Posted on 12/05/2002 7:34:30 AM PST by JohnGalt
December 5, 2002
ABORTION: TO PROTEST OR NOT TO PROTEST by Thomas Fleming
Abortion has become a metaphor for the new America produced by the 60's revolution. For 30 years we have been all about peace and love and human rightsand legally killing a million and a half babies a year. Most pro-life activists are content with appealing to the conscience of the mothers, reserving their harshest epithets for the physicians who betray their profession and murder children. However, the truth is uglier than we like to admit. These "doctors" are simply hired guns, hit men who take the money and asks no questions about the guilt of innocence of their victims. But the really horrifying part is not the hired killers but the mothersthe millions and millions of mothers, who choose to kill their own babies.
As much as any Christian in America, I earnestly hope and pray that some day we can stop the killingor at least live under a political and legal system that shares our commitment to life. How to go about realizing that hope is no simple matter. Despite all the time and money that has been lavished on political, judicial, and propaganda battles, the pro-life movement has achieved next to nothing. And if the leaders of that movement think that the leaders of the Christian Coalition are going to talk the Republican Party into outlawing abortion, they should resign their positions and go back to minding their own children and their own businesses.
The only positive results of pro-life agitation have been achieved in places like Minnesota and the Dakotas, where local demonstrators have peacefully and legally made life difficult for abortionists and their families. Many of the demonstrators are affiliated with Operation Rescue, which has also staged less legal and less peaceful demonstrations in front of big-city abortuaries. This week, Operation Rescue and its head Joseph Scheidler, are back in front of the Supreme Court, which is hearing their appeal against convictions and fines ($275,000) imposed under RICO statutes designed to inhibit the activities of organized crime.
The case is trivial in itself. RICO laws, even when applied to the Mafia or the Teamsters Union, are a distortion of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Applied to pro-life activists, they are a monstrous travesty. A victory for Operation Rescue, however, would change nothing. Mothers and doctors will continue to murder babies, and deranged activists will continue to degrade human life by waving fetuses and graphic photographs and show their contempt for Christian moral teachings by breaking good property laws in the vain expectation that good will come of it. St. Paul answered that one nearly 2000 years ago.
But the pro-life movement likes to cast itself as just another civil rights movement, trotting out the entirely irrelevant and dangerous comparison of abortion with slavery, Roe v. Wade with Dred Scott. Their faith may be Christian, but their "rights-of-man" philosophy is the pure anti-Christian Jacobinism spouted by Rousseau and Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King. America, for them, is still a Christian country but America's Christian creed is summed up in Jefferson's "self-evident" truths and his deist trinity of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If Martin Luther King's followers broke the law in a good cause, why can't Operation Rescue?
The homicidal feminists and life-hating lesbians who sued Operation Rescue claim that Dr. King, unlike Joseph Scheidler, always told his followers not to block entries, but this is a distinction without a difference, because King, a practitioner of civil disobedience, was leading illegal demonstrations, and anyone who has followed the historical record knows that many of the demonstrations inspired by King turned into ugly riots in which neighborhoods were burned down and innocent people killed.
The problem is not that Operation Rescue's methods and tactics are worse than those of the civil rights movement, but that the two groups have the same principles. Joe Scheidler, good and brave man that he is, is dangerously wrong in his political and moral philosophy. His explanation of the case before the court is pure American Jacobinism: "One of the most beautiful things about this country is we can protest our grievances. That is a trademark of America."
The good old English right of petition is, in fact, contained within the Constitution, but protesting grievances is in the tradition of mob violence, labor agitation, illegal sit-ins, and anti-Christian groups like PETA, whose celebrity spokesman, Martin Sheen, is supporting Scheidler's right to protest. So murdered babies are now on par with minks raised for their pelts and the hens that are robbed of their infertile eggs by human exploiters.
But pro-life demonstrators who practice civil disobedience are making a fundamental mistake that is more grievous even than their ignorance of constitutional law and Christian morality and that is their persistent belief that America is a Christian country with a mistaken but basically Christian government that only needs a little adjustment.
Yes, there are protestors who have declared that in permitting abortion, the United States is no lo longer a legal regime but a Nazi tyranny, but that is nonsense: Many legitimate, albeit non-Christian governments have tolerated both abortion and infanticide. The point to keep in mind, however, is that the hallmark of Christianity, from the beginning, has been a respect, bordering on reverence, for the life that our Father has given us and that Christ has redeemed. Any doubts a man may express about the sanctity of innocent life is a sure sign that he has no faith, and a great country in which the overwhelming majority of the population claim to be Christian but think that abortion is permissible in cases of rape, incest, birth defectsor potential low IQ or halitosis or who knows what other irrelevant reasonis not a Christian nation, and there is nothing that Joe Scheidler or a million Joe Scheidlers can do about it.
