I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading Charlie Johnson’s ascerbic commentary over the past four years. All of us right-thinkers will always remember Little Green Footballs and the animated gif that destroyed Dan Rather’s career in 24 hours. Charlie appears to be considerably more libertarian in outlook than me, however, and seems to take great delight in lambasting – uncritically – social conservatism whenever possible. His seeming worship of Darwinism (and accompanying attacks on Darwin’s critics) has me scratching my head. Not that I necessarily agree with simple-minded critiques of Darwin, mind you. Rather, it’s the way Charlie responds that makes me uncomfortable. To my mind, vitriol is best used sparingly and humor is always better as an instrument of criticism. That’s why P.J. O’Rourke has been so successful.
So, I was interested to read Charlie’s short comment on P.J. O’Rouke’s new column in the Weekly Standard. P.J.’s column ‘We Blew It’ is, according to Charlie a ‘one of the best election postmortems I’ve read so far’. Charlie quotes P.J. on abortion and highlights one phrase as follows:
In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.
The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.
If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.
‘The law cannot be made identical with morality.’ While I agree generally, I do, however, recognize that law is merely the empty vessel into which we pour our moral assumptions. Many hideous things have been done – even in our own country – by people acting ‘according to law.’ Slavery was practiced ‘according to law’, for example, but I don’t hear anyone denouncing abolitionists today (even though they were ‘single issue’ people). These same abolitionists struggled for decades to swing public opinion – when most people, even in the North, just wished they would shut up and go away.
Certainly, there are many vices that moral people overlook in their neighbors. We can argue how long the list should be and which vices should be proscribed – if any. Abortion, however, is not and never can be merely a private issue, if for no other reason than the left – for very clear reasons – requires unrestricted abortion to complete its quest for temporal godhood. Like P.J., I believe that people are assets and not liabilities but it is more than that: quite apart from theological assumptions about personhood, I know in my bones that if earthly gods can dispose of the unborn by fiat then these same gods can likewise dispose of me. We protect the unborn for our own safety’s sake. And, like slavery, this is an issue that transcends mere tactics and should never be viewed simply as a throwaway in this or that political campaign.
So, yes, Charlie, abortion is one of those issues where law really should be congruent with morality.
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