By DEXTER DUGGAN
Like many others, observer Robert W. Merry is looking for the answer to “when will the American people rise up politically with a full-throated cry of ‘Give us back our democracy’? That, incidentally, is one of the most powerful recurrent themes of our history.”
At The National Interest journal’s web site on March 24, its political editor, Merry, looking for the rise of “the political volcano,” wrote that “seldom in our history has there been such a gap between the sensibilities of the American people and the willingness of government officials to ignore and trample those sensibilities.”
Also on March 24, at National Review Online, political writer Quin Hillyer reported that “on issue after issue nationwide,” Louisiana conservative Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal says, “I sense that there is a rebellion brewing . . . where people say we want our freedom back.”
One could cite example after example in current commentary of traditionalists saying the fuse is ready; where’s the match?
The word on the cyberstreet is that people are looking for someone ready to put “boots on the boulevard,” determined Americans protesting a tyrannical government.
This is no-how new. Ask Americans in 1776. What finally will set the torch ablaze today?
It’s bad enough that antireligious Barack Obama ignores the Constitution whenever he pleases, and his many media adorers tweet in awe. But Obama has even taken to rewriting the words of the Constitution for what he apparently views as a long-term project to twist government further against its citizens.
If he were merely venal, he’d be content to stuff his suitcases with stolen taxpayer cash for the day of oceanfront retirement. But Obama and his administration speak of Americans being granted “freedom of worship” instead of the very different, and historically constitutionally guaranteed, freedom of religion, a basic concept enshrined in the foundational First Amendment.
As critics note about Obama’s momentous word change, the government is saying Americans still can go inside a building on the weekend to sing hymns, but their religious values must be confined therein. (Just like in Communist China.) Look no further for proof than Obama’s insistence that people must pay for what they morally abhor under Obamacare, argued before the Supreme Court on March 25.
He grants arbitrary health-care waivers as far and frequently as he pleases, but for good Christians like the Little Sisters of the Poor or Mennonites or evangelicals, there’s only the skinny Messiah’s grim refusal.
Moral aggression against people is on a number of fronts, and even in a number of countries. The elites battle to make this nation and the world a morally dirtier, more decadent place.
When the Arizona legislature approved a modest religious-conscience bill in February, blatant falsehoods against the measure thundered throughout a compliantly lying national news media, while corporate corruptocrats direly threatened serious economic punishment of the Grand Canyon State.
This wasn’t civility and tolerance by the elites; this was the mailed fist shaking in rage against any American who still dares to express conscience.
Americans are a better people than to shudder and surrender to these lying fraudsters, whether the thugs go by the name of The New York Times, the National Democratic Party, or Republican corporatists and their political errand boys.
It has been so easy to tear down the walls of tradition since the 1960s. Why wouldn’t the elitists expect to keep getting away with this forever? Perhaps victimized citizens just thought each assault would be the last. But they’ve finally started to awaken to the dimensions of the never-ending war.
Within a couple of decades, “same-sex marriage” has gone from being an unthinkable assault on history and morality to a virtual necessity that everyone must praise and facilitate or else face punishment of personal destruction.
What possibly could be next down the pike? Mandatory cannibalism of aborted babies? Compulsory drowning of practicing Christians? Christian beheadings overseas are reality already. Further fears for the future are no exaggerated conjecture or mere laughing matter because today’s unmoored immorality never tires of new and unlikelier victims to savage.
Against this background, consider the case made in New Yorker Edward Short’s book Culture and Abortion (Gracewing: 2013, $24.95, 277 pp.) that the 20th-century imposition of permissive abortion on the legal systems of the United Kingdom and the United States was madly at variance with the values and traditions of both lands.
Short looks into the lives and works of such figures as Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, and Walker Percy, as well as social reformer William Wilberforce — who seemed to have every reason to give up his fight against slavery but would not — and motherhood in Georgian England.
In both life and literature, the battle is against one adversity or another, bad fortune, bad faith, handicap, illness, cowardice, imprudence, and other challenges. Sometimes one triumphs, sometimes one fails, but that’s the nature of existence. One at least must try. A person who’d face no problems in life likely would dream some up to fill the void.
A mother who wants a good education for her children will do what she can toward that goal. Parents may work additional jobs to help pay family bills.
What kind of macabre society encourages excuse-making of utter futility? I aborted my babies because I didn’t think there was a good school they could attend. I aborted my babies because they wouldn’t get cultural advantages. I aborted my babies because they’d take up my time. I aborted my babies because Obama encouraged me to.
This is a sure social dead end. Oh, that little door in the cul-de-sac leads to the Planned Parenthood chop shop.
Confronting negatives and trying to triumph can be the essence of existence. Killing the unlucky isn’t supposed to be a fundamental right, although Hitler, Stalin, and Mao among 20th-century others gave that a whirl.
The Network Of Complicity
Toward the end of Culture and Abortion, noting U.S. and British governments’ more recent degradations of human dignity, Short laments that “the Servile State is beginning to take full control of its tragically docile citizenry.”
One may only hope that Americans’ defiant stirrings noted above mean the docility is about at an end. Americans’ character is hardly one of deference to oppression.
Coming as it did in the wake of the National Socialists’ Holocaust against unwanted life, the pro-abortionists’ 20th-century crusade is especially inexcusable, Short reminds us. Nor can they evade the power and unmistakable evidence of ultrasonography.
One can imagine God saying: All right, in all charity and patience I will grant you pro-abortionists the assumption that you never really understood what you were about. So now I’m sending you the graphic scientific evidence of the horrors you’re doing.
And what did most pro-abortionists and their prideful media enablers do? Hide their eyes and hide the evidence. Continuing the slaughter is too precious to their cause.
One can only wonder how many more decades they get before God decides their defiance is beyond all endurance, even His.
To be sure, even some of the most dedicated pro-abortionists like New York pioneer Bernard Nathanson, MD, did repent of their ways when shown the evidence, as Short notes. Nathanson is a powerful example of someone who’d stumbled onto the road to Hell through well-meaning inadvertence but had the wisdom to change directions when shown the roadmap.
Too many others can’t admit their errors even though the flames at the end of the highway to Hell grow ever closer.
Short includes a passage from Catholic convert and Southerner Walker Percy suggesting wryly that Ku Klux Klan members “are not bad fellows actually, at least hereabouts, except when it comes to blacks, Jews, and Catholics.”
But might that not be the case with many people potentially imperiling their souls? Maybe the Planned Parenthood abortionist got a university degree, knows a lot about Greek history, helped some people down on their luck, and can cook up a weekend feast, but just happens to maim women and kill 20 babies daily. Should he wonder why he vaguely sees flames down at the end of his roadway? May God judge as He knows best.
Drawing toward the end of his book, Short quotes Blessed John Paul II on “the network of complicity” including international institutions and associations to spread abortion around the world. The reader in 2014 certainly must think of the work of Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton to this end.
To John Paul, this defiance of goodness meant “we are facing an immense threat to life: not only to the life of individuals but also to that of civilization itself.”
As I write this on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, it’s surely more than coincidence that Short holds up John Paul citing the message of reassurance by the angel to Mary on this very feast: Be not afraid. With God nothing will be impossible.
Neither to a Jewish virgin of long ago nor concerned Americans now.
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