Sunday, October 11, 2009
Respect For Life: A Sunday Rumination (With A Dividend)
Forgive me, please. I'm about to go on an uncharacteristic tear, and I beg your indulgence. It won't happen again...for a while, anyway.
In the month of October, my parish celebrates Respect For Life, the Catholic principle of honoring and defending all human life, born and yet to be born. In particular, we are exhorted to pray for the safety of the unborn everywhere, and to help to finance the local and regional crisis pregnancy centers that have proved so effective at dissuading mothers-to-be from killing the children within them.
Yes, I said killing. There is no deontological distinction between a born baby, whose right to life we would automatically concede, and the unborn infant he was in his mother's womb. Killing the latter is just as morally heinous as killing the former, regardless of what the law might say here, there, or anywhere. There is complete continuity between them, and continuity is identity.
Nor are the correlations between the popularization of abortion and other manifestations of the Culture of Death to be overlooked. Abortion was and is "the camel's nose under the tent." Without its easy acceptance, we would have put up far more resistance to the demands for "assisted suicide:" doctor-prescribed euthanasia for those deemed to have no "quality of life." We would have blanched at the Groningen Protocol, and the tide of acceptance it's enjoyed in Europe and the United States. We would have seen the moral compromise required to permit the creation of embryos for the sole purpose of consuming their tissue in research labs.
We would have risen in horror at Amy Richards's story, and the slaughter she inflicted upon two of her innocent triplets to avoid a "Staten Island future."
We would never have allowed Michael Schiavo to starve his brain-damaged wife to death, doing to that helpless woman what we would never have inflicted upon a condemned mass murderer.
Of course, the Culture of Death has more outcroppings than the above. It capered at Waco. It danced a jig at Ruby Ridge. It chortles and rubs its claws together in gleeful anticipation whenever a woman under threat from a vengeful ex-boyfriend is denied a gun permit and is told to make do with a "restraining order."
The current high priest of the Culture of Death is Peter Singer, who denies that born babies and incurably ill adults have a right to life.
In this battle, one cannot be neutral. You can stand for death -- for the privilege of inflicting it on innocent others incapable of resisting you -- or for life, its preservation and nurturance. There is no middle ground.
Choose wisely.
And now, the dividend: Connie Du Toit, Eternity Road's creator and Webmistress, has graciously invited me to be her guest on the Du Toit's BlogTalkRadio show "Kim and Connie" this evening. ("I thought we'd agreed, noooooooooooooooooo Catholics," Kim grumbled.) The show will include among its topics disaster preparation, to which I will be contributing my thoughts. The show will air at 7:00 PM Eastern time, and is scheduled to run for one hour. I look forward to having my Gentle Readers join us. Click the button below:
...to link to the program.
