When Linking Abortion with Other Violence Comes Naturally to Pro-lifers
(compiled by Rachel MacNair)
Part 1: Connections
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One common criticism of the consistent life ethic is the idea that, when opposing abortion, adding other issues is intended to be a way of watering down abortion, and giving politicians (especially Catholic politicians) a pass by letting them proclaim themselves good on other issues even if they’re bad on abortion.
Consistent lifers have responded that declaring abortion to be an issue of violence to be treated like other issues of violence strengthens the case against abortion. Instead of giving a pass, we’re challenging the politicians: if you’re good on other issues, why aren’t you consistent by opposing abortion as well?
But there’s another important point: independent of considering the consistent life ethic, right-to-lifers themselves often find it natural to use other issues of violence to explain how very important it is to oppose abortion. Here we offer a few examples.
Carol Tobias
President, National Right to Life Committee
Societies that have come down on the side of life have generally thrived, their citizens enjoying a better chance of living good and fulfilling lives. Societies that have chosen to disregard the basic right to life have almost universally broken down into chaos and cynicism. Chaos like the kind we’ve seen in recent acts of senseless mass violence . . .
The fight for the right to life is so much bigger than the media will admit . . . it’s also about what kind of society we and our children will spend our lives in.Can we trust that our laws and customs and popular culture will nurture the value of each of the people we care about – young and old? Or are we just disposable “products,” liable to be killed or left to die because an abortionist, or a terrorist, or a bureaucrat trying to cut costs in a national health care program wants us dead?
E-mail message, April 16, 2013 – “Every Human Life is Precious”
We also understand that the fight for the Right to Life follows certain historical patterns of other great causes before us.
So we understand that when we pass a law to ban late abortions in one of the states, we are paralleling our historical cousins who passed laws to end slavery in their states. When we see abortion numbers fall sharply, we know we are saving lives just as other noble charitable projects worked to reduce life-stealing hunger and disease.
E-mail message, February 2, 2016
Mark Crutcher
Life Dynamics
In a roundtable conversation, Mark is discussing Republicans who think the abortion issue should be toned down.
These guys say we ought to separate the “moral” issues from the “economic” issues . . . [Prochoicers] don’t have the moral foundation to make these economic decisions . . . What these guys ought to be saying is, even if we don’t care about abortion . . . we ought to be willing to at least use that as a barometer for what kind of economic decisions they’ll make. . . The military. If you think that going to war doesn’t have moral components to it, you’re nuts. And if we say we don’t want to deal with these moral issues, we want to deal with the money and the military and the terrorism – if you don’t apply morals to those issues, you’ve lost your mind.
LifeTalk News, October 1, 2010
Life Talk News: Troy Newman, Rev. Johnny Hunter, Fr. Frank Pavone, Jill Stanek, Mark Crutcher.
Mark has criticized the consistent life ethic, but Johnny and Frank are supporters.
Richard M. Doerflinger
Former Director, Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Where did we get this corrosive climate, in which people can ignore contrary arguments about any issue simply by asserting the worthlessness of any human being who gets in the way of their own goals and desires? Theories will differ. Personally I would offer this: We have had one of the world’s most extreme policies allowing the destruction of unexpected or inconvenient unborn children for over four decades now. . . We are the only Western nation that still regularly uses the death penalty as a response to crime. In recent decades there have been powerful and well-funded campaigns, successful in five states and the District of Columbia, to have society declare that a good way to get rid of the problems of terminally ill patients is to assist them in getting rid of themselves . . . . Isn’t it likely that these developments have led some people to think they have a right to treat inconvenient other people as worthless compared to themselves?
A Distinctive Catholic Vision for Politics
Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life
Peace is more than the absence of war. The foundation of peace is justice, that everyone’s rights are protected and everyone’s dignity is recognized. . . . To fight abortion, therefore, is one of the ways that we work for peace. Abortion completely oppresses and diminishes the rights of the child who is killed. Rather than fostering right relationships, it destroys them, starting with the most basic relationship between a mother and her own child.
William Brennan
Author
From Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives
(The second edition has a different sub-title: The War of Words Against the Victims)
A remarkable strain of consistency permeates the language employed to highlight the human and spiritual nature of individuals and groups subjected to massive victimization. The contemporary opponents of abortion and euthanasia rely on the same range of positive expressions to defend the unwanted unborn and born of today that were used to defend Native Americans, African Americans, Soviet people, Jews, women, and other targets of past oppression.
From Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives
(The second edition has a different sub-title: The War of Words Against the Victims)
Added 09.30.25:
Lila Rose
Yale Political Union tightening security after Kirk assassination
by Orion Kim, Staff Reporter,, Yale News, Sep 17, 2025 quoting Lila Rose of Live Action in a debate at Yale University
In a claim that drew many hisses from the audience, [Lila Rose] compared abortion to historical examples of people being deemed “subhuman,” including Jews during the Holocaust, slavery, and Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
“When you strip people of their humanity, you open the door to every kind of violence,” she declared.
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Part 2: Consistency, focuses on the other direction: how opposing other kinds of violence strengthens the case against abortion.
For a set of quotations from abortion doctors, nurses, and sympathizers that link abortion to war (as a way of justifying abortion), see Is Abortion Against Peace Principles?
See our blog posts for more sets of quotations:
Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills
Recognizing Humanity: Orwell and the Consistent Life Ethic
by John Whitehead
We’re 70 years from the publication of one of the 20th century’s most influential books: 1984. George Orwell’s 1949 novel about future life under an extremely repressive regime has shaped political debate and popular culture for decades. The novel’s anniversary will doubtless prompt further reflections. I reflect on Orwell’s concern for defending human dignity against many threats—a concern that resembled the consistent ethic of life.
George Orwell didn’t accept the ethic as the Consistent Life Network understands it, since he supported war, even serving in the 1930s as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. While Orwell’s views on war were complex (and deserve separate treatment), he wasn’t a peace advocate.
Nevertheless, his writings criticize other threats to life. The book 1984 is famous for its portrayal of cruelty and misery inflicted by government tyranny. Orwell’s other writings also criticize abortion, the death penalty, racism, and poverty.
A recurring motif in Orwell’s writings is a moment when, amid conditions that de-humanize victims of oppression and violence, someone recognizes the victim’s humanity. As our member group Rehumanize International might put it, these are moments of re-humanization in unlikely situations. Such vivid moments turn up repeatedly in Orwell’s writing.
The Humanity of the Poor
Being a democratic socialist who spent significant periods living among and observing poor people, poverty was probably Orwell’s greatest concern. His book The Road to Wigan Pier documents the lives of coal miners and other working-class people in northern England. A famous passage describes Orwell’s sight, from a passing train, of one woman:
As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that “It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us”, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
The Humanity of the Colonized
Orwell opposed British imperialism partly because he had once helped serve it. During 1922-1927, he was a police officer in the British colony of Burma (present-day Myanmar). These first-hand experiences of Empire contributed to his anti-imperialism in later writings. During a trip to Morocco (then a French colony), Orwell described how a person’s humanity can be obscured by racism—and cross-examines his own attitudes:
When you walk through a town like this—two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in—when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces—besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names?
