WEEKLY COLUMN:
JDM vs the WORLD

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FINE PRINT

A few short hours after speaking one-on-one with Alan Keyes, I arrived as planned at the Amnion fundraising dinner to hear his keynote speech. Given his reputation, I was anxious to experience his “live act”—and I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. But by the time I arrived at the Springfield Country Club, I was consumed not only by an eagerness to hear more from Dr. Keyes but also by what I’d already heard. Our discussion had, indeed, inspired me. Even as I chowed down on the main course, chicken, Dr. Keyes’ words played over and over—“higher than human choice,” “murder is murder,” “we’re all created by God”—in my mind.

And so, too, had I concluded abortion is America’s greatest error in judgment since slavery. “I’m not sure that’s the issue at stake,” Dr. Keyes had told me. But I was convinced.

Before Dr. Keyes took the floor, we heard from a man whose daughter got pregnant while in high school. This man said he and his wife were so confused at one point that they considered kicking their child—their own flesh and blood—out of the house. The irony here is not without texture. Abortion is its own sort of exile. His daughter ended up having the child, however, and it was a boy.

An unwanted or unexpected pregnancy doesn’t just affect a pregnant woman, you see, but also her soon-to-be daughter or son. It affects her parents. It affects the parents of the young man who got her pregnant, and, indeed, the young man himself (whether he stays for the struggle or not). In an indirect way, it even affects couples waiting to adopt baby boys like the one this man’s daughter gave birth to.

So while it would be simplistic to say abortion is ever seen as “an easy way out,” it’s easy to see why people might think it’s a be-all, end-all solution. Abortion seems to offer a final answer to all of the issues, all of the questions, and all of the problems all at once. But in “solving” one crisis, it creates a bunch more.

For example, the next speaker that evening—a woman—came to the podium in tears. She spent the first several minutes wiping her face and whispering “thank you, thank you, thank you,” but finally regained her composure and said, “Abortion is a pleasant euphemism for murder.”

“I had killed my daughter,” she went on to reveal, and it led to “the death of my emotions and my mental functioning.” This happened when she was 16-years-old, and by the age of 23 she was considered mentally ill. Doctors told her she had “an overdeveloped conscience,” but that she’d done “the right thing” aborting. But she so struggled with doing “the right thing” that she remained incapacitated for ten years, in which time she received Social Security and Medicare benefits totaling $650,000.

As she spoke, I found myself thinking what I often think of government spending. That is, that the government didn’t spend this money because it cared about the woman’s welfare, but because, in so doing, it gobbled up yet a little more power from the people. Taxpayers had but two options, after all: (1) Pay for her treatments; or (2) Go directly to jail.

I know that sounds callous, but I think there’s a point to be made here.

I mentioned slavery earlier. If you’re anything like me, you attended public schools for 13 years and somehow never learned that slavery ended peacefully in many countries just years before the Civil War. Of course, I come from Jersey, where even the Founding Fathers aren’t safe from revisionist school boards. But the point is, we ended one contradiction to freedom—slavery—with a series of further contradictions. Big Gov’t solutions, I mean, like military conscription, the suspension of habeas corpus, the silencing of presses, and the introduction of income taxes. So slaves are free now, and thank God for that, but 600,000 black and white Americans died in a war that, again, didn’t necessarily have to happen to bring slavery to its demise.

And that’s not to say it wasn’t worth freeing the slaves. It was. But the same Big Gov’t that the Civil War gave us persists to this day, running schools that teach children—like yours truly, once upon a time—its one-sided view of said war. The point I’m trying to make here is that when we treat liberty irresponsibly, we create problems that threaten to destroy it.

(Thus, we speak of “enduring freedom” these days while making war on shoes and library cards.)

Now, to be sure, this woman at the Amnion dinner wasn’t proud of her $650,000 in State-mandated handouts. “The younger a woman is when she decides to kill her baby,” she said, “the harder it is for her to make decisions throughout her life.” But isn’t that just what Big Gov’t wants? Whether it’s owning a gun, wearing a seatbelt, smoking a cigarette, or eating at Mickey D’s—the fewer decisions you make on your own, the more the government gets to make for you.

When Dr. Keyes took the floor that evening, he spoke candidly about the post-September 11th era, noting how we said “God bless America” with such confidence when the Twin Towers fell. But that’s when he said something that shook me. He said, “Did it ever occur to us to ask: Can God bless America?”