This is an anti-Christian country, and the honorable Christian has limited options. The law is the law, and abortion is legal, as the harpies and ghouls of Planned Parenthood and NOW insist. If the law told us to slaughter the innocent, we should be compelled by conscience to refuse, but there is no practical way, legal or illegal, that we can employ stop the anti-Christians from killing their babies. What we can do, however, is to keep the commandments of our faith, obey the laws that are made by Nero or the Supreme Court as "a terror for . . . the evil." However, we can, by our life and example, attempt to move the conscience of the anti-Christians and, above all, to bring them to the Christ who promised His followers that He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
I extended the argument into political terms that it makes no sense to me that abortionist should be allowed to operate laissez-faire while other industries are heavily regulated.
It was my nature to support the protestors, but Fleming seems to have revealed that position to be a weak moral stance in the face of the greater issue at large. I will think this one over...
On his point that this is an anti-Christian nation, I know I've been saying that for years. It's about time that it be acknowledged. It's not a Christian nation (although it was clearly founded by such and many today simply claim to be), it's not even a non-Christian nation....it's anti-Christian. But then, we are feeling the birthpangs of the endtimes and no Christian should be surprised by it. While I don't like it, I know that greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world. As believers we also know that we are overcomers - regardless of who and how many hate us. After all, they hated Him first.
Yes, it is "horrifying", the surviving victims of abortion indeed suffer the consequence of their actions (be sure to read entirel linked article).
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On the issue of "to protest or not to protest" I will weigh in with the following.
For the agnostic: "neutrality is a deceitful pretense. In this case, to not speak out against evil, you allow it to advance.
For the Christian, Scripture is graphically clear:
Lukewarm = neutral = not taking a stand, and the consequences thereof.
Any Christian out there who thinks abortion is permissible in cases of rape or incest, please feel free to reply with a defense of your reasoning. I understand how the politicians figure they have to include those exceptions in order to make progress but, I want to hear from anyone who thinks abortion must be permitted in these cases.
I love this country, but I've never labored under any imaginings that we are somehow favored by God above all nations. We certainly have experienced His blessings and bounty...but only as a result of the remnant within.
I disagree.
If one thinks that Christ's gospel can be interpreted correctly by every individual, then chaos is bound to result.
Churches based on episcopal hierarchies are not free from potential problems, but unity of belief and authenticity of doctrine is much more likely to occur when popularity does not determine doctrine.
Thank you, Notwithstanding. This is something I've always understood intuitively but never put into words.
Pinging (as usual, if you would like to be added or removed from my "conservative" Catholic ping list, just send me a FReepmail.)
This is so true. Last nite on FNC they ran a clip of some NAG (Gandy? Grady?) listing the grievances they have against those horrible, awful, barbaric (sarcasm) protesters. "They are still ... praying outside the clinics." Pat Ireland was looking on and nodding. Praying in public is a RICO offense?!!? Astounding.
...Many of the demonstrators are affiliated with Operation Rescue, which has also staged less legal and less peaceful demonstrations in front of big-city abortuaries. This week, Operation Rescue and its head Joseph Scheidler..."
Joe Scheidler is not the head of Operation Rescue.
deranged activists will continue to degrade human life by waving fetuses and graphic photographs and show their contempt for Christian moral teachings by breaking good property laws in the vain expectation that good will come of it. St. Paul answered that one nearly 2000 years ago.
Since Fleming derides such people as deranged and as showing contempt for Christian moral teachings, I would like to hear Fleming's analysis of Romans 13 wherein Paul describes what constitutes LEGITIMATE authority, with reference to what the purpose of law is in the first place. And Jesus, referring to the purpose of law, asked the question of the Pharisees, "Which is lawful, to do good or to do evil; to save life or to kill?" To that profound question Fleming has no answer but, "... "The law is the law, and abortion is legal". But which is more deranged, to accept as law that which is contrary to justice, and actually therefore no law at all, or to display a photograph of an aborted baby ? Perhaps Fleming can walk by on the other side of the road and rationalize that the victim he refuses to help is not his neighbor, but if he himself were the one about to be taken into a building to be butchered, then perhaps he might have a different perspective on his "it is legal" argument.
But pro-life demonstrators who practice civil disobedience are making a fundamental mistake that is more grievous even than their ignorance of constitutional law
Fleming is is no position to lecture us about constitutional jusrisprudence. He is wrong about Jefferson's "self-evident" truths and his deist trinity of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because Jefferson actually took the ideas from Scottish Presbyterians. Fleming dismisses the comparison of abortion with slavery as entirely irrelevant and dangerous, and then implicitly repeats the same mistake of essentially accepting the categorization of human being as chattel by accepting what he himself characterizes as murder as "legal". Had he been there at the time, perhaps Fleming would have objected to the rescue of the baby Moses because it was "illegal".
Let him save his invective for the baby murderers, not those trying to save babies from the fire.
Cordially,
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