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood…and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing—that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight.
“Marrakech,” 1939
The Humanity of the Condemned
The 1931 essay “A Hanging” describes an execution Orwell allegedly witnessed. Some dispute the story’s accuracy, but even if fiction, it still evokes horror at capital punishment and empathy for the person executed.
Walking with the condemned to the gallows, Orwell writes
I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me…And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery…His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.
The Humanity of the Preborn
Pro-lifers are stereotypically viewed in the United States as political conservatives, strongly religious, and usually Catholic. Orwell matched none of these stereotypes, being a socialist who wasn’t religious (and who intensely disliked Catholicism). Nevertheless, an early, lesser-known novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, conveys the humanity of the preborn as powerfully as any pro-life leaflet.
The protagonist, Gordon, and his girlfriend Rosemary are confronted with her unexpected pregnancy. As they discuss whether to marry, she mentions “another way,” saying it could be “done for only five pounds.”
That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words “a baby” took on a new significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers…Though they were feet apart he felt as though they were joined together—as though some invisible living cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating—a blasphemy, if that word has any meaning.
Gordon goes to the public library and looks up fetal development. He tries to calculate how old the child would be and find the corresponding pictures:
He came on a print of a nine weeks foetus. It gave him a shock to see it, for he had not expected it to look in the least like that. It was a deformed, gnomelike thing, a sort of clumsy caricature of a human being, with a huge domed head as big as the rest of its body. In the middle of the great blank expanse of head there was a tiny button of an ear. The thing was in profile; its boneless arm was bent, and one hand, crude as a seal’s flipper, covered its face—fortunately, perhaps…It was a monstrous thing, and yet strangely human. It surprised him that they should begin looking human so soon. He had pictured something much more rudimentary; a mere blob with a nucleus, like a bubble of frog spawn. But it must be very tiny, of course.
Thinking the child might be younger, he turns to a six-weeks picture:
A really dreadful thing this time—a thing he could hardly even bear to look at. Strange that our beginnings and endings are so ugly—the unborn as ugly as the dead…Its huge head, as though too heavy to hold upright, was bent over at right angles at the place where its neck ought to have been. There was nothing you could call a face, only a wrinkle representing the eye—or was it the mouth?…
He pored for a long time over the two pictures. Their ugliness made them more credible and therefore more moving. His baby had seemed real to him from the moment when Rosemary spoke of abortion; but it had been a reality without visual shape—something that happened in the dark and was only important after it had happened. But here was the actual process taking place. Here was the poor ugly thing, no bigger than a gooseberry, that he had created by his heedless act. Its future, its continued existence perhaps, depended on him. Besides, it was a bit of himself—it was himself. Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?
Gordon and Rosemary marry and establish a household together. The novel ends with Rosemary first feeling the child move; Gordon contemplates how “Somewhere in there, in the safe, warm, cushioned darkness, it was alive and stirring.”
Conclusion
Orwell was a great writer who expressed himself with brutal clarity, and without the jargon and euphemisms which so often hide violence. His assertions of people’s humanity in the face of threats from tyranny to poverty, imperialism to abortion, are worth reading and remembering today.
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For more of our posts on literature, see:
Right-to-Life Issues in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Literature
Dickens (Christmas literature)
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Three Nonviolent Lessons from Dr. Who
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
An Example of Why the Peace Movement is in Deep Trouble
by Rachel MacNair
Ego and Anger
Richard Rohr, OFM, is a Franciscan Friar, a prolific author, and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), a CLN member group. One major point made by CAC is that if we take action on nonviolence without contemplation, there’s a danger we’ll bring in ego-centered thoughts and unconstructive anger – which could end up doing more harm than good.
Richard has also been for many years an endorser of our Consistent Life Mission Statement. As he put it:
If we do not have a seamless garment of justice that applies to all of our relationships and all of society, we will not be taken seriously on any individual hot-button issue. If we do not seek and pursue justice across the board, then any concerns for or against issues of abortion, homosexuality, immigration, women’s rights, prison reform, opposition to war, etc., should and will be seen as a small rag that has been torn from any clean or consistent cloth of thinking. It is seen as mere self-interest or angry moralizing.
Daily Meditation, November 19, 2010
Rachel at the CAC conference with a cardboard cut-out of Richard Rohr
The “Action” Part
I went to a CAC conference, “The Universal Christ,” on March 28-31, 2019. I expected there would be, as is normal with 2,300 attenders, a variety of opinions on the consistent life ethic, including people who’d never heard of it. Richard Rohr expounded on the contemplation aspect. Most of the comment on action and specific issues of inclusion came from the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, and she did an excellent job. Except for just a few deadly minutes.
In her first talk, she selected five areas of concern where people are being badly mistreated, and the first concerns that she mentioned I share.
Suddenly, she made a remark about how maybe government ought to more vigorously regulate Viagra and vasectomies – and said we knew where she was going with this.
Oh, yes. I knew. Her point was that if there are abortion regulations for women, then shouldn’t we also regulate medicine specific to men?
I’ve heard this astonishing non-sequitur many times. I’ve seen speakers think it was clever. Yet it completely ignores the actual point in contention. Given how thoughtful and well-reasoned the presentation had been up to this point, this sudden turn to sarcasm was by itself jarring to me.
She quoted Jim Wallis of Sojourners as saying he thought Trump was so bad that Christians couldn’t justify voting for him even for the sake of a set of issues he listed, one of which was abortion. This left a one-sided impression of what Jim thinks.
Jim is another endorser of our Mission Statement, and Sojourners is a member group. And Jim has indeed been quite exercised about Trump, as has Richard Rohr, along with several others of our endorsers (and me). But he also said, in a piece called Politically Homeless:
Moral issues of intrinsic concern to the faith community are often disregarded or disrespected by Democratic Party orthodoxy, which often takes extreme or overly strident views on issues like abortion. Many of us in the faith community regard abortion as a moral issue and part of a consistent ethic of life and seamless garment of concern for the many threats to human life and dignity. . . we find the Democrats even reluctant to make a commitment to reducing abortion by supporting women with health care, nutrition, and social services. Many in Democratic leadership don’t seem to want to talk about or even being willing to use the word “reduction” as a positive term in relation to abortion. . . . While a younger generation in the faith community is indeed more welcoming of LGBTQ people than their parents have been, they are not so welcoming of abortion as the Democratic elites seem to be, and the Democratic Party needs to figure that out.
Sojourners, January 4, 2018
Jacqui went on with the normal over-simplified rhetoric about how government shouldn’t have control over women’s bodies. As is customary, she was totally oblivious to what that assertion means: women who’ve felt traumatized by their abortions should be denied the right to petition their legislatures for a redress of their grievances. Their voices are discounted and excluded.
But then came the assertion that set my heart to pounding and put tears in my eyes: she said while she’d never had an abortion herself, if she had ever gotten pregnant and been told there was a disability, she’d want to talk to her pastor about it and didn’t want government interfering.
Dropped into the middle of a presentation stressing the importance of being inclusive of everybody, she expressed intense bigotry against people with disabilities. I’d say one can’t get much more bigoted than proclaiming it’s acceptable to chop a child into pieces just because she has an unspecified disability. And this was her only mention of people with disabilities.
Oh, but it’s worse. When she said this, she got applause from the crowd.
I was suddenly struck with this fear: Trump may win re-election because so many anti-Trump people are deliberately making themselves unattractive to tender-hearted people who are grieved over massive violence to millions of babies.
In a speech on inclusiveness, she had also deliberately excluded, by not even acknowledging that they exist, an entire category of human beings: unborn children. This is a category that every human being ever born has once fit into.
I fear greatly that the practical effect of this kind of inconsistency, shared by many in the crowd and in the country, will benefit Trump. I think a good case could be made that Trump would never have won the first election without it.
The Apology
There were no literature tables, no leafleting allowed (I put a handful of our leaflets on one table where others had put theirs), and in the one short Q & A I was never able to get to the microphone in that huge crowd. I did have lengthy conversations with a staff person, who was sympathetic but couldn’t offer me any method of redress beyond one-on-one conversations, and he accepted the two books I offered to donate for CAC’s staff library.
In Jacqui’s second session, she apologized if she had offended anybody. This at least had the advantage of communicating lack of unanimity.
But she wanted to clarify her position. Her position was stated more humbly this time. But the apology was thereby turned into an opportunity to have yet more stage time for a “pro-choice” position. Unchallenged.
Genetic testing was mentioned, but the bulk was the normal argument about how women need a choice.
The case I’d make (if I had a chance) is that this assertion actually helps patriarchy, by implying the absurd idea that only women who freely choose abortions are having them. It lets off the hook men who are pressuring, threatening, dictating, or withdrawing support. It helps them to do so self-righteously.
I think the crowd was full of people who hadn’t thought about that point, and would benefit greatly from having it brought to their attention. Instead, we had a bandwagon.
This leads to another observation: the stark contrast between her abortion comments and the rest of what she said. She was normally speaking her own words, well thought out and innovative. Not words you’d expect from just anybody, but what she herself says. Yet on abortion, she was using other people’s words. I know because I’ve heard them. Over and over. For decades. With such oversimplification, she struck me as stepping out of character.
Without Contemplation
Without contemplation – either individual reflection or group discussion – there’s a danger of ego-centered thoughts and unconstructive anger.
Is it ego-centered to declare the right not to give birth to a child with disabilities? What does this do to inclusiveness for born children and adults with disabilities? What does it say to the millions of people worldwide who regard being female as a disability?
Is it unconstructive anger to demand that tender-hearted people vote differently, scolding them for regarding their concern as most important, when one hasn’t spent time to understand where their angst is coming from?
Of course, I also fall prey to the ego-and-anger problem – I think we all do. But CAC is right to point out the dangers are very real.
I’m also not implying that the Democrats would be OK if only their abortion position changed. After all, Obama presided over modernizing nuclear weapons and civilian-killing drones. But Trump is on people’s minds now as a major threat to peace, justice, and inclusion.
One word I’d use for a small bit of something toxic in a large positive set of justice proposals is poison. For so long, the abortion issue has been poison in the midst of peace advocacy. I think this incident is yet another illustration of this.
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Dr. Lewis Responds
Editor’s Note: Dr. Lewis was sent a pre-publication copy of this post and asked if she wished to offer thoughts. Here is her response in full:
“Rachel, it seems you disagree with me. I am pro-life and pro-choice and here is my talk: https://www.facebook.com/CenterforActionandContemplation/videos/427055894770821/. Thank you.”
Explaining Belligerency
by Rachel MacNair
Why did U.S. slaveholders insist on expanding slavery into new territories, despite existing political wisdom that keeping the practice out of places where it might encounter stronger opposition would be more practical? Why are there advocates for war, or for abortion and euthanasia, who can’t stand the idea of conscientious objection, even by few enough people that it has no impact on the practices? Why do people act so very belligerently that they end up harming rather than helping the violent institution they wish to promote?
The key to understanding this is a theory from psychology that fits right in to the way consistent-lifers think.
Consistency is a Psychological Need
Human beings seem to have a basic psychological need to have consistency, stability, and order in how they see the world. When information threatens their previous views, they feel uneasy. They resort to defensive maneuvers: screening out upsetting experiences, denying obvious facts, or – most importantly here – reinforcing beliefs by making aggressive and belligerent declarations.
In 1957, Leon Festinger introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance, and it helps explain a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Hundreds of studies have backed this up: people with ideas in conflict, or ideas and behavior in conflict, feel a tension. They’ll search for ways – sometimes markedly innovative ways – to avoid the discomfort of inconsistency.
That some wish to screen out unpleasant facts or ideas is hardly surprising. The reason cognitive dissonance has been widely accepted as an explanation for what would otherwise be bewildering behavior is that it explains dogmatic insistence on something that’s been proven wrong – and taking actions to reinforce the belief by getting other people to share it.
Irrational Behavior: U.S. Slavery
When slavery started to be criticized by a handful of people, and then by larger numbers, the slaveholders could have just ignored this. Instead, they insisted on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This aggressively expanded slavery. Northerners now had the spectacle of manacled blacks being led back into bondage. Slavery was harder to ignore – and seeing its reality was more effective than mere words from abolitionists.
Slaveholders’ biggest triumph, and biggest downfall, was the Dred Scott decision in which a slaveholding Supreme Court majority gave slaveholders everything they wanted. A lot of non-slaveholding people who would have been happy to just leave the whole thing alone were pushed into action. The distinction between slave states and free states became unclear, and indifference wasn’t possible anymore. The dynamics of the slaveholders’ drive had generated an opposition.
John Noonan comments:
Why did the slaveholders act as if driven by the Furies to their own destruction? . . . Why did they take such risks, why did they persist beyond prudent calculation? The answer must be that in a moral question of this kind, turning on basic concepts of humanity, you cannot be content that your critics are feeble and ineffective, you cannot be content with their practical tolerance of your activities. You want, in a sense you need, actual acceptance, open approval. If you cannot convert your critics by argument, at least by law you can make them recognize that your course is the course of the country.
A Private Choice, New York: The Free Press, 1979, p.82
Abraham Lincoln recognized this dynamic in his famous speech at Cooper Institute in 1860. He was asked what would convince the slaveholders that his party had no designs on their property or the Constitution. He replied, “This, and this only: Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”
Irrational Behavior: War
A common problem in wars is “effort justification”: the belief that if one has put resources and energy into achieving a certain outcome, that outcome must be valuable. More effort needs to be put in to protect and justify the effort already made. When the only alternative is to admit all the effort was wasted, especially to admit stupid behavior or poor judgment, then the effort must continue. The continuation of the American war in Vietnam for years after it seemed clear to many that the effort would not achieve the desired result is one of the most cited examples. Currently, we see this in the various parts of the “War on Terror” – especially America’s longest war in Afghanistan.
An emotionally gripping form of effort justification is the idea that we can only honor the bravery of those soldiers who died or suffered serious injuries by sending more soldiers to suffer the same fate. This argument distracts from looking honestly at whether the war can be rationally justified.