Think about that.

What does he mean, can God bless America? Of course He can, can’t He? He’s God. He can do anything He wants! And besides, we sing the song.

But Dr. Keyes was onto something.

“The evil that we fight is but the shadow of the evil that we do,” he said. Abortion and terrorism “represent the exact same principle.” And we need not experience a 9/11 to know terror firsthand. Indeed, a “walk down to the local abortion clinic” will put us face-to-face with an evil that’s claimed “scores of millions of lives in the course of its reign.”

The math is frightening. Nine-Eleven slaughtered 3,000 souls. Abortion has taken more than 40 million in the 30 years since Roe v. Wade. You can talk about health exceptions all you want, but 40 million abortions in 30 years constitutes an awful lot of problems with “health.” Every day for three decades running, we have exceeded, on average, the terrorists’ single-day toll—aborting folks who haven’t yet got the cognitive skills or vocal cords to launch a redress of grievances.

But, then, that depends on your definition of life, doesn’t it? Some say a fetus is just a mass of tissue. Again, though, that’s what we said about slaves. We declared them incomplete people so as not to be bothered with respecting their rights.

Still, as Dr. Keyes pointed out, we thought ourselves righteous when terror struck on 9/11, not just because we were victims but because we thought we were pure in heart and mind. We weren’t the ones aiming for women and children. We weren’t the ones making “guided missiles” out of airplanes. The ideas alone seemed foreign to us; we weren’t taught to think that way.

But the terrorist, Dr. Keyes said, had a different point of view. The terrorist saw everything. He saw the fuel he’d need to maximize the explosion. He saw the flight patterns. He saw the cockpit door. The terrorist “saw it all,” Dr. Keyes said, “but he didn’t see the people.” Why? Because of “a willingness to disregard the claims of innocent human life.”

Much the same, we see many sides to abortion. We see choice. We see privacy, health, and the apparent right to shirk responsibility. We see everything, but we fail to see the people that the unborn become. Their youthful ambitions and indiscretions. Their goals of becoming vets and astronauts. The tea parties they’ll host. The tree houses they’ll build. Curiosity. Discovery. Prom night. Heartbreak. Hopes. Dreams.

We don’t see it all. We see what we want to see.

And in this way we’re no better than terrorists and tyrants abroad.

Eventual scientific breakthroughs aside, there exists but one formula for human life. No doubt, you know the details by now. Yet we play games with when it is and isn’t all right to kill children. Forget about trimesters: Andrea Yates drowned five kids and N.O.W. came to her defense.

Condoleezza Rice once called slavery “America’s birth defect.” How fitting, then, that the rights once denied to slaves are now denied to the unborn. While we erect whole statues to commemorate our liberty, and while we’re so bold to suggest terrorists attacked us out of jealousy, our respect for the “unalienable rights” of “all men” remains at best arbitrary. If liberty is “the power of choice,” as defined by Merriam-Webster, one’s forced to wonder if we deserve that power based on the things we choose.

Though I’ve never been comfortable talking about abortion, I decided to interview Dr. Keyes on the subject anyway. I was frank with him. I explained how I avoided the issue because it never seemed to go anywhere.

“That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’ve ever heard one,” he shot back. “Evil has induced you to think in a way that good cannot succeed.”

So, too, has death induced us to think in a way that life is not always worth living.

Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic practiced eugenics and ethnic cleansing in the same spirit that leads us to choose abortion. The Chinese, with their one-child-per-family population control policy, kill off baby girls much the same. How can we go around the world preaching democracy with a straight face when we routinely silence the voices of inconvenient people back home?

That the “family is under assault,” Dr. Keyes told me, is emblematic of “an even more fundamental assault… to drive God out of public life.”

I would go one step further. I would argue the State believes it is our God now, and I would argue it’s a vengeful God at will. The family was our first line of defense against oppression, but we have traded marriage for divorce, stable families for open relationships, school choice for compulsory brainwashing, self-control for Social Security, and life itself for death. We have failed to heed Ben Franklin’s warning on swapping liberty for security. We’ve forfeited responsibility and stand to lose both.

Moms and dads are becoming obsolete now. The Nanny State is replacing them. The American dream is over, but keep sleeping, child. Go back to bed!

So the question stands: Can God bless America? Should He? Will He? Try writing your senator. Maybe he’ll know.

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