Catholic and Enjoying It!
…Is it time to dump the term ‘pro-life’?
No. I think that, instead, it’s time to *be* pro-life. That means, as Tom Kreitzberg says that prolife organizations and spokesoids should a) advocate a correct position on at least one of the issues delineated in the Catechism concerning respect for human life; and b) advocate an incorrect position on none of those issues.
I’m talking to you, Judie Brown. You too, Austin Ruse.
Is it too much to ask that prolife leaders not place the word “torture” in scare quotes and offer indefensible defenses of waterboarding, repeating the lie that “it was just three high value prisoners” and ignoring the murders of detainees and the torture of innocent people (using other forms of torture), all while simply getting wrong the Church’s teaching on the intrinsic immorality of torture, aiding and abetting the confusion of consequentialism and double effect, and radically undercutting their own mission by confirming in the minds of pro-aborts that the prolife movement is basically the religious arm of the GOP?
Why are prolifers so eager to die on this hill? Are they insane?
What is required is a prolife movement that actually expresses the Church’s full teaching on life issues. Mysteriously, prolifers are quick to sneer at all this as the horrific “seamless garment”. If, by this, they mean the attempt by some lefties to say “Since you support the death penalty, I can support abortion” they need to get outside their comfy categorizations and think again. Nobody says that torture is happening in numbers anywhere near the monstrous abortion rates in our country. Of *course*, abortion is (numerically speaking) a far more grave problem.
But, philosophically and legally speaking, they are basically the *same* problem: the notion that you can do grave evil that good may come of it. And, in a certain sense, torture is more insidious precisely because the defenses of it are now being offered by the very people who, for decades, have been warning about the dangers of embracing consequentialist morality. If the salt loses its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? When a Judie Brown or an Austin Ruse or a Raymond Arroyo start going to bat for torture of the naked and crude consquentialism of Marc Thiessen, the principle effect of this is to destroy the main argument that Catholic theology has against abortion or any other grave sin. The solution is not to say, “Shut up. Stop talking about this and support the GOP.” The solution is to maintain a serious prolife witness that condemns intrinsic and grave evil in *all* its forms and maintains respect for human life and dignity and the full-orbed teaching of the Catechism, even when it is unpopular with one’s political tribe.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In