Irrational Behavior: Weaponizing Medicine
The sweeping nature of Roe v. Wade has been likened to Dred Scott. A gradual approach of opening up abortion was working, and may have continued to work. Roe brought a backlash which is still going strong about five decades later.
There was an initially successful attack on “informed consent” or “right-to-know” legislation, letting women know of fetal development and possible complications. In one of the many follow-up cases from Roe in the U.S. Supreme Court, the 1987 Thornburgh decision, which overturned the legislation, Justice Blackmun said the information wasn’t “always relevant to a woman’s decision, and may serve only to confuse her, and heighten her anxiety.”(Thornburgh, 476 U.S. at 762.)
Legally protecting people from getting information just because some think it might not be relevant is unprecedented. This established a constitutional right to ignorance for women. This case was explicitly overturned in the Casey decision of 1992.
On the startling idea that anyone with scruples about abortion or euthanasia shouldn’t even be allowed in the health field, Wesley Smith put it well in Pro-lifers: Get Out of Medicine!:
There is a reason that moral diversity is under attack in health care. When doctors refuse to abort a fetus, participate in assisted suicide, excise healthy organs, or otherwise follow their consciences about morally contentious matters, they send a powerful message: Just because a medical act is legal doesn’t make it right. Such a clarion witness is intolerable to those who want to weaponize medicine.
First Things, May 12, 2017
Having no pro-lifers in medicine would, of course, deprive those of us who prefer a doctor who won’t kill people to be the medical person touching intimate parts of our bodies. This attacks our right to choose our own medical care. But this is beside the point, because “choice” isn’t the point. To the intolerant, the very fact that we hold that opinion means we’re to be discounted.
Conclusion
We understand that belligerence and high intolerance best if we understand its origin. It’s not merely that people feel something strongly. It’s that deep down, they know there’s inconsistency in their thoughts and behaviors, and they can’t stand it. It’s too much tension. In general, the human mind has severe trouble tolerating inconsistency – and so it will practice inconsistency more belligerently, in order to pretend it isn’t there.
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For more of our blog posts on psychological aspects of nonviolence, see:
The Mind’s Drive for Consistency
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
by John Whitehead
Activists seeking to end or radically reduce nuclear weapons’ threat may find it difficult to get public attention. Despite the high stakes involved—the lives of millions and even humanity’s survival—the nuclear threat frequently seems distant and abstract. The danger is future and hypothetical, in contrast to current, actual situations of people dying or suffering from other injustices.
Anti-nuclear peace activists should recall how the struggle against nuclear weapons has been connected to other struggles: for gender and racial equality, against poverty, and for the protection of preborn humans. These connections between the nuclear disarmament cause and other causes have a long history.
“No Nukes” and Feminism
Women’s rights and peace have long between intertwined, a connection embodied in contemporary history by organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Women’s Strike for Peace (WSP) (see the recent Consistent Life blog post on WILPF member and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams). Both these groups participated in struggles against nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, proclaiming “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race,” WSP organized demonstrations involving thousands to protest nuclear weapons.
One of WSP’s most famous members, Coretta Scott King (also involved in WILPF), traveled to Geneva in 1962 to attend, on behalf of WSP, a 17-nation conference on disarmament. These and other efforts by peace activists contributed to a significant victory in 1963 with the international treaty limiting testing of nuclear weapons.
Another significant trip was taken by Erna Harris, a WILPF member and one of the first black women to get a degree in journalism. Harris participated in the 1964 Soviet-American Women’s Conference of 12 Soviet women and 12 American women in Moscow. Upon returning to the United States, Harris traveled around the nation speaking out on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
One aspect of feminist opposition to nuclear weapons is radiation’s disproportionate negative effects on women. Evidence from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nuclear weapons tests, and nuclear accidents suggest women are more likely than men to develop cancer from radiation exposure. A 2006 National Academy of Sciences report found the cancer incidence and deaths were 40-50% higher among women than among men exposed to comparable doses of radiation. For pregnant women, exposure to radiation risks harming or killing their children in the womb—a danger that should especially concern pro-lifers
Another aspect of feminist critiques of nuclear weapons is how stereotypical notions of masculinity—aggression or “toughness”—can influence policy makers. Concern over nuclear weapons’ devastating human costs or hopes for a more peaceful world without these weapons, are dismissed as weak, naïve, or “soft,” similar to how women’s perspectives are dismissed.
Ray Acheson, an activist with WILPF and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—who spoke at the Consistent Life-cosponsored “Two Minutes to Midnight” conference—has written on both these aspects of nuclear disarmament as a feminist issue. Commenting on reactions to the recent United Nations Treaty banning nuclear weapons, Acheson wrote “Those who want to elevate the voices and perspectives of those affected, are dismissed as ‘emotional.’”
Acheson cites a story of a nuclear strategist who expressed horror at the millions of deaths nuclear weapons would cause, only to then feel ashamed and “like a woman.” She comments,
The association of caring about the murder of thirty million people with “being a woman” is all about seeing that position – and that sex – as being weak, caring about wrong things, letting your “emotions” get the better of you, and focusing on human beings when you should be focused on “strategy.” Caring about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons is feminine, weak, and not relevant to the job that “real men” have to do to “protect” their countries. It not only suggests that caring about the use of nuclear weapons is spineless and silly, but also makes the pursuit of disarmament seem unrealistic and irrational.
A humanitarian and gender-sensitive analysis of nuclear weapons offers an alternative to this kind of thinking.
“No Nukes” and Racial Justice
Black Americans and other people of color have connected the struggle for racial justice with peace, including nuclear disarmament. Historian Vincent Intondi, who also spoke at the “Two Minutes to Midnight” conference, chronicled this activism in African Americans against the Bomb. Crucial connections between racism and nuclear weapons include how nuclear weapons could serve as tools of colonialism and how spending on weapons took resources away from the poor, especially people of color.
Racial justice and peace were linked in a dramatic demonstration against both colonialism and nuclear weapons in the winter of 1959-1960. Following the French government’s decision to test nuclear weapons in the Sahara, a group of peace activists, including American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, resolved to travel to the nuclear test site in a nonviolent attempt to stop the test. The activists received support from Ghana, which had recently hosted a conference of African states which resolved that “nuclear testing should be suspended and means taken to reduce the arms race.”
The peace activists traveled overland from Ghana to French-controlled Africa. French authorities stopped them and, despite repeated attempts, the peace activists never reached the site of the early 1960 tests. Nevertheless, the nonviolent witness attracted international media attention, in African nations and the United States, and led to protests outside French embassies. One African who observed the activists’ journey connected the issues concisely: “If [the bomb tests are so] harmless, why not hold it in the country outside Paris, so all the French people can see the wonder?”
U.S. Civil rights activists protested nuclear weapons over the following decades. Martin Luther King repeatedly denounced these weapons throughout his public career. In 1964, a group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) visited Harlem and met with Malcolm X. During their meeting, he observed “You have been scarred by the atom bomb.” Then, referring to the poor living conditions the hibakusha had seen in Harlem, he added “You just saw that we have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.”
