FRN Columnists' COrner - "An Interview With Alan Keyes - Part I" By Jonathan David Morris

Free Republic Network ^ | 11-02-03 | Jonathan David Morris

[Bob J]

Columnists' Corner

"An Interview With Alan Keyes, Part I: "A Deep Moral Challenge"

By Jonathan David Morris

Amnion is a crisis pregnancy group local to the Philadelphia area. Its mission is to provide pro-life counsel to those contemplating, or in some cases coping with, abortion. A few weeks ago, I decided to reserve a seat at Amnion's 20th anniversary fundraising dinner -- two seats, really, since my better half was there -- and soon determined a mission of my own: To interview the evening's guest speaker, former presidential contender Alan Keyes.

And, indeed, I landed the interview, but not before realizing something about myself. It turns out I'm really not too keen on talking about abortion.

Looking over the many columns I've written the last few years, this is something I should've noticed sooner. In fact, I've almost completely ignored the topic altogether, making little more than scarce semi-references here and there. It's not that I haven't got an opinion, of course. I do. It's just that those who are for abortion are for it, and those who aren't, aren't, and trying to bring both sides together -- over the Internet, or even over dinner -- isn't my idea of a good time. It's a fine way to make enemies out of friends.

So I admitted as much to Dr. Keyes upon speaking with him prior to the Amnion dinner last Friday.

Before I got that far, though, I began by mentioning the U.S. Senate's recent passing of a partial birth abortion ban, which George Bush has said he'll sign into law. This, the president says, is an important step in America's efforts to "build a culture of life." But what does that mean? Might the culture of life extend to Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Floridian woman whose fate has become a life-or-death struggle between her parents and husband? That's an issue familiar to the president's brother, Jeb, but what about issues more familiar to the president himself, such as the death penalty and war?

"I believe it entails respect for the principle that we're all created by God," Dr. Keyes told me. It's a "deep moral challenge that America faces," but "taking the life of another human being that is in no way a threat to you" is, was, and always will be wrong.

Bush's culture of life? It's imperative, all right, but so much so that Dr. Keyes wondered during his Amnion speech if Bush -- much less the American people -- really considered the civilian costs of our wars with Iraq and Afghanistan.

But does abortion necessarily entail "taking the life of another human being that is in no way a threat to you"? How about a woman's health? Sen. Barbara Boxer has said of the partial birth ban, "If you don't make a health exception, then you are essentially saying that women just aren't that important."

And Howard Dean, meanwhile, has said of the ban, "As a physician, I am outraged that the Senate has decided it is qualified to practice medicine."

I read Boxer's remark to Dr. Keyes; I also read Dean's. Politics aside, I asked, is there any legitimacy to what they said?

"I don't know what these people are talking about," Dr. Keyes replied. "I hear the words, but I don't know what they mean."

He then asked, "When we pass a law about murder, is that practicing medicine?" And he provided his own answer with a resounding no. "The first precept of the medical profession is to protect people," he said, and abortion, therefore, is "not what medicine is about."

Still, some might argue that abortions are going to happen regardless of whether we allow them. Shouldn't we aim, then, to make them safe, legal, and rare?

Descending into a rare flash of sarcasm, Dr. Keyes asked if I thought we should create "drive-by zones" where thugs can feel free to gun down civilians. Would this "make drive-by shooting safe and rare"? And what might it accomplish if so?

Right and wrong are "higher than human choice," he said. "You can't take an act morally wrong and change it by legal wrangling." He stressed that "murder is murder," and suggested we'd do well to abide by an age-old axiom: Thou shalt not kill.

Regarding the partial birth ban, he also hastened to warn that pro-lifers shouldn't be quick to claim victory. "There are people in the Republican Party who will use this as an excuse to move on," he said. "The ban is a good step insofar as it ends a barbaric practice," but it represents a single procedure that many in the medical community already concede is unnecessary -- inasmuch as any abortion procedure can ever be seen as necessary.

"Whether it's inside or outside the womb," he said, abortion is "an obscene violation of the person."

And he echoed this sentiment during his speech that evening, saying the ban doesn't mean we're learning to do good but rather "learning to do evil while pretending it is good."

But, of course, there are those who'd cast talk of good and evil as meaningless religious rhetoric, saying it has no place as the basis for American law. This goes for abortion as well as a host of other issues -- and in a country where the Constitution guarantees religious freedom, it's not a moot point.

So what about that ancient piece of paper -- the Constitution -- anyway? The president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Gloria Feldt, has called the partial birth ban "unconstitutional." Is it, though?

I asked Dr. Keyes this question, and it was the nearest I've ever come to unleashing a caged tiger. He immediately challenged that the "fictional right to abortion" was "a fabrication of the courts" created "by fiat, not by the people." Though he's reluctant to dignify the relative constitutionality of abortion by debating it (he calls the discussion "quite reprehensible"), he strongly supports an amendment banning all forms of it once and for all.

But let's you and I stop and think this over for a moment.

Maybe you believe in God, maybe you don't -- I don't know -- but it's not the point. Let's set our preexisting moralities aside and ask ourselves: Do we really want to live in a country where the Constitution must explicitly prohibit infanticide? Must we pass an amendment against punching pregnant mothers as well? Because it would seem to me any society that needs to have this spelled out has much bigger problems than the punching of pregnant mothers. Such problems need to be dealt with at the root.

If you take a look through our founding documents, you're unlikely to find explicit permission to drain the brains from babies' skulls. Nor does the Constitution specifically prohibit this practice, but therein lies the problem: It shouldn't have to.

This much should be obvious to a society deserving the freedom with which it's endowed.

Products of their time, our forefathers remained silent on issues they could not foresee -- up to and including partial birth abortion. But I'd argue misbehavior is the fatal loophole of every free society. It is the catch-22 that time and again condemns liberty to captivity. After all, whereas we have abortion in modern America, many early Americans partook in the wholesale enslavement of Africans. Entire communities of human beings were whisked from their quarters by the cover of darkness and shipped to a New World -- and we, the people, were complicit in it.

As I said to Dr. Keyes -- who himself, of course, is an African-American -- it would seem to me that the rights denied to the unborn today are the same rights -- the same constitutional rights -- denied to black slaves as recently as a century and a half ago.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." And just as Dr. Keyes said the culture of life "entails respect for the principle that we're all created by God," so, too, did Jefferson suggest these truths to be self-evident. Evidently, however, they're void where prohibited (i.e., inconvenient for us).

Like the slaves of yore, the unborn are denied Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness on the grounds that they're incomplete people -- mere fractions of humans, or so we claim.

So what, exactly, is the "deep moral challenge" of which Dr. Keyes spoke? Perhaps it's finding the maturity to conclude -- amongst other things -- that abortion is no more a matter of personal preference than the slave trade before it. The people it most affects, after all, are the people whose wants and desires aren't taken into account.

Our failure to see this poses a threat to that most American of principles: Freedom itself.

[Tune in next week for Part II: 'Can God Bless America?']

Jonathan David Morris is a political satirist based in New Jersey. You can catch more of JDM’s ramblings at readjdm.com.