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 Beyond
Pro-life, fighting the Whole Cultural War
By John Horvat
II
In the Cultural War, the fight over abortion
is one of the fronts where the battle rages most fiercely.
It is no surprise that many rally with great fervor to this
cause that transcends borders in our increasingly borderless
world.
Thus, there are many reasons to be enthusiastic
supporters of this noble cause that defends those very ones
who have no one to come to their aid.
Perhaps the first reason worth of mention
is its amazing capacity to unite. It really could not be
any other way. The brutality of the abortion act is such
that it is not a matter of being Catholic or American or
another nationality. It is enough to be human to be against
abortion. Our very nature cries out against this crime.
Another reason for enthusiasm is the pro-life
cause’s amazing capacity to stir up passion. Rarely
has there been an issue in America that has given rise to
such a monumental grassroots action network.
The angry left simply cannot compete with
it. They do not have the prayerful dedication and quiet
heroism of pro-lifers who day in/day out take this fight
to the sidewalks and make of it a true crusade.
A Capacity
to Win
Finally, the pro-life cause has an amazing capacity to win.
For those who want to see, pro-life advocates have pummeled
pro-abortion radicals over the years.
One only needs to consider the states reduced to a single
abortion clinic or the unavailability of abortion in ninety
percent of American counties. Abortion clinics are closing
not opening. Their total number stands at their lowest level
since 1987.1 Doctors and nurses
to staff them are becoming increasingly hard to find and
keep.
Meanwhile, youth swell the ranks of the
pro-life movement. The support of bishops and religious
is now widespread. Opinion on abortion is shifting toward
life.
In addition, state legislatures have enacted literally hundreds
of abortion restrictions. Some states are now pushing through
legislation that will lead to a head-on collision with Roe
v. Wade.
The pro-abortion movement is losing ground
everywhere for those who wish to see. Only the cold cynicism
of the major media can look at over 150,000 people at the
annual March for Life and some dozens of counter-protesters
and conclude that “abortion activists on both sides
of the issue were out in full force.” 2
A Single Reservation
Thus, while there are many reasons for enthusiasm for the
pro-life cause, there is room for a single reservation.
The issue may have an amazing capacity to unite, stir up
great passion and even be winning. However, it also has
the amazing tendency to reduce the whole Cultural War to
abortion. And it is not the whole war.
Resolving the abortion issue, we may win
a major battle but not the Cultural War. We must resist
the idea that, without abortion, we can retreat to a kind
of Mayberry where we can babyboom once again and everything
will go back in order. Unless we broaden the fight to include
the full cultural spectrum, we will not prevail.
To find further proof that the battle extends
beyond the abortion issue, we need look no farther than
the very people the pro-life cause amazingly manages to
unite.
The list is very diverse: libertarians,
feminists, rockers, punks, atheists, agnostics, Greens and
even pagans for life. Take away the uniting principle of
life and we are left with groups that in varying degrees
have agendas that oppose the Christian civilization that
we so ardently desire. Winning the pro-life battle only
throws us into another cultural battle with our temporary
strategic allies.
Finally, the grave moral crises that cause
abortion must be addressed. Abortion takes place because
of promiscuity, immorality, a contraceptive mentality and
the breakdown of the family. Just closing down all the clinics
will not provide a definitive solution to these causes of
abortion.
Going Beyond
Pro-Life
All these issues force us to go “beyond pro-life.”
And the first way to do this is to go beyond the vague notion
of “life” as our unifying principle.
Indeed, in the natural order, man’s
inviolable right to life is the first right and therefore
the basis for all others. However, this does not mean that,
on order to maintain life, we can pass over the values that
give meaning to life. Many things are worth more than life
itself.
Honor and country are more than life and
that is why we have national heroes. Principle often eclipses
life. This is the case of personal self-defense which takes
the life of a dangerous aggressor or the mother who gives
her life for her child when complications develop during
pregnancy. As Catholics, we know that, in the supernatural
order, the Faith is more important and that is why we have
the martyrs.
Adopting “life” as a unifying
principle risks putting ourselves with those who put life
above principles, honor and Faith. It can also put us under
the almost biological understanding of “life”
of pacifists, ecologists and animal rights activists.