Combining the struggles against racism and nuclear weapons continued during the intensified arms race of the 1980s. Librarian Greg Johnson and his wife formed Blacks Against Nukes (BAN) to raise black Americans’ awareness of nuclear weapons’ dangers. For years, they gave talks at schools, colleges, and churches. Johnson recalled how he aimed to bring different issues together: “Black and poor people in this country are suffering in the name of national security, which has to do with people who are educated, fed, and clothed, not with how many weapons you have in your arsenal…We saw a pattern of colonialism to subjugate nonwhites. And the bomb was part of it. It was all connected.”
“No Nukes” and Pro-Lifers
Some activists have defended human life from both nuclear weapons and abortion. Activist and comedian Dick Gregory participated not only in the civil rights struggle but was a frequent presence in anti-nuclear activities and denounced abortion as a tool of racist population control.
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry is best remembered for her critique of racism, but her work also included pro-life and pro-peace themes. Bernadette Waterman Ward, in an essay reprinted in ProLife Feminism: Yesterday & Today, observed how a crucial dramatic moment in Hansberry’s play Raisin in the Sun is Mama’s outrage over her daughter-in-law seeking an abortion and her son’s failure to stop this: “Your wife say she going to destroy your child. And I’m waiting to hear you talk like [your father] and say we a people who give children life, not who destroy them,” she says. Hansberry was also a long-time opponent of the nuclear bombing of Japan and of nuclear weapons in general. One of her final plays was What Use Are Flowers?, about survivors of a nuclear war and their struggle to build a new world.
An activist who explicitly connected both these causes was Julianne Wiley. An anti-nuclear activist who highlighted nuclear radiation’s negative effect on preborn children, Wiley recounts in Consistently Opposing Killing how she was moved to reconsider her attitudes toward abortion when another woman pointed out how abortion also killed children in the womb. Her activism then expanded to include combined opposition to nuclear weapons and abortion and led to the foundation of Pro-Lifers for Survival—the predecessor organization to the Consistent Life Network. Almost 40 years later, the danger nuclear radiation poses to the preborn remains an important connection between the pro-peace and pro-life causes.
Conclusion
Opposition to nuclear weapons has drawn a wide variety of activists and been combined with an array of other causes. The common thread is that while nuclear weapons, in one sense, kill “indiscriminately,” in another sense they’re quite discriminating by inflicting greater harm on vulnerable groups and reinforcing social injustice. Highlighting nuclear disarmament’s importance for social justice clarifies the peace cause’s full significance and may attract more people to the peace movement.
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For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Women’s History Month: Jane Addams
Jane Addams is a notable follower of the consistent life ethic (before the term was coined). We offer a lengthy book excerpt, a shorter book excerpt, and a note from the exhibits at Hull House Museum.
Condensed excerpt from ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today, pp. 120-126
The Nonviolent Power of the Maternal Body Politic: Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Hull House (founded 1889)
by Mary Krane Derr
Jane Addams’ astoundingly fruitful life included a Nobel Peace Prize—the first ever to an American woman—and founding or early leadership roles in the professions of sociology and social work, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, American Civil Liberties Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was the guiding spirit of Hull House, Chicago’s globally famous settlement. . . . .
Hull House – outside and inside
Around the turn of the twentieth century, death penalty proponents argued for electrocution as a supposedly instantaneous, painless, humane alternative to hanging. Electrical shock had already been used as an abortion technique . . . Despite his professed personal opposition to the death penalty, Thomas Edison oversaw the invention of the electric chair for Westinghouse, selling the press on it by lethally shocking dogs and cats. In 1903, he filmed his electrocution, billed as an “execution,” of Topsy, a Coney Island elephant, before a crowd of 1,500. The neglected, abused animal had rampaged and killed three men, including a trainer who deliberately threw a lit cigarette into her mouth.
The same year, a Michigan legislator and businessman proposed electrocution upon birth for disabled babies—as an amendment to the budget for the state’s home for the “feebleminded.” Addams, a death penalty abolitionist, responded:
The suggestion is horrible. It is not in line with the march of civilization nor with the principles of humanity. The Spartans destroyed children physically infirm. Are we to go back to the days of Sparta? Feebleminded children are one of the cares of a community. It is our duty to care for them.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life, p. 161
Against the growing push for permanent mass institutionalization, Addams argued for what the disability rights movement now calls independent living. . . . Above all, it was necessary to “consider the problem of the special child . . . from the point of view of the child,” or, as present-day disability advocates would say, “Nothing about us, without us.” To overwhelmed parents, Addams offered,
You think you have a child unlike other children; you are anxious that your neighbor not find it out; it makes you secretive; it makes you singularly sensitive; it places you and the normal children in your family in a curious relation to the rest of the community; but if you find out there are many other such children in your city and in . . . the United States, and that a whole concourse of people are studying to help these children, considering them not at all queer and outrageous, but simply a type of child which occurs from time to time and can be enormously helped, you come out of that particularly sensitive attitude and the whole family is lifted with you into a surprising degree of hopefulness and normality.
The Jane Addams Reader, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain
In 1908, Hull House and the Chicago Medical Society (CMS) formed the Joint Committee on Midwives . . . Previously, as heads of the CMS Committee on Criminal Abortion, [Dr. Rudolf ] Holmes and [Dr. Charles] Bacon had assisted public officials in prosecuting those who performed “the crime of feticide,” temporarily persuaded newspapers to ban “criminal advertisements,” and discovered “the relatively great frequency of the crime of abortion among midwives . . .” The midwifery committee was charged to explore these problems further with Hull House promising “to defray all cost.” Jane Addams’ commitment of Hull House’s hard-won, always precarious funds evinced her personal support of the study’s goals . . .
In the decades following the investigation, Addams and all four committee physicians dedicated themselves even more deeply to the very social measures that got at the root causes of abortion. . . . In addition to its day nursery, infant care clinic, mothers’ club, and other maternal-child programs, Jane Addams involved Hull House in sex education and the direct provision of family planning. For her international readership, Addams wrote more than once of the need, at the personal and policy levels, for compassionate acceptance and aid of all those involved in non-marital pregnancy. . . .
Addams’ vision of the maternal body politic, with its “form of power that doesn’t have as its means violence and doesn’t have as its end total control and command,” remains one that could bring peace to the abortion war today, with its forced and lethal pitting of disempowered women against their own unborn children, not to mention other, related wars.
Excerpt from Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing, by Rachel MacNair, p. 2
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jane Addams noted aftereffects of having killed. Known for her innovations in social work, the reports from her investigations were anecdotal and primarily aimed at social change advocacy work rather than academic review. While she did publish some work in academic journals, such as the American Journal of Sociology, most of her writing is for the popular audience. Of the early builders of sociological theory, she was the only one who addressed and described PTSD [Posttraumatic Stress Disorder] directly. Though she did not have the terminology or contemporary concept yet, she was studying World War I, at a time when the concept was beginning to form.
