By PEGGY MOEN
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, three children and two beavers race through the snow in Narnia to escape the evil machinations of the White Witch. The Witch is holding a fourth child, their brother, as a hostage in her castle. She fears they will bring about the return of Aslan the Lion, thus overthrowing her and restoring peace and freedom to the beleaguered magical land.
They hear a sleigh catching up to them, and dive under a bridge. But it is not the Witch in her sleigh, but Father Christmas in his. He comes bearing gifts — gifts that will aid the children in their coming battle with the forces of evil.
Just as the visit from Father Christmas provided the children with a respite in their struggle against the White Witch, The Life Legal Defense Fund dinner, held at the Bloomington Event Center May 20, gave the 150 pro-lifers a pause between the leak of the draft of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe and the upcoming release of the actual decision.
Guests at the dinner were upbeat in view of Roe v. Wade’s likely demise. Also, the news about San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone barring pro-abort U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Communion had just broken. That, too, lifted spirits.
Michigan attorney Michael O. Kenney, JD, LLM, did something even more significant in his multimedia presentation, “The Heart of the Matter: Bringing America Back to Life.” He gave the pro-lifers historical insight into the opposition, largely by comparisons between the anti-slavery movement and the right to life movement.
Kenney has been married for 35 years and he and his wife are the parents of seven children. He earlier worked in Catholic education. His film credits include Unplanned and Pray: The Story of Patrick Peyton. Kenney is on the board of advisers of the Pro-Life Partners Foundation, described as “the wind beneath the wings” of the pro-life movement.
Kenney told his enthusiastic audience that his talk would be “a journey-like experience.”
He recalled Abraham Lincoln’s February 1860 Cooper Union Address in New York City, in which he addressed the South’s “peculiar institution” — slavery — just as Kenney was addressing our present-day “peculiar institution” — abortion.
“The facts with which I deal with this evening are mostly old and familiar,” said Lincoln, “nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts.”
Kenney cited a range of thinkers and a number of seminal historic events to show how deep the battle for life runs, which could explain why it has been so difficult to win.
He quoted G.K. Chesterton: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. . . . It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.”
Kenney noted that the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, followed by the U.S. Constitution in 1787, with Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary a “blueprint ready to be launched” in 1789.
But, at the same time, another revolution was underway in another country: the French Revolution, the “first atheistic revolution,” which de-Christianized France, by exiling thousands of priests and murdering hundreds more.
The French Revolution was therefore very different at heart from the American Revolution.
Kenney, however, cited this cautionary quotation from Pope John Paul II: “Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”
At the time of the Civil War, said Kenney, a moral hero appeared on the scene: Anthony Comstock, a Union Army veteran and a Congregationalist who became a crusader against obscenity. An opponent of contraception, he lobbied successfully for the “Comstock Law,” which banned transporting obscene material through the mail. That ban included transporting contraception.
But in 1914, Margaret Sanger, the great adversary of chastity and of life, launched a publication called The Woman Rebel, which pushed contraception. She was charged under the Comstock Law, but fled the country. Later, she became an advocate of eugenics.
Live Chastely
In his talk, Kenney quoted from two noted writers quite familiar to Wanderer readers.
He displayed on the film screen a quotation from Msgr. Charles Pope, from the 2021 Men’s March for Life in Washington, D.C.:
“85 percent of abortions are committed on single women. . . . Live chastely.”
Kenney also displayed the following from longtime Wanderer columnist Donald DeMarco:
“There is only one way to reduce abortion, and that is to reduce its cause, which is in the contraceptive mentality.”
Kenney also saluted the pioneering work of the late Robert and Mary Rosera Joyce against that mentality.
But the 1965 Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut undercut all that when it struck the state’s Comstock Law banning the sale of contraceptives.
In that decision, Kenney pointed out, the Supreme Court “veered outside the scope of law interpretation.”
In the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he noted, Justice Anthony Kennedy said: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one own’s concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Then, on May 2, 2022 the draft Supreme Court ruling on Roe was leaked. Alito’s draft declared: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
We await the legitimate release of the decision, probably sometime within the next month. We may face witches then and in the meantime, but we look to our great Christian novelists and Catholic thinkers for inspiration and consolation.
The LLDF dinner gave the Defender of Life Award to Jo Tolck of HALO, Health Advocacy and Leadership Organization, and also recognized Marlene Reid, a longtime Twin Cities pro-life activist.
Alexandra Snyder, executive director of LLDF, detailed some of the organization’s work, including the defense of those arrested outside abortion facilities and handling cases of food and water deprivation. See lldf.org for details and to make a donation.
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