A Unifying
Principle
We must find another banner that can unify us in
the pro-life struggle and still encompass the whole Cultural
War. By defining our enemies’ unifying principle,
we can define our own.
We like to portray pro-abortion radicals
as pro-death promoting a culture of death. We label their
clinics as death camps and their sidewalk activists as "deathscorts."
All such descriptions are indeed true. However, the other
side chooses as their unifying principle not death but rather
what they call themselves – pro-choice.
And this “choice” means freedom
from rules, morals or restraints. An unlimited choice is
what unifies the radicals of the Cultural War. Thus, they
display a consistent unity favoring not only abortion but
any other practice – free love, homosexuality, bi-sexuality,
transgenderism or any sexual deviation – that favors
a raging sensuality.
In his book, Revolution and Counter-revolution,
Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira says: “When the
Revolution proclaims absolute liberty as a metaphysical principle,
it does so only to justify the free course of the worst passions
and the most pernicious errors.” 3
In short, their unifying principle is this
“freedom” which is actually a revolt against
moral law ranging from a mild irritation to a rabid fanaticism.
Thus, our unifying principle should explicitly
and proudly declare that in opposing abortion we are defending
true freedom, which is guided by the moral law based on
divine and natural law. Thus, our unifying principle is
the defense of moral law.
Pro-life
means Pro-moral law
Fortunately, this is what the pro-life movement has
done implicitly. Abortion has polarized the nation because
it has become a moral issue that gnaws at the heart of mainstream
America. To continue to be effective, we should explicitly
call abortion what it is – the breaking of God’s
moral Law by the taking of innocent human life.
In his 2004 book Bearing Right: How Conservatives
Won the Abortion War, William Saletan, sustains the pro-life
cause advances because it turns the debate into a moral battle.
He writes: “Many people think that the political struggle
over abortion has been resolved and that feminists have won.
They are mistaken. The people who hold the balance of power
in the abortion debate are those who favor tradition, family
and property.” 4
By turning the issue into a moral battle,
we force the other side to abandon their principles. Mr.
Saletan shows how pro-abortionists of the sixties in fact
abandoned their feminist and sexual liberation roots.
Abortion was supposed to have been a liberating
experience to defy the male chauvinistic world. Today’s
aging women-libbers no longer parade as enthusiastic supporters
of abortion but as embarrassed apologists who must repackage
abortion “rights” to an unreceptive public.
When pro-abortion advocates try to moderate their extremist
message, it only takes them farther away from what unites
them.
In this sense, the pro-life movement’s
greatest victory is that it has made abortion a great moral
battle. Thus, the pro-abortion movement has so compromised
its position that Mr. Saletan claims it “must ask
itself what it has won and what it is fighting for.”
In this battle, who loses is the one who
gives up all his principles first. It is a tug-of-war which,
like all tug-of-wars, is never won by the one who pulls
to the middle but the one who pulls the middle to himself.
Unmasking
“Pro-Choice”
A second way to carry on this struggle “beyond pro-life”
is to extend it to defend the moral law as a whole. The
pro-life movement is a natural bridge to all other issues
involving the moral law.
This consists of unmasking the central
thesis of pro-choice advocates who declare freedom is whatever
a person wants to do. They claim every man is the law to
himself and thus “freedom” exonerates man from
any obedience to the commands of God and His law. Their
“pro-choice” mentality has nothing to do with
freedom but rather substitutes moral law for boundless license.
The pro-life position affirms true freedom
as so clearly explained in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical
Libertas, On the Nature of Human Freedom (1888).
Leo XIII denounced those with this “false
and absurd notion” of freedom. Rather he says that
freedom is the faculty of choosing means fitted for the
end proposed by reason. “When man acts according to
reason, he acts of himself and according to his free will;
and this is freedom.” 5
There are, for example, many ways for a
man to travel to a given city. His reason may propose many
routes and he exercises his freedom by choosing one of them.
However, he might also follow his whims and go in the opposite
direction and lose his way.
When man chooses error, it is a defect
not a quality of freedom. Choosing what is perceived as
a false good is a defect of the mind and a proof of its
imperfection. We have nothing against people being pro-choice,
but we must oppose those who are pro-wrong choice/error.
