The Pro-Life Movement and Political Correctness

A few months ago I was invited to a seminar on Christian resistance theory in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Among the speakers slated for the event was one Rev. Matt Trewhella, who, though not Reformed, and not self-identifying as a theonomist, nonetheless makes habit of furthering the theonomic position in many respects. To wit, he has argued persuasively against state licensure for marriage, enjoined Christian families to birth more children, called for a complete exodus of government schools, rebuked the debt-based finance system and its masters, commissioned the first-ever English translation and publication of an important Reformation-era document on Christian Resistance, namely the Magdeburg Confession, authored a popular book introducing evangelicals to the doctrine of the lesser magistrate, and everywhere preaches the conservative (Reformed) view of Romans 13 as invalidating any government which runs afoul of God’s law. It is rather inexplicable how he champions so many doctrines which arose uniquely in the context of Reformed theology without in fact being a Calvinist, but it is a rather happy inconsistency, nonetheless, as he seems to be reprising many dimensions of Calvinist thought which the majority claimants of Calvinism have, just as inexplicably, laid down. As we have heard, God may make the stones speak on occasion.

However, upon arrival at the conference it was apparent that the topic of Christian resistance wasn’t the cause of the gathering, but ancillary to another – the pro-life issue. There were sandwich boards strewn about depicting the gory aftermath of abortion, people were decked in all manner of pro-life tees, hats, bracelets and what have you; and every table, booth, and kiosk was brimming with the telltale literature and regalia. But even if taken by surprise at the subject, I really wasn’t disappointed, as the slaughter of innocents underway is so prime an occasion for Christian resistance. This application, though unexpected by me, was certainly sound enough.

But in the immediate wake of the countrywide campaign to purge that great symbol of Christian resistance – the Starry Cross – from public life, and coming to what I understood to be a symposium on Christian resistance, I naturally came sporting my Confederate ballcap. And, mind you, the Confederate flag is still, on any given day, a common sight in the Idaho panhandle, so I thought nothing of it.

But there’s one thing I forgot to mention: the group sponsoring the event this afternoon, I came to find, was “The International Coalition of Abolitionist Societies.” Yes, amid the anti-abortion imagery and slogans were liberal helpings of all the boilerplate illustrations of shackled and supplicant black slaves which we all recognize as staples of leftist Yankee propaganda befitting the fevered imagination of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Banners, books, and tees were everywhere emblazoned with William Lloyd Garrison’s slogan of self-veneration, “I am an Abolitionist,” and I saw one man wearing a shirt which read simply, “John Brown, Christian saint.” I couldn’t believe my eyes for all the leftist virtue signalling around me. And reciprocally, neither could my fellow attendees believe that I bore the ensign of the Confederacy in their midst, for the Bonny Saltire I displayed in defiance of the humanist order eclipsing God’s Law was seen in the eyes of these neo-Christians as a symbol of ultimate evil. Inasmuch as they had conflated the pro-life cause and abolitionism in their minