Dear Vicomte13,
"In other words, I believe that the divine law of protecting life utterly supersedes any contrary human opinion, including democracy and legal structures."
I agree. I no more assign any legitimacy to laws enshringing a "right" to abortion than you. They are unjust laws, and of themselves, require no adherence.
"I want to see life protected, and I am ultimately more committed to seeing innocent life protected than I am to any particular process for getting there."
Believe it or not, I am too.
"'Well, we tried. We got the process right. But the People were just not with us. Tough luck. The People voted that those babies die, and that is the end of it.'
"I do not believe that even the People have the 'right' to vote that babies die. "
I agree with you.
But I think your path is more likely to end in ultimate defeat.
"I belief that the right to life is divine, and that is trumps every human law in every case. You don't."
In this, you're wrong. I agree that the right to life is divine, and trumps every human law in every case. Absolutely.
"Therefore, the solution I prefer is for the judiciary, which created the abortion-on-demand right in the first place, should be peopled with men and women with a proper respect for the limits of power of human beings, and a clear understanding of the sacredness of life."
That would be nice... except.
"But at the end of the day, if abortion will be prohibited by imperial judicial action, then I want that action taken NOW,..."
I wouldn't.
Because we don't live in a Catholic confessional state, or even a country that is predominantly Catholic.
We live in a pagan nation that used to be predominantly Protestant. We're living off the moral capital of the previous status.
As well, many of the ordinary people of the United States are at least somewhat Christian, not entirely pagan.
But the power elites of our country are almost uniformly pagan.
We don't live in a Catholic monarchy, but rather a non-Christian republic. Or at least, it used to be a republic.
You're endorsing a system not readily suspectible to change by the agitiation of ordinary folks, if you can get your tyrants in control.
Unfortunately, our tyrants aren't going to get control, because we represent NOWHERE NEAR the majority. And even if our tyrants got control for a fleeting time, they would not last. Tyranny is manipulated by the powerful, not the ordinary. The powerful in our country are the most corrupted, the most evil, the most pagan, the most bought-in to the culture of death. So it goes in tyrannies. The righteous tyrant is the exception, not the rule.
Worse still, with the other side's tyrants in control, the defeat of life is becoming, and will become complete.
I have no illusions about the United States. Our country is a pretty decent one, as countries go. Over the long course of human history, it's been a ton better than average, perhaps even the most just country to have existed on earth. Perhaps.
But it's just a country governed by men, and men are fallible. Men sin, and make errors of judgment. Only the pope, when proclaiming teaching that is certain as the Universal Pastor of the Holy Catholic Church is rendered unable to speak falsely.
In our system, I believe it isn't at all likely that we'll get pro-life tyrants, at least not for any measure of time.
On earth, there are no eternal solutions in human dealings. But the most long-lasting ones are the ones that arise from the common consensus of the people.
The right to life, in a republic, is best defended, on the ground, practically speaking, by a citizenry that embraces it.
And in a republic, that consensus is expressed through political means, through democratic means, not through tyranny.
The irony is, although it is far from perfect, there is pretty much a pro-life consensus in the United States, today. Most folks, when asked whether they would ban abortion in all cases by rape, incest, life of the mother, and genetic deformity, say, yup, that's what the law ought to be.
Well, that's about 96% of abortions. That means, if we were to restrict abortion to those cases, the number of legal abortions would fall from somewhere around 1.3 million per year to somewhere around 50,000 per year.
That's about 50,000 too many, from my perspective, from the Catholic persective. But it's about a 1.25 million not-dead babies improvement over what we have now.
And yes, I would rest, then. For at least a day, and maybe a week.
Then, back to trying to change the law to protect in law the last 50,000 babies per year thus threatened.
But the trick there will be that we will have convert folks to real, obedient Faith in the One True Church (including a lot of nominal members of the One True Church). I doubt that we'll get further than what I've described without creating a genuinely Catholic culture in the United States.
But we cannot even get to the very most minimal position - banning infanticide - right now, because we have judicial tyranny.
I don't endorse continued judicial tyranny as a solution to the current judicial tyranny. Although the democratic solution is way far from perfect, I think in the longer term, it beats tyranny by a bunch.
sitetest
Sitetest,
Thank you for your post.
We agree on so much, even on the particular moral solidity that having a Catholic state gives to the laws of society.
A couple of thoughts:
(1) Actually, before the next Census, America will be a predominantly Catholic nation, at least according to the Census reports. One of the nastier shocks that the Democratic secular left has gotten from the waves of Hispanic immigration, which they figured would be their new "Black Bloc" of ethnic thralls, is that Hispanics are more Catholic and traditionally Christian in morality than they are ethnic. So many are poor, and yet 44% voted for the Republicans in the last election. The demographic trend of Catholicism is actually the best in the nation.
(2) I think that there is almost complete common ground on Christian moral issues between Roman Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Baptists and the like, as well as the growing numbers of Eastern Orthodox from the Middle Eastern diaspora. We all disagree on ecclesialogy, of course, and always will during our lifetimes. But each through his own path has come to the identical place on life. The old "mainstream" (but rapidly dwindling) traditional Protestant sects have embraced the culture of death, but the catholic Orthodox, and the atomized Evangelicals with little to nothing in the way of organized Church to distract them from the Word of God in the Bible, are all flying in close formation when it comes to abortion and euthanasia.
That's why I suggested, further up the thread, that what is really needed is not a new political party, nor necessarily a mass Christian exodus from the Republican party, but a Christian Innocent Life PAC that only focuses on abortion and euthanasia, on which all pro-life Christians agree.
That said, I don't see it being organized by anybody.
The current pro-life groups are generally tied to a specific church or religion. That's somewhat effective, but what you really NEED, politically, is for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and all of their religious followers to be in the same political organization and sharing values with the Catholics and their bishops on abortion. A pan-Christian Innocent Life PAC would be huge. It would dwarf the NRA, and it would really represent the views of all of its members on the narrow but vital front on which it acted. All of the existing groups would still exist, but the bigger organism would be able to coordinate their clout in a way that it is difficult for them to do now. To put it in simple terms, when you look at the current structure of the pro-life movement it's just very hard for the Reverend Falwell and the Archbishop of New York to sit down in full view of all of their members and work as officials and spokesman for the same organization. They've used the Republican Party as their proxy, but that obviously doesn't work.
A Christian Innocent Life NRA is what we need.
We stay Republicans or Democrats, nominally (what difference does it make), but our PAC brings together all of the like-minded people on the issue we care most about, and drives the agenda much as the NRA drives the Second Amendment agenda.
I see no distinction between Catholic and Evangelical pro-life belief, and think that we can get to a majority consensus for protecting babies a long time before we have a Catholic America.