After documentation of men who refused to shoot to kill even in the trenches, she talked of insanity among the soldiers in various places, and of their being dazed after participating in attacks. She talks of hearing “from hospital nurses who said that delirious soldiers are again and again possessed by the same hallucination — that they are in the act of pulling their bayonets out of the bodies of men they have killed.”
Hull House Museum Exhibit Sign (viewed March 13, 2012)
Against Eugenics –
Eugenics, the study and practice of selective breeding with the goal of improving the human species, was very popular in the early decades of the 20th century. The American eugenics movement gained traction among Progressive era reformers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, and scores of prominent figures, but Jane Addams and several of her peers resisted it. While Hull-House reformers believed they could improve the lives of their impoverished neighbors by introducing them to new modes of hygiene, nutrition, and healthcare, they vehemently opposed the notion of the intrinsically lesser value of different races, the poor, mentally ill, and disabled.
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For more of our blog posts on notable historical women, see:
Dr. Charlotte Denman Lozier (1844-1870): Restellism Exposed
Does Socially-Approved Killing Increase Criminal Homicide?
by Rachel MacNair
When killing is socially approved, does this provide a model for killing that isn’t? We offer evidence.
The Homicide Rate and Executions
Do executions deter murder? Since societies with executions still have murders, we know it’s not a complete deterrent. But are there fewer murders than there would be otherwise?
There’s another possibility: there could be more murders. Perhaps potential murderers don’t identify with the executed, but see them as villains just like others do. Instead, they identify with those they see as the purveyor of justice—the executioner. Wishing to see themselves as also purveyors of justice, they’ve just been given instructions on how to deal with individuals they see as villains in their own lives. This is the “legitimation of violence model.”
So, if the threat of executions has any impact at all compared to other punishments, which idea is right, based on the evidence?
Many countries have at different times abolished the death penalty altogether, so we can look at the homicide rate in the year before abolition and the year after. Dane Archer did this (see pp. 118–139 of his 1984 book, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective).
If capital punishment is a better deterrent than long imprisonment, the homicide rate should usually have risen after abolition. In most cases, it decreased. The evidence favors the “legitimation of violence model.”
The Homicide Rate and War
The idea that wars might increase crime and lawlessness has been suggested from scholars ranging from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More to Machiavelli. Winston Churchill and Clarence Darrow suggested that World War I specifically had this effect. Sociologist Emile Durkheim noted a sharp rise in the homicide rate after the Franco-Prussian War.
In the same book as the study on executions, Dane Archer found that, when the difference between prewar and postwar homicide rates was calculated, there was a very large upsurge in homicide rates (see pp. 63–97).
Since some combatant nations did show unchanged rates or decreases, Archer looked at what the differences between nations were. The main difference was in the size of the wars. Nations with larger combat losses showed homicide increases much more frequently than nations with less extreme losses. While both victorious and defeated nations showed homicide increases, the victorious nations were more likely to do so.
Why? Social disorganization? Then defeated nations should show more frequent increases than the victorious. So should those with worsened economies. Yet it was the opposite. Violent veterans? Perhaps some, but the increases in perpetrators occurred for both women and men and in all age groups
Archer proposes the most likely explanation is the legitimation of violence model. Civilians are influenced by the “model” of officially approved killing and destruction:
What all wars have in common is the unmistakable moral lesson that homicide is an acceptable, even praiseworthy, means to certain ends. It seems likely that this lesson will not be lost on at least some of the citizens in a warring nation. Wars, therefore, contain in particularly potent form all the ingredients necessary to produce imitative violence: Great numbers of violent homicides under official auspices and legitimation, with conspicuous praise and rewards for killing and the killers … Even though social scientists have in the past amassed impressive experimental evidence that violence can be produced through imitation or modeling, they have in general neglected the possibility that government—with its vast authority and resources—might turn out to be the most potent model of all.
(pp. 66, 94)
The case for this model may be strengthened by noting that crime rates often go down during nonviolent campaigns. This hasn’t been subjected to as rigorous a study, but Gene Sharp does cite several instances in his 1973 book (pp. 789–793).
Homicide Rate and Abortion
One idea is that abortion would lower the criminal homicide rate by preventing the births of people inclined to commit murders, what with having been unwanted and being members of the underclass. This bit of prejudice against those in poverty, with a tinge of racism, doesn’t sit well with many.
But in support of the idea, statistics in the United States show that the homicide rate did in fact trend down in the 1990s, at about the point when those who would have been born in the 1970s, but because of Roe v. Wade weren’t born because they were aborted, would have been hitting their late teens. That’s when violent crimes are most likely to be committed.
This wasn’t a controlled experiment, and any number of things could account for it – but most especially, take note that the number of abortions were declining at the same time as the number of criminal homicides. It would be every bit as reasonable a theory that a high prevalence of people solving problems by killing someone in the womb was associated with someone solving problems by killing outside the womb. Whatever lowered the incidence of killing people in-utero could therefore also cause fewer people to kill ex-utero.
Given that there can be all kinds of explanations, neither theory can be confirmed without a controlled experiment. History doesn’t allow for this. But if the “legitimation of violence” model works in war and executions, might it also work with abortions?
Violent Crime and Female Feticide
In a report on scholarship entitled “Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China,” authors report:
In 2005, 120 boys were born for every 100 girls in China, a surplus of one million boys . . . the social implications of a large number of men with little or no prospect of marriage are largely unknown. In this paper, we look at crime rates, which nearly doubled in the last two decades, and argue that male-biased sex ratios have contributed to this rise . . . we find that a 1 percent increase in the sex ratio raised violent and property crime rates by some 3.7 percent, suggesting that the sex imbalance may account for up to one-sixth of the overall rise in crime.
Homicide of Women Who Refused to Get Abortions
Here’s a list of dozens of pregnant women who’ve been murdered by or at the behest of the child’s father because she refused to get an abortion. To get on this 2012 list, these conditions were necessary:
1. The woman’s murderer was caught;
2. The motive being about her refusing to get an abortion was known somehow;
3. This got into court records or newspaper articles so that a search could find it.
Therefore, this list is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg.
Conclusion
We may argue against forms of socially-approved killing on the grounds that killing is wrong and therefore shouldn’t be socially approved. Yet we also need to be aware that the story doesn’t stop there. Such killing sets an example. Therefore, the death toll is much higher than those whose targeting was socially approved.
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For more of our blog posts on a similar theme, see:
Remembering Rep. Walter B. Jones, Jr.
by Patrick O’Neill
It may be have been unprecedented on the U.S. political landscape — a Catholic U.S. Congressman who was invited to be the keynote speaker at both an anti-abortion rally and an anti-war rally — in the South.
Yet, that’s what happened when Republican Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., an Eastern North Carolina Congressman who lived out his adopted Catholic faith like an Old Testament prophet, came to podiums a few blocks and a few years apart to address audiences that hold few shared values. Jones died Sunday in his hometown of Farmville, on his 76th birthday after a short stint in hospice care.
Far removed from the self-survival mindset of most Catholic Democrats who fearfully abandoned their Church when it came to protecting the unborn, Jones sounded every bit like Jerry Falwell when he spoke in Raleigh at the North Carolina Right-to-Life Rally railing against “baby killing.”