Choice in this case is a positive formulation of a negative
prerogative, that is, the revolt against God’s law.
Necessity
of Law
Because of this, Pope Leo XIII says human freedom
necessarily needs light and strength to direct man’s
actions to good and to restrain them from evil. Indeed,
without guidance, “the freedom of our will would be
our ruin.”
For this reason, there must be law; “a
fixed rule of teaching on what is to be done and what is
to be left undone.” Law is the guide of man's actions
based on the “the moral necessity of our voluntary
acts being in accordance with reason.”
Therefore, true freedom in society does
not consist in everyone doing what he pleases. This only
would end up in turmoil and confusion. Rather by following
the injunctions prescribed by civil law, true freedom helps
all to more easily conform to the prescriptions of eternal
law.
The Pontiff concludes: “Nothing more
foolish can be uttered or conceived than the notion that,
because man is free by nature, he is therefore exempt from
law.”
Thus, there must be moral law, those fixed
rules of conduct whereby men live together in society, and
have their origin in the natural, and consequently eternal
law. And since this law is valid for all times and all places
– indeed, natural law is written on the soul of every
man – it necessarily follows that our pro-life struggle
embraces more than just abortion but the whole moral law,
so well defined by the traditional teachings of the Church.
Thus, we can go “beyond pro-life”
by embracing not just abortion but all those issues that
involve moral law. This includes social issues like contraception,
euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, homosexual
marriage, free love, divorce, or pornography. It includes
political issues like socialism or communism; or religious
issues like blasphemy. By attacking them, we destroy the
cultural underpinnings of abortion.
In taking this position, we form a proper counterpart to
those on the other end of the spectrum who unify their position
not around death as such, but the elimination of this moral
law and the installation of a regime where every man is
his own law – a state of affairs, which Leo XIII proves,
necessarily ends in tyranny and the suppression of the Church.
Practical
Applications
A third way to go “beyond pro-life” is perhaps
the most difficult since it involves defending this moral
law in our daily lives.
All too often these issues remain just
that – issues – things that happen to other
people. However, as these issues become more widespread,
they soon take on a human face and we are forced to take
a position.
Thus, going “beyond pro-life”
means killing abortion at its source by engaging in the
Cultural War where it permeates all aspects of our lives,
be it arts, advertising, music, fashions, entertainment,
or education.
Let us face the fact that if we are really going to be effective
against abortion, we must rollback the advances of the sexual
revolution of the sixties – that explosion of sensuality
that prepared the way for abortion. We must reject the hypersexualized
MTV culture that loses no opportunity to fuel a culture
without morals, restraint or meaning.
Going “beyond pro-life” means
making those links no one wants to make, those seemingly
innocuous connections that end up destroying our society.
It means taking very seriously those blasphemous
films that are “fiction” yet attack the author
of all law, God Himself. It means rejecting those “innocent”
fashions or the “harmless” music that fuels
the promiscuity that leads to abortion and so many other
woes.
It involves taking a position on those
“normal” things everyone is doing, watching
and wearing. The battlefield is not in some faraway theater
but the cinema down the road or the media connections that
find their way inside our very homes.
It also means encouraging all conservative
and healthy reactions that pose obstacles to this process.
It means patiently broadening the perspectives of others
to see the full extent of this fight.
In other words, it means engaging in a
cultural counter-revolution.
Getting Together
That is why it is essential that people get together
to make this resistance easier. We need to form militant
Catholics who study the principles of our Catholic Faith
and apply them.
We need to find strategic points where we
believe the enemy is vulnerable and network with others to
be more effective. We need to find people who never dared
think about activism and get them involved, as was done against
The Da Vinci Code in 2092 theater protests nationwide.
We invite all to defy our neo-pagan culture
and to embark on what one of the medieval orders of chivalry
called the “most beautiful adventure in the world.”
Against seemingly overwhelming odds,
we must do all this trusting in Providence, knowing that
those who defend God’s law can expect His aid. We
do this with our eyes upon the Blessed Mother who at Fatima
promised us the final victory.
The above article was based on
a talk given at the TFP Student Seminar on January 20, 2007
in Spring Grove, Pensylvania.
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