I recently attended a "meet and greet" in my city with U.S Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH) who is a candidate for U. S. Senate this year. The Congressman talked about a great many things: healthcare, the wars, education, the deficits, and mounting national debt among them. One thing that stands out in my memory, however, is his pledge to be "100 percent pro-choice."
He will not tolerate any restriction on a woman’s right to choose. "Not on my watch. Over my dead body," he said to applause from the friendly audience.
I thought of offering to help make arrangements for his dead body, since I know some funeral directors in my neighborhood who would be happy to have his business. But the Congressman’s body is not the issue. It will, in all likelihood, become dead in due time from natural causes. It will not meet death by being torn limb form limb, with the severed limbs thrown out with the rubbish. No, that is fate the Paul Hodes courageously defends for infants unwanted by their natural parents. Because he is "pro-choice." Later, I asked a member of the audience, someone who is also running for public office this year, if he endorsed that 100 percent, unqualified support for the "choice" of aborting or not aborting.
"Yes," said the gentleman, who, like Hodes, is a lawyer. "I’m a Roman Catholic, but this is a religious issue."
Really? It reminded me of a time many years ago, when a young priest, not long out of seminary, was substituting at my home parish while the pastor was on vacation. The visiting priest told me he did not know where he stood on abortion. It was only a few years after Humanae Vitae and the dust hadn’t yet settled. I assumed the young priest had majored in confusion at the seminary and had received his degree, not standing out from the rest.
But I will never forget the reaction of a devout Latin Mass Catholic and the father of 11 children.
"JEEEsus!" he roared in utter disbelief. "Were does he stand on grand larceny?"
Well, I didn’t ask, but I’m sure the young priest was "personally opposed" to grand larceny. But if the U.S. Supreme Court were to rule that laws against larceny fall disproportionately on the poor and the ethically challenged, thus impeding their progress our of poverty, the office-seeker with whom I spoke might say that while he realizes there is a commandment against stealing, that is "a religious issue" and he would be opposed to placing any legal limits on opportunities for larceny.
Ridiculous, you say? No one would endorse legalizing larceny. No, of course not. We respect money in 21st century America. We no longer respect human life. Who would have thought, back before Roe v. Wade became the "law of the land," that dissecting infants in their mothers’ wombs, or even partially out of the womb, would become perfectly acceptable, not only to the morally degenerate among us, but to Congressmen and candidates for U.S. Senate? Or is that a distinction without a difference? Who would have that a baby born with Down’s syndrome, whose parents had decided he would not have a "meaningful life," would be left to starve to death by the hospital authorities, with court approval?
Suppose the Supreme Court were to rule that physical or psychological abuse of infants and toddlers by their parents were a matter of privacy, concerning which no state may legislate, save within the parameters prescribed by the high priests and priestesses of the high court. Would we then say that moral scruples about child abuse are a "religious issue" and the state must maintain strict neutrality?
But no, we know our leaders’ sensibilities would not tolerate child abuse. But they not only accept, they defend feticide and even infanticide as a matter of "choice." They defend it as something that will not be restricted "on my watch," because it would be "over my dead body."
"We cannot build a more peaceful world by killing one another’s children," said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Or, we might add, by killing our own. The pro-death politicians and the people who support them have had their way over an estimated 50 million dead bodies. As we observe the 37th anniversary of that Roe v. Wade decision, moral depravity is but another name for the age in which we live and the politics we support with our votes.