In Raleigh again, at the invitation of Veterans for Peace, Jones received a standing ovation from a room full of lefties the likes of which you’d expect to see for Sen. Bernie Sanders or former Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
Christina Cowger of North Carolina Stop Torture Now, said Jones was one of the few politicians who gave an ear to a group that has been calling for U.S. accountability for its role in torture for more than decade.
“Before he became ill, Jones told us he would appear in public and make a statement about torture and North Carolina’s role,” Cowger said. “It’s too bad we didn’t have a chance to make that happen. He was a remarkable man.”
Jones spent most of his House career essentially on a mission to atone for his vote in support of sending troops to Iraq following the 9-11 war hysteria. It was Jones’s contention that he had been lied to by Pres. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others that led to his vote in favor of preemptive war.
So enthusiastic was Jones in initially backing the war effort that he is credited with coining the term “freedom fries” to replace “French” fries in the U.S. House cafeteria when France refused to join the pro-war-with-Iraq U.S.-led coalition.
“Jones was driven by his principles,” wrote the News & Observer editorial board on February 11: ‘Don’t just praise Rep. Walter Jones — emulate him.’) “He voted with Donald Trump only about 50 percent of the time.”
Jones voted against Trump’s tax cuts and against repealing the Affordable Care Act, and he supported overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Jones called on Trump to release his tax returns and he called for an independent investigation into claims Russia influenced the 2016 election. He was against feeding the national debt and wanted money out of politics.
However, Jones paid dearly for his maverick positions. The February 11 News & Observer editorial board noted the consequences Jones endured for his moral independence.
Jones “won few friends with his courageous stands. In fact, he was rewarded by being stripped of committee memberships, was never named a committee chairman and was banished to the Republicans’ back bench.
“That’s the price to be paid these days by a politician, from either side, who does not come to attention and salute the party line. Independence should be a trait that is celebrated, not punished, but Jones knew that’s not the case in 21st century America.
“Jones’s colleagues could better honor him not by heaping praise on him but by emulating him. Where has their respect for his nonaligned nature been up to now?”
Jones made national headlines for his change of heart over his Iraq War vote. An early supporter of the war, Jones eventually regretted his pro-war vote.
“I did not do what I should have done to read and find out whether Bush was telling us the truth about Saddam (Hussein) being responsible for 9/11 and having weapons of mass destruction,” Jones is quoted as saying in a 2015 radio interview. “Because I did not do my job then, I helped kill 4,000 Americans, and I will go to my grave regretting that.”
As part of his self-imposed “penance,” Jones began sending personal letters — more than 11,000 in total since 2003 — to families of dead troops. Jones began sending the letters after attending the funeral of Marine Sgt. Michael Bitz, who died in Iraq in 2003.
“I want them to know that my heart aches as their heart aches,” Jones told the Associated Press.
Jones posted photos on the wall outside of his House office, of “anybody that’s been sent and died from Camp Lejeune,” he told The News & Observer. To date, Jones’ memorial had grown to more than 500 photos of troops that died.
In a tribute to Jones by Raleigh News & Observer political writer, Rob Christensen, published February 3 while Jones was under hospice care, Christensen called Jones “an American original.”
Christensen wrote that Jones:
has been a social conservative: a leading abortion opponent . . . He has been a special favorite of the Religious Right, and when he visits the small towns and country churches that dot Eastern North Carolina, he speaks a language that is more likely to come from the Bible than from a political consultant or poll. . . .
Although his colleagues do not regard him as a deep thinker, there has always been a ideological consistency to his positions. Jones believes in protecting life — whether it is the unborn or young men sent into battle for optional wars.
Christensen also wrote, Jones’ “spigot of campaign funds out of Washington was long ago cut off, and he is sometimes seen sitting alone at the Capital Hill Club, a GOP social club, two blocks from the Capital.”
Jones was born Feb. 10, 1943, in Farmville. He is survived by his wife, Joe Ann, and daughter, Ashley.
An email statement from Jones’ congressional office was issued following his death Sunday: “Congressman Jones will long be remembered for his honesty, faith and integrity. He was never afraid to take a principled stand. He was known for his independence, and widely admired across the political spectrum. Some may not have agreed with him, but all recognized that he did what he thought was right.”
at our 30th anniversary conference, 2017
Editor’s Note: When Christenson says Jones “believes in protecting life,” this doesn’t include opposition to the death penalty, nor does it imply that Jones followed the consistent life ethic. It’s the juxtaposition of opposition to both abortion and war, using the same principle, which interests us.
How Black Panther Promotes a Consistent Life Ethic
by Andrew Hocking
Andrew Hocking writes about spirituality in movies, TV, and books and frequently discusses politics from a consistent life perspective.
Since its release last February, the movie Black Panther has made a tremendous impact, becoming a commercial and critical success—currently a Best Picture Oscar nominee—and also generating commentary about its social significance. As the first major studio release about a black superhero, with a black director and predominantly black cast, the racial justice themes of Black Panther have appropriately received much attention.
While those themes alone would make the movie important to defenders of life, Black Panther champions the consistent life ethic across multiple interrelated political issues. Specifically, the film exhorts us to apply the same ethic to our public policy and personal lives. If we do not, disastrous consequences follow when we violate our conscience for the sake of the nation. (Significant spoilers follow.)
Follow Your Conscience
The fictional African nation of Wakanda embraces a strict isolationist policy as it hides its significant technological advancements made possible by their natural resource vibranium. Throughout history, Wakanda did not act as it watched neighboring nations being enslaved and colonized. In the present day, the country’s government refuses to help outsiders, not sharing technology, providing aid, or accepting refugees.
This begins to change when T’Challa, the Wakandan king and superhero known as the Black Panther, leads a mission to capture an individual who previously attacked his nation. As the mission unravels, a CIA operative named Everett Ross takes a bullet in order to protect a Wakandan. Despite the risk of exposing his nation’s secret technological advancement, T’Challa brings Everett back to Wakanda to save his life.
T’Challa acts as he does because, simply put, he could not have stood by and watched an individual die when he had the power to save him. Few could do so. This being the case, why do many people support policies of national inaction?
The Danger of Double Standards
Whether spoken or unspoken, many believe the fallacy that morality for a government is different from that for a person. The previous king, T’Chaka, explains to his son, “You’re a good man with a good heart. And it’s hard for a good man to be king.” He implies that a king, or government, must commit immoral acts for the sake of their nation.
The fundamental conflict between the antagonist, Erik Killmonger, and T’Challa flows from King T’Chaka’s mistaken belief. Decades prior to the film’s main events, he violated his conscience to do what he considered to be in Wakanda’s best interest. After killing his brother to protect a friend, he left his brother’s son and mother to fend for themselves, living in poverty in Oakland, California, rather than bringing them to Wakanda. Justifying immorality in the name of serving the country, he actually endangered the country as this boy grew up to become Erik Killmonger, who nearly kills T’Challa and usurps power.
As I write about spirituality in stories at asyoupoetshavesaid.com, I need to make a comment directed to conservative Christians. Many white Evangelical leaders explicitly say the Bible’s commands to individuals do not apply to governments. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, recently commented:
It’s such a distortion of the teachings of Jesus to say that what he taught us to do personally — to love our neighbors as ourselves, help the poor — can somehow be imputed on a nation… It’s a distortion of the teaching of Christ to say Jesus taught love and forgiveness and therefore the United States as a nation should be loving and forgiving, and just hand over everything we have to every other part of the world… In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country.
Comments like this imply Jesus’s teaching might work in theory, but not in practice. It denies that acting ethically, by caring for the poor and turning the other cheek, for example, is “best for the country.” It reveals a fundamental disagreement in worldview, a difference over what is right, what is wrong, and what works.
What Do We Truly Believe?
The end sequence of Black Panther exemplifies how people’s worldview determines their actions and political stances. Specifically, we see the outworking of T’Challa’s and Killmonger’s beliefs about the morality and efficacy of violence.
Unsurprisingly for an action film, T’Challa physically defeats Erik Killmonger. Nevertheless, though he stabs Erik in the chest in the heat of battle, T’Challa says “We can still heal you…”. Erik responds “Why, so you can lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ‘cause they knew death was better than bondage.”
The audience never finds out what T’Challa would do after saving Erik’s life. At a minimum, though, his offer of healing spurns the logic of the death penalty. At best, his offer embodies restorative justice. The movie’s post-credit scene offers evidence in favor of this second interpretation, showing that T’Challa worked to successfully rehabilitate a killer named Bucky Barnes, who is featured in other Marvel films.
T’Challa’s worldview values life, leading him as an individual to offer mercy and forgiveness towards an individual, even to an enemy. Since he is absolute monarch as well, the film presents his worldview manifesting itself in government policy. Finding no place for the death penalty, he offers restorative, not retributive, justice.
Erik’s response, however, reveals he does not even consider that his future would involve anything other than incarceration. Why would he? He grew up in poverty knowing racial injustice, likely seeing first-hand mass incarceration destroy his community. Furthermore, his experience as an American covert operations soldier erased any further notions of grace or mercy, leaving him with a worldview that has room for only retributive, not restorative, justice.
Erik pulls out the blade in his chest and dies moments later. Effectively committing suicide, he continues to act out the worldview that views death as a solution.
While some might say a government could never apply Jesus’s radical teachings to love your enemy and turn the other cheek, Black Panther demonstrates it has applications which can lead to beneficial outcomes for all. Instead, failing to embrace these teachings leads to unnecessary suffering and death.
Making It Personal
Have you made T’Chaka’s mistake? Do you justify immoral government action or inaction?
As a quick test, think of a government policy you support and consider if you could personally act out what you have voted for the government to do. For instance, could you personally block a refugee family from entering the country? Could you personally kill a person on death row?
If you support policies that contradict your conscience, what does this say about your underlying beliefs? Rest assured that protecting and cherishing life through nonviolent means is the best policy for individuals and governments.
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For more of our blog posts from Andrew Hocking, see:
Three Nonviolent Lessons from Dr. Who
How to Value People Like Mister Rogers
For more of our blog posts on movie reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes
by Julia Smucker
Julia Smucker
Last October, in one of a series of opinion pieces in Slate on how the political left should approach the U.S. Supreme Court, Christopher John Sprigman made the point that the liberalization of abortion laws that came with Roe v. Wade, without popular consensus in its favor, has proven disastrous for the left by giving the right a tangible, long-term foil against which to militate. “The price of Roe,” he summarized, “is all the progressive change we gave up when Roe helped push the center of American politics to the right.”
More recently, Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson mirrored Sprigman’s argument from the opposite side of the political aisle, warning of the steep costs to the moral credibility of “institutions on the right,” and particularly the pro-life movement (though without treating these as entirely synonymous), from willingness to associate themselves with the corrupting influence of Donald Trump.
Being a political independent in part because of the consistent life ethic, I’m resistant to the framing of life issues in conventional left/right terms. Nor do I find motivation in prospects for political advantage or disadvantage for a given ideology. Nevertheless, I sympathize with both writers’ concerns to the extent that they desire to protect human beings who are vulnerable to violence and other indignities.
Furthermore, the juxtaposition of their arguments points to a more significant overarching concern from a consistent life perspective: the promotion of public policies that hurt the vulnerable is costly not only to those directly harmed, but also to the protection of other vulnerable human beings by extension, whenever nonviolent and life-affirming policy goals become bound together with violent and life-denying ones.
Gerson, to his credit, does attempt to dissociate the pro-life movement from political “conservatism” as conventionally understood, introducing the movement in his column as having “traditionally been in a different category.” He explains, “If you believe that a fetus is a member of the human family from its first moment … then opposition to abortion is inherently a social justice issue. It is the defense of the weak and voiceless against violence.” This framework for what it means to be pro-life leads naturally into the necessity of consistency, “to care equally for the lives of women in crisis” and “for the health and welfare of children after birth,” to “be opposed to the dehumanization of unborn children and the dehumanization of refugees and migrants.” As an issue of defense of the weak, Gerson argues, “The legitimacy of pro-life sentiment is demonstrated by its consistency.”
To sacrifice this consistency for the sake of political gain is not only harmful to those dehumanized by the policies and rhetoric of “Trumpism” but also, by association, to the pro-life movement itself. Associating with misogyny, nativism and racism, abuse and cruelty, he elaborates, comes at a serious cost to pro-life claims to stand for women, social inclusion, charity and reason. The price of “the Trumpification of the pro-life movement,” then, is the very credibility of the movement’s basis in compassion.
Sprigman frames the price of Roe more in terms of the advancement of an undefined “progressive” ideology for its own sake, but to the extent that what he means by “progress” overlaps with justice toward vulnerable human beings, his point parallels Gerson’s. To serve his argument against over-reliance on the Supreme Court to effect justice, he mentions some of the more glaring examples of unjust Supreme Court decisions, such as its affirmation of slavery in Dred Scott, of detention of Japanese-Americans in Korematsu, and of discrimination against travelers from primarily Muslim-majority countries in Trump v. Hawaii. Ironically, Roe fits this pattern in a way that Sprigman doesn’t acknowledge, if one looks at it as a pattern of failure to protect human beings from dehumanization and violence. But even though Sprigman sees Roe itself as a positive by virtue of its conventional association with “progressivism,” he’s still skeptical about whether it’s been worth the obstacles it’s created to more laudable goals related to nondiscrimination. The price of Roe is not only millions of prenatal lives, but also the victimization of numerous others by the broad license given to other forms of violence and exclusion, sometimes in the name of fighting against Roe.
Both legalized abortion and the broad bigotry of Trumpism are already negative things in themselves, with immeasurable costs to human dignity. That’s all the more reason for people on both sides of the aisle to let go of goals that are counterproductive to their best ideals and belie claims of compassion for the vulnerable – ideally for consistency’s sake, but at least for the sake of the lives they do seek to protect.
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For more of our blog posts from Julia Smucker, see:
Amnesty International’s Blind Spot
Defining Reproductive Justice: An Encounter