Read Part I of this article here.
Whenever President Obama spoke in his recent address to Planned Parenthood about the principal activities of their organization, he talked about dealing with “contraceptive services.” Now let it be stated that, if all that the Planned Parenthood organization were doing was searching to cure diseases in women, like cancer, we would all be delighted to join them. Many other organizations exist for the purpose of treating medical issues that do not imply abortion in their work.
When the president includes a good or neutral activity along with the evil (albeit unnamed), he wants us to believe that both were in the same acceptable moral category. Who would want to be against helping women with cancer?
Here, however, we are asked to believe that finding cancer is equivalent to having an abortion. But pregnancy is not a sickness, while cancer is. We are meant, by the president’s rhetoric, to glide over these two different things as if they are the same worthy moral act. This is a deception. It seeks to puts a lie in our souls about what is.
President Obama, in his lecture, ridicules states like Mississippi and North Dakota for their efforts to limit abortion. He implies that these efforts are wrong because they are “out-of-date.” This is his argument: “So the fact is, after decades of progress, there’s [sic] still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s, than in the 21st century … When you read about some of these laws, you want to check the calendar, you want to make sure you are still living in 2013.” The criterion of truth here seems to be chronology, based on “progress,” which is always what we do now.
The president, to be sure, does not always eschew the language of right and wrong. “Forty-two states have introduced laws that would ban or severely limit access to a woman’s right to choose.” He calls the North Dakota and Mississippi initiatives to restrict abortion (i.e. “woman’s right to choose”) “absurd” and “wrong.”
If it is “wrong” or “absurd’ to seek to limit or ban abortion, then what the president is doing must be right, namely fostering and providing facilities for abortion. God’s “Thou shalt not kill” now means “Thou shalt kill certain designated groups according to the time or year in which they live.” It is evil to say of what is right that it is wrong, and of what is wrong that it is right. The more subtly we do this, the more effective.
With regard to whether something is right or wrong because of the time in which it was enacted, we recall Chesterton’s comment about those who say something can be right in one century but wrong in another. “It’s like saying something can be right on Tuesday but wrong on Wednesday.” It is striking that President Obama’s logic would allow him to invoke such a dubious chronological principle to justify what he wants.
Moreover, as Robert Reilly pointed out, if we go back not to the 1950s, but a hundred years ago to the founding of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger’s influence, the whole impetus of that organization was based on Darwinian eugenics. It was to weed out inferior races by preventing them from breeding. With this background, the president’s own genetic origins would have been the object of Planned Parenthood concern.
Whether a thing is right or wrong does not depend on the time in which it appears but on the truth—on the validity of the argument that establishes it.
What the president evidently calls wrong is anything that disagrees with his own conception of what the law, in the service of his ideology, can do. But by his own chronological logic, if states finally succeed in limiting or forbidding abortion, since that would take place after the time when it was available to everyone, it should be accepted as up-to-date, and the abortion position as outdated.
Mr. Obama is a clever rhetorician but not a careful thinker. Hitler and Stalin were once up-to-date. One needs more than chronology to challenge them. Perhaps this is the reason the Declaration of Independence was not cited during the Planned Parenthood meeting.
The final point that needs to be made concerns the starting point of the so-called “right to choose” rhetoric. What should govern this whole question is not the woman or the man but the child. Neither a woman nor a man by him or herself has any “right” to choose to have or not have a child. What they have is a freedom to marry. If a child is begotten of them in this relationship, it is their duty to bring it to birth and care for it in a home.
A child is always a gift, not a “right,” nor the product of a contract or a scientific process. The primary focus is the child, not the parent. The logic works in exactly the opposite manner from the way we insist on thinking of children. Every child thus has the right to have both a mother and a father (not one mother or one father or two mother s or two fathers) bound together in an exclusive relationship in which the family is formed. We should be speaking not of a “woman’s right to choose” but of a “man and a woman’s duty” to accept and care for what they beget as a gift in their personal relationship. This arrangement is what is best and normative for the child and its parents and the society in which they live. When this principle is violated, everything in the society itself begins to unravel.
Thus, in answer to the initial query, “Why was this the most evil speech of an American president?,” in my opinion, it is because the speech systematically lies to us about what is really happening when the “right to choose” or “contraceptive services” are put into practice.
The words are chosen carefully with full knowledge of what they are intended to convey and full knowledge of what actually happens. C. S. Lewis, following the Socratic tradition, said that evil is to call what is good evil and what is evil good. This is basically what Genesis said of the sin of the First Parents who wanted to place the distinction of good and evil in their own hands, not God’s.
Stripped of all the rhetoric and masked words, this address told the American people, probably too ready to listen, that what was evil was really good, a “right” in fact. Why this speech is particularly heinous is not that it was spoken by some professor or distraught lady, but by a president pursing public policy. He maintained that what was proposed was worthy of God’s blessing. It was right, not wrong. These are not ordinary confusions. They follow, knowingly or not, a logic and force determined to overturn, in the name of progress and being up-to-date, all the proper relations of man, woman, child, family, and society.
The second century Epistle to Diognetus, cited in the beginning, already affirmed that Christians marry like other men, have children, but, it added, do not “expose,” that is, abort, them. This criterion is still what defines a human being and a Christian. We are told that such “teaching” is backward and not current. We are asked not to think about what we are doing but only to ask about our “right to choose.” But we all know what we choose when we exercise this oft-cited “right.” We do not have the courage to call evil what it is.
We must hide our evil in obscure language. This hiding tells us better than anything else that, when we so lie to ourselves, we know that we do so lie. We prefer the power that this lie gives us to the truth of what happens when we exercise this very strange “right,” with no acknowledged object. We are asked officially to deceive ourselves about the most innocent and wondrous act in human reality—the conception and birth of a human child. We are asked to do this so that we will be “up to date,” because our only criterion of truth is what we choose, not the proper question, of whether what we choose is good or evil.
Read Part I of this article here.
Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., taught political science at Georgetown University for many years. His latest book, The Mind That Is Catholic, is published by Catholic University of America Press. His forthcoming book Remembering Belloc will be available from St. Augustine Press in the spring of 2013.
