(Tim) This from Joe Sobran 25 years ago. Due to failing health, Sobran's pen has been stilled in recent months, but this article is even more helpful today than it was a quarter century ago. Reading these old words, it's clear we've come a long way.
Note the absence of any mention of sodomy under his warning that "the state could redefine family relations...at its whim." Also, after his description of the murder victims' pain and tears, note his apology for "the unpleasantness" of the words. In our shameless, merciless day, it appears so quaint.
Really, it's obvious the hip reformed dudes who voted for Barack Obama and condemn single-issue voters haven't a clue about the smallest part of what Sobran says. Claiming to be wise, they have become fools and are in need of the most basic remedial education by--well, I hate to say it again--but by Roman Catholics who believe in the Fall, depravity, sin, and true wisdom which begins with the fear of God.
On to Sobran...
* * *
I have always marveled at the charge that the anti-abortion movement is engaged in "single-issue politics." To meet the charge head-on, why not? What single issue lies nearer the heart of civilization? What could be more barbarous than the killing of an unborn child, by the choice of its mother, through the agency of a doctor, and with the blessing of the state? What could be more hypocritical than to speak of "terminating a pregnancy," when the child is squirming in agony and perhaps, on being removed from the womb before death, crying?
This (and I apologize for the unpleasantness) is at the core of the anti- abortion movement...
But the "single" issue is, as I argue in one of these essays, more accurately described as crucial: other issues revolve around it. The debate about abortion is really the kind of debate America shies away from: a debate about what man is, and about what society should be.
...I have found that the abortion issue has so many ramifications that it can't possibly remain isolated. Time and again when I thought everything there was to say had been said, new and vital considerations came to the fore, The Court's disruption of life rippled outward to disrupt the family: it ruled that women were entitled to get abortions without informing their husbands, and teenage girls without informing their parents. The Court's very willingness to assert these things implied something deeply ominous: that the state could redefine family relations, as well as life itself, at its whim.
All these issues converge in the abortion issue. Just what is being killed when the tiniest human embryo is destroyed? Do we dare to say it is nothing? Do we dare to risk assuming the role of enemies of creation? The very act of abortion implies something grave about the whole universe. If it is not wrong, then what can be right? Do we exist in a void in which nothing matters? Is the whole sense of piety--the motive of so much important human action, in history and in our daily lives--deluded?
All these questions and more are felt to be at stake by the millions of people (many of them unattached to formal religions) who recoil from the idea of permitting casual abortion, let alone defining it as a "right." Under its pretended neutrality, the Court has given a positive answer to the religious question: it has defined us, operationally, as an atheistic people, a people for whom no moral considerations may obstruct the claims of convenience and hedonism assisted by advanced techniques of killing.
The anti-abortion movement refuses to accept that definition of America. This is the heart of the issue. Those of us who oppose abortion, morally and legally, are trying to keep alive the very idea of piety--man's subordination to creation and the Creator--at a time when we are being seduced with false promises of power over creation, society, each other. We are arguing that human embryos have souls; we are even arguing that abortionists have souls.
(Here's the complete essay.)
