Recently I was invited to speak at a fundraiser organized by Lifespan, a right-to-life group in Michigan.  I am not ordinarily a pro-life speaker, having written relatively little on the subject, but I was challenged by the topic that activist Sue Ducharme asked me to reflect on. 

Here is the problem.  Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the pro-life movement has been laboring mightily to overturn abortion on demand.  It has won some small victories: a restriction against partial birth abortion, some parental notification laws, a couple of significant court appointments. 

Even so, America continues to have some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world.  The pro-life movement has made some progress in its arguments, shifting the center of debate, yet it has failed to put even a dent in Roe v. Wade and successor rulings.  Three and a half decades after Roe, the abortion casualty toll approaches a staggering 50 million. 

"If our pro-life case is so good," Sue Ducharme asked me, "why aren't we winning?"

It doesn't make sense to argue, I told the guests at the Lifespan dinner, that many Americans remain doubtful that the unborn are human persons with rights.  Even if this is true, in a case of this importance, you have to give the unborn the benefit of the doubt.  If a hunter sees something move behind a branch and isn't sure whether it's animal or a human being, is it reasonable for him to go ahead and shoot? 

Moreover, it seems particularly bizarre for liberal Democrats whose chief political virtue is compassion to be such champions of abortion rights.  These are people who are able to produce moist eyes for just about every excluded and vulnerable group in the world.  They feel the pain of the seals, they grieve over sex trafficking in Asia, and they are inconsolable over the plight of the children in Darfur.  These causes produce in them genuine indignation and mobilize them to defensive action.  Why then do the unborn right in their own communities inspire no similar compassionate concern? 

The "pro-choice" slogan offers no explanation, because of course the legitimacy of choice obviously depends on the question of what is being chosen.  Abraham Lincoln exposed this argument a century and a half ago.  He argued that if Negroes are hogs, then there can be no question that people have the choice to buy and sell them.  On the other hand, Lincoln contended, if Negroes are human beings, then how can one invoke choice in order to deny choice to other human beings?  Lincoln's argument is that choice cannot be defended without regard to the content of choice. 

Why then, in the face of its abominably bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically?  My answer is that abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution.  We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century, and there is a widespread social understanding, especially acute among elites, that if there is going to be sex outside of marriage, there are going to be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies.  Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution for this social problem.

In order to have a sexual revolution, women have to have the same sexual autonomy as men.  This ideology, however, is contradicted by the laws of biology.  Consequently feminists like Gloria Steinem and Shulamith Firestone, who championed the sexual revolution, found it necessary to denounce pregnancy as a kind of outside invasion of the female body.  The fetus became, in Firestone's phrase, an "uninvited guest."  As long as the fetus occupied the mother's womb, these activists argued, the mother should be able to keep or get rid of it at her discretion.

If you're going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs.  By the same token, if you're going to have a sexual revolution, you've got to be ready to clean out the debris.  After thirty five years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society we are still adding bodies to the heap.

No one in the pro-choice camp, of course, wants to admit any of this.  It's not only politically embarrassing, it is also embarrassing to one's own self-image to acknowledge a willingness to sustain permissive sexual values by killing the unborn.  Despite the lack of public candor, however, my analysis might help to explain why otherwise compassionate people fight so tenaciously against the most helpless and vulnerable of all living creatures, the unborn. 

It is bad enough to be losing politically; it is worse not even to know why you are losing.  If I am on the right track, it follows that pro-life arguments are not likely to succeed simply by stressing for the umpteenth time the humanity of the fetus.  The opposition already knows all this.  Rather, the pro-life movement must take into account the larger cultural context of the sexual revolution that, invisibly but surely, sustains the triumphant advocates of abortion.  It is time to go back to the drawing board.

Recent headlines about infidelity among high profile couples are symptomatic of the sexual revolution that harms children the most

In this week's TIME cover article, Unfaithfully Yours, Caitlin Flanagan explores the corrosive effect of infidelity and asks what it will take to make marriage matter again.

"America's obsession with high-profile marriage flameouts — the Gosselins and the Sanfords and the Edwardses — reflects a collective ambivalence toward the institution: our wish that we could land ourselves in a lasting union, mixed with our feeling of vindication, or even relief, when a standard bearer for the "traditional family" fails to pull it off. This is ultimately self-defeating. It is time instead to come to terms with both our unrealistic expectations for a happy marriage and our equally unrealistic beliefs about the consequences of walking away from the families we build. (See pictures of classic weddings on LIFE.com.)

The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it? If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren't many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.

Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation's own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives — that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.

Who is left to ensure that these kids grow up into estimable people once the Mark Sanfords and other marital frauds and casual sadists have jumped ship? The good among us, the ones who are willing to sacrifice the thrill of a love letter for the betterment of their children. 'His career is not a concern of mine,' says Jenny Sanford. 'He'll be worrying about that, and I'll be worrying about my family and the character of my children.'

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1908243,00.html

Episcopal Bishops gathered in Anaheim this week move toward ordination of gay bishops and blessing same sex unions by overturning current moratorium

“The election of the Bishop of New Hampshire, the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, created an apparently irreconcilable rift between liberal and traditional Anglicans.

Liberals believe the Bible should be reinterpreted in the light of contemporary wisdom.

Traditionalists insist that it unequivocally outlaws homosexuality.

To avoid expulsion from the Communion, the Episcopal Church agreed a temporary ban on the ordination of gay bishops.

But, impatient for change, its General Convention meeting in Anaheim, California, voted on Monday to end the moratorium.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams - who is head of the 70-million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion - said it ‘remained to be seen’ whether the vote by the House of Deputies - made up of clergy and lay people - would be endorsed by the US Episcopal House of Bishops.

‘I regret the fact that there is no will to observe the moratorium in such a significant part of the church in North America,’ he added.

BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8149248.stm

Alfred Kinsey hid under the guise of scientific research to unravel societal sexual mores and spawn the sexual revolution

"Alfred Kinsey and others who were actively striving to overturn traditional morality were successful in part because they packaged their message as scientific truth even though their facts were riddled with error. However, it is also clear that, shocking though their ideas were, their message was what many in society wanted to hear. Kinsey's books advanced the flawed concept that if everyone else is doing it, it must be okay. Many of those who previously had held back gained a sense of permission from this faulty line of reasoning.

In addition, by mid-century, the authority of religion had to a great extent been superseded by the authority of science. Thus Kinsey's pronouncements fell on the fertile ground of a society whose moral underpinnings were a mere shell with no solid core of conviction. Many, even among religious leaders, had come to view biblical teachings as merely human ideas. Thus the Bible's commands with respect to sexual conduct were seen as a set of arbitrary, humanly devised taboos rather than divinely revealed laws to guide humanity through a potentially difficult area of life.

Kinsey's reports and the efforts of those who used his material as a basis for their own arguments ultimately generated the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s. As Jones pointed out in the preface of his biography: 'Kinsey deserves a place in our thoughts when we ponder individuals who helped change their times. More than any other American of the twentieth century, he was the architect of a new sensibility about a part of life that everyone experiences and no one escapes. Kinsey was the high priest of sexual liberation.'"

John C. Anderson
visionmedia.org

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1908243,00.html

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