By: Paul Murano – February, 2007
The 34th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. on January 22nd, gathering tens of thousands from around the country, remained under the radar. The mainstream media, once again, refused to cover it.
Why?
The journalistic arm of the cultural left sees abortion as the necessary back-up for the fornication culture it created upon the birth control pill. This march symbolized blasphemy against the religion of secular humanism and its four-decades-old culture of death, where Water Slide Bounce House the gods of equality (translated as sameness) and relativism reign. In this post-Christian religion, women are masculinized and men feminized. With the feminization of thought, personal experience and emotion displace objectivity and reason. Taken to the extreme, nothing is real unless it is experienced and felt.
If truth and goodness are purely subjective, we create our reality rather than discover it. Here is the crux of our current culture war: Is truth and morality created by us or is it to be discovered and conformed to?
The former is the religion of secular humanism, the latter Christianity. The former has man as its center and ultimate authority, the latter has God. This intellectual path away from ethical monotheism and natural law can look enticing: we can re-create reality simply by manipulating the language and convincing enough people. That’s a lot of power. If we don’t like the definition of marriage, redefine it. If human beings become burdensome, redefine them to give us room for abortion and euthanasia.
Such self-deception, however, always leads to death. The biblical principle that lies lead to death can not be denied for very long. The war in Iraq is a legitimate concern, but the media and intelligentsia of this country have refused to recognize a gruesome war ongoing since January 22, 1973.
The late Mother Teresa once said: If mothers are killing their own children by abortion, how can we possibly ask other people to stop killing each other? By making pre-birth homicide a legal choice we have declared war on God; and since that declaration 60 million of us, 1.5 million per year, 4400 per day, every single day in this country, have been sacrificed to the gods of the religion of the cultural left. I asked a female friend who is pro-life why, in a world that one-third of us under 34 years old are missing due to abortion, there’s so little alarm or outrage. She mentioned it’s because people need a face. She admitted that with most people “unless there is a name and a face, it doesn’t become part of their personal experience. It isn’t real to them.”
The irony is that this feminine psyche expressed above is what makes women beautiful. The focus on personal experience, relationships, and emotional responses are what makes them attractive to men as potential wives, mothers, and glue of the community. However, it is a two-edged sword. The first woman in Eden needed to personally experience the forbidden fruit in order to understand its value. Adam, who should have utilized his power of reason and objectivity to stop her, gave in. Theologians call him the “first wimp.” The more men rely on personal experience and emotion to discern truth and define reality, the more we become a society of wimps. What the annual Walk for Life in Washington, D.C. showed us on January 22nd was that there is hope for a non-wimpish future. Experience as well as reason moved many young people, tens of thousands of them, on that bitterly cold day, to stand up for truth despite the gods of egalitarianism, androgyny, and relativism of the religion of secular humanism. Many women held up signs stating, “I Regret My Abortion.”
They are members of the “Silent No More Awareness Campaign” of women who have had abortions. Young men braved the cold to stand up for those who have no voice of their own, simply because it was the right thing to do. And, both young men and women under 34, realizing they are survivors of the abortion-age, exercised their obligation to speak out.
One third of their peers were not so lucky. It was a time to show that legalized abortion produces broken women, missing children, and a weakened nation. It was a time to celebrate life and mourn all those who lost theirs before birth. It was a time for men, called to love and protect women and children by nature, to speak out against injustice despite how unpopular it might be. On January 22nd real men stood up with broken women who had abortions and others who respect the sanctity of human life, to proclaim proudly and courageously together: We must be silent no more.
Paul Murano teaches theology and philosophy at Assumption College and Northshore Community College. He is also the producer of Paying Attention! Radio Program on WCAP. You can E-mail Paul at PJDM@aol.com