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NRL News
“In So
Many Ways, You Make Our When I heard the President’s voice booming out over the sound system, it brought to mind how much it meant to me the first time the newly elected George W. Bush addressed the March for Life. It was January 22, 2001, and now that the Clintons were evacuating the White House, we felt reassured that we were finally emerging from the nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue. On that chilly day, Mr. Bush first pledged his solidarity with our Movement as President. He said in a straightforward and quietly eloquent way, “I deeply appreciate your message and your work. You see the weak and the defenseless, and you try to help them. You see the hardship of many young mothers and their unborn children, and you care for them both. In so many ways, you make our society more compassionate and welcoming.” When he spoke to the gigantic throng assembled on the Mall last month for the last time, President Bush recounted some of many upward steps we’ve taken under his stewardship. And then the President made a statement the significance of which few people probably caught: “As you give voice to the voiceless I ask you to take comfort from this: The hearts of the American people are good. Their minds are open to persuasion. And our history shows that a cause rooted in human dignity and appealing to the best instincts of the American people cannot fail. So take heart.” That is my personal North Star, which I use both to navigate and set my course. My latitude is a firm belief that minds are open to persuasion. My longitude is a conviction that our campaign for human dignity, appealing as it does to America’s best instincts, cannot fail. Our nation’s capital was awash in pro-lifers. Attendance was enormous. A number of years ago when I first started writing about the overwhelming number of young people, some suggested I was either slightly exaggerating or placing too much emphasis on something that might be cyclical. But there are no ups and downs when it comes to the mark made on the March (and everything else) by high school and college-age students. It seems as if their numbers grow each and every year. It is no accident that the Los Angeles Times ran a fascinating piece the day of the March whose subject was the Movement’s young people. In “Antiabortion cause stirs new generation,” the Times offered a thoughtful overview of the growing importance of the “new generation.” It was not just, as NRLC’s Derrick Jones told the Times, “You look at pictures of marches [over the years] and the crowds just keep getting younger and younger and younger.” The story also cites examples of how younger pro-lifers are active in educating not only their peers but also the larger public. Proving yet again that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, our benighted opposition has belatedly tried to replenish their aging ranks. “Abortion-rights supporters are also reaching beyond the old guard of leaders,” the Times wrote, “which veteran activist Nancy Keenan refers to as ‘the menopausal militia.’” the Times wrote. They say they understand that they blew it. At one level their comments have a ring of sincerity. “In a speech last week, Keenan, president of NARAL, acknowledged as much,” the story continues. “‘Our reluctance to address the moral complexity of this debate is no longer serving our cause—or our country—well,’ she said.” But a little further in the story you see they’ve learned nothing except to try (as they habitually do) to hide abortion advocacy in some other issue that doesn’t generate the same backlash. Same-old, same-old. Mouth words about “moral complexity” and then change the subject. Back on the Mall pro-life champion Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) was gracing the stage as he has faithfully for so many years. He reminded the crowd of the comments made by pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama (D-Il.) just a couple of days before. Obama, Smith said, “criticized Americans for both our moral deficit and empathy deficit and called on us to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.” Smith asked, “Can Senator Obama not see, appreciate, or understand that the abortion culture that he and others so assiduously promote lacks all empathy for unborn children—be they Black, White, Latino, or Asian—and is at best, profoundly misguided when it comes to mothers?” Smith then offered this powerful indictment: “Why does dismembering a child with sharp knives, pulverizing a child with powerful suction devices, or chemically poisoning a baby with any number of toxic chemicals, fail to elicit so much as a scintilla of empathy, moral outrage, mercy, or compassion by America’s liberal elite?” Let me end with the conclusion to the editorial I wrote for the first issue of NRL News after President George W. Bush assumed the helm. A couple of years ago science writer Jim Holt wrote a provocative piece for the Wall Street Journal which I kept. Our bodies, he observed, are infected with parasites and bacteria. It is by “evolving rapidly and finding the ‘key’ that unlocks our cellular defenses that they do their deadly mischief.” Only by “changing the locks against them with equal or greater rapidity,” Holt wrote, “can we keep them out.” The tumblers in my mind clicked when I thought about this metaphor. Tenderhearted folks that they are, pro-abortionists often compare the unborn to a parasite. In fact there is a parasite—an “organism” which feeds off the host and contributes nothing—but it is not the unborn child, it is the impulse to abort. The impulse to resort to killing our unborn children is ever present in us; after all we are mere mortals. So when a pregnancy presents what a woman perceives as a crisis, unless she possesses adequate defenses—strong character and a loving support system—that “parasite” (the impulse to abort) can easily win out. The rapidly evolving pro-death mentality (it now attacks additional victims, such as the medically dependent elderly) has wreaked so much lethal havoc precisely because it’s been so adept at finding the “key” to “unlock our defenses.” Our task, following Holt’s imagery, is to “change the locks” with “equal or greater rapidity.” By that we mean any of a great number of things, all of which are important. Everything from volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center, to “changing the culture,” to all-purpose pro-life education, to legislation and political action. That latter endeavor by NRL PAC paid off handsomely, in spite of some naysayers. George W. Bush will be a strong pro-life President. Equally important as his convictions, I suspect, will be the kind of man he is. Our next task is to make sure the White House remains a place where the hand that rocks the cradle is as worthy to succeed George Walker Bush. |