ
Let's talk about that. Can we
limit that to Tuesdays and
Thursdays?
At the very base of any standard of western liberty is the idea that life must be protected, murderers punished, and ritual homicide suppressed. You can't offer "liberty to live" and "liberty to murder" in the same declaration of human rights. The Aztec temples--and their priests--had to go. No arguing. No nuance. No exceptions. Such abominations had to be destroyed. Praise God.
The ever increasing number of pro-life, anti-abortion activists in America routinely face a kind of sneering rejection among people who claim to be pro-life but who vote pro-death. We are told that we can't be "single issue" voters, and while there is some truth to that on other fronts, there can never be multiple truths on the question of life itself.
What, really, in the temporal realm, is more important than life? Can we ever hope to protect our property, our incomes, our churches, if we can't protect life itself? How can we ever hope for an increase in public virtue, for more honesty in our financial transactions, and in our personal lives, if a great slaughter of the innocents is taking place daily in America? If the Aztecs had blood-spatter on their foreheads, we are swimming in oceans of human sacrifice. We make the Aztecs look like the Osmond family. Father Pavone of Priests for Life tells the story of a group of small boys who were reported throwing something off a bridge. When they were questioned, the boys responded that they were throwing "little people." They had found a container of aborted babies behind an abortion clinic and they were throwing them into the river below.
Is this the America the founders envisioned when they wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" Are we really "free" when we permit this sort of outrageous violation of the freedom of the most defenseless, the most innocent life?
In the nineties, that paragon of personal virtue, Bill Clinton, said his goal for abortion would be that, someday, it might be "safe, legal, and rare." Could we say the same thing about slavery? Could we hope that slavery might be "safe, legal, and rare." Would Cortez have accepted this compromise on the subject of human sacrifice? Would "safe, legal and rare human sacrifice" sound like progress in anyone's mind?
The unparalleled thievery of the federal government, in printing money without backing, the shameless financial chicanery of a Bernie Madoff, the short-term, spendthrift irresponsibility of Congress, the federally funded executive bonus, are all part of one devious moral-whole. Why should anyone care about stealing your money if they can kill their own child in the womb? Even Cortez would have known that. Order and civilization absolutely demand--as the first order of business--that you protect life. Why plant a field if you can be butchered, at will, by the local medicine man? Why build a village school if the natives are addicted to infanticide and cannibalism?
It all begins with life. We are worse than barbarians if we abide murder--especially the murder of the smallest, most innocent life. It is not "single issue." It is the first issue. It is the issue that must be solved before anything else can be solved.
Some mistakenly assume that the taking of any life--even those who fall just victim to the hangman or who die in warfare--are protected by this truth, but that would be a false understanding. Historically, we execute those who take life to balance the scales--and to emphasize the high seriousness of the crime against life itself. We prosecute just warfare against barbarian nations. We are not talking about the mere act of taking life, but that of taking innocent life. We are talking about homicide in all its forms--murder, infanticide, cannibalism, abortion.
Moreover, as the founders knew when they attributed the right to life to our "Creator," it cannot be the subject of polite debate or qualification or regulation by human senates and academic panels. It has to be absolute, axiomatic, unquestioned. Those who defend life are decent and normal. Those who argue for murder should be seen as we would now see a slave master or a Nazi prison guard.
There are many, of course, who are morally asleep, who would see this as "extreme," but very few who are asleep enjoy being prodded to wakefulness. Soft recruits do not enjoy boot camp. When a culture like ours--that has for so long accepted child killing in the womb--gets told it is little better, and probably much worse, than the knife-wielding pagans of old, it tends to get cranky and self-righteous. Anti-abortionists are told they are against women's health, or women's rights, even though those same pro-lifers are working to protect the 500,000 "little women" killed in the womb every year. Logic has never been on the side of the "pro-choice" movement. It is a movement that is both morally and mentally asleep.
Science has made it even more brutally clear. The images of the unborn living in the womb are breath-taking in their presentation of a human form, and the heart-rending images of babies ripped limb from limb by the process of abortion are so damning, that--unlike the images of the Nazi Holocaust, which we are properly reminded can "never be forgotten"--these images of babies shredded, burned, literally sucked to death by "doctors" are routinely banned. The abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war can be shown. The murder of 1 million American babies a year cannot.
With respect to our leadership on the abortion issue, I came to the conclusion some years ago that American presidents are really middle managers, that our process no longer encourages true leadership, so I will readily admit that our choices for moral leadership, in the historic American sense, have not been legion, but, I was very surprised that so many Christians, Catholics, and Jews would vote for Barack Obama. Certainly, he was smooth, articulate, and polite to a fault. I never found much content in his actual platform, but I can certainly understand why people value a smiling, "hopeful," face---even if pure evil lurks behind that mask. And "pure evil" is exactly what Barack Obama represents on the abortion front. We have never endured a president who so whole-heartedly supported abortion on demand. He has already rescinded the Mexico City policy, which now forces American taxpayers to pay for abortions abroad. He has moved to lift freedom of conscience protections for medical professionals who choose not to perform abortions. As a candidate, Barack Obama even voted against the "born alive infant protection act" in Illinois, twice--proving he was not only a friend of abortion, but infanticide as well. To make this display of evil even more preposterous, Barack Obama continually treated the nation to his status as a "Christian."
This Sunday, we face the colossal absurdity of a Catholic School, Notre Dame, inviting Barack Obama to speak at its commencement and receive an honorary degree. Some expect nearly 20,000 protestors at the event and many of the seniors refuse to participate. They will engage in prayer services elsewhere on the campus. They are saying, in effect, let us not make a mockery of our institution by honoring a friend of death.
I would submit to you that there is no more true Christianity than the Christianity which states, "you have dishonored the name of Christ, you have made a mockery of His grace, and you will not share my table, until you repent." There is no more true mark of leadership than being willing to say "this is not up for debate. There can be no compromise on people who claim Christ and then claim the right to kill children."
Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame, in other words--not the new, abortion-loving version of higher Catholic education.
May the hearts of the children, someday, be turned back to their fathers--the hearts, at any rate, of those that are still beating after the present holocaust.
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