Paul Greenberg

Where There Is Love

Editor's note. Paul Greenberg, the Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, delivered the keynote address at the National Right to Life Convention held June 24-26 in Milwaukee.

Even when Anne Dierks called for Arkansas Right to Life, and I explained that I seldom accept speaking engagements out of state, thank you very much, I knew I'd be here. I knew I'd say yes, I'll give the keynote at this year's National Right to Life Convention.

Because there are some invitations a person doesn't refuse. Just as, on a long-ago summer's day outside a little church next to the railroad tracks in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, I linked arms with some young people to sing "We Shall Overcome." No matter how it might look.

Some things you just do. There comes a time when you have to take sides, because some things you believe in. And you have to say so.

It's been said before: The evils that befall the world are not nearly so often the product of bad people as they are the result of good people who remain silent when they should speak out.

So here I am. So are a thousand or more other people. Lord knows they're not here to hop aboard a bandwagon. They're not the sort of folks who get government grants, or have a stake in the abortion industry; they're here because, like me, they've got to be. About some things you don't have such choice. A moral imperative, a German philosopher called it.

For in this vague, shifting, nuanced world in which good and evil so often bend, how many issues can there still be as clear, as commanding, as the choice between life and death?

These people aren't supposed to be here. This issue was settled years ago, decades ago, by a single, definitive Supreme Court decision in 1973. Haven't these people ever heard of Roe v. Wade? Don't they know they're fighting for a lost cause?

Abortion on demand is the law of the land, and always will be. Or so we're told. Just as a different generation of Americans was told that Dred Scott v. Sanford was the law of the land, and the slavery question had been settled. Forever. As of the 6th of March, 1857, all the states were going to be slave states. The Supreme Court had said so. Discussion concluded, debate precluded. Case closed. To paraphrase my favorite line from a Ring Lardner short story: Shut up, they explained.

Those old-time abolitionists and Republicans and Free-Soil Democrats and antislavery Whigs-what a motley crew-were supposed to represent a lost cause, too. But they understood something.

No cause is forever lost. Not in this ever-changing world. Because no cause is forever won. That's the nature of politics. Of ideas. Of faith. Day by day we make our own choices. And the folks gathered here have chosen life.

No, they're not supposed to be around anymore. They're just ghosts, political artifacts, living fossils, an optical illusion. They're the remains of another day, of an earlier, archaic way of thinking that once held life sacred. This convention is just another collection of dry bones.

But here they are-moving, talking, cheering, applauding, making plans, being renewed, picking up steam, reaching out to others.

Dry bones?

These bones live.

What a collection of faces are gathered here. Talk about diversity. This crowd really looks like America. And they've all been drawn here by the one issue that cuts across every political, social, religious, ethnic, geographical, sexual, class, and party line. None of that matters, not here, not now, not when life is at stake. For these people understand something:

If abortion is not wrong-abortion on demand; abortion for no good medical reason; abortion as a routine, accepted feature of American society, the taking of innocent life without restriction or scruple or qualm-if all that is not wrong, then nothing is.

And soon enough, everything will be given that kind of pervasive, unthinking disregard for life. For that is the nature of evil. It spreads. It becomes ordinary, profitable, banal. Abortion today, euthanasia tomorrow, eugenics next in our brave new cloned world.

Now and then I wonder if those on the other side of this issue can have thought this thing through, or don't they dare think it through?

Does that explain their need for so many evasions and euphemisms, for the latinate phrases they use to obscure what it is they're choosing when they champion Choice? Is that why the country seems awash in partial-birth abortions? Is that why so many say they personally don't approve of abortion, meaning they personally wouldn't stop it?

George Orwell said it: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." It still is.

Hasn't even our president said he believes abortion should be rare? The only great difference between his position and the right-to-lifers' is that they believe it.

Now these people have gathered to talk about the direction their movement should take. Should they keep fighting it out on the political front, pursuing their options in every courtroom and legislative hall?

But politics is only the art and practice of power; sometimes it is only the brute imposition of power. And "those convinced despite their will remain unconvinced still."

The challenge to the Right-to-Life movement is to reach minds and hearts and souls.

So should they make this a culture war, and make respect for life inseparable from the way the country thinks, acts, lives? Or redouble their political and legal efforts? Which way should we go? various delegates ask me.

My answer?

Yes.

All of the above.

Our big problem, we who favor life, is not that we protest too much but that we haven't protested enough.

Our attention long has been caught by the slaying of the unborn, and we only recently noticed that Death has opened a second front against those at the other end of life's spectrum: the old and infirm, all those whose "Quality of Life"-another slippery phrase-isn't high enough. At least in the eyes of our new elite.

Now it is our elders, our handicapped, our ailing whose existence is begrudged them.

Soon enough it will be those whose income, or class, or race, or social circumstances fail to meet someone's idea of the requisite quality, and they will be marked by our ever-enveloping culture of death.

A confession: Those of us who revere life have been rightly rebuked for not caring enough for life after birth. But some folks here do-they've taken the lead in fighting the creeping Kevorkianism in American life, or rather American death.

Those of us who say we respect life need to respect the living, including those who disagree with us. Martin Luther King said it: You can't teach anybody anything unless you love 'em first.

In this fight, some of us have forgotten that we have an ally in the conscience of our adversaries. We should never cease appealing to it. Those on the other side of this issue are for life, too. They just may not know it yet. We need to keep reminding them. If we do that, once again We Shall Overcome.

For in this fast-dying century, surely all of us have had enough of violence, of contempt for the dignity of life, of euphemisms for evil, of thinking of death as a solution. A better century awaits. This milling assemblage, so outwardly different and inwardly united, bridging every division on behalf of life, gives hope. No, I wouldn't have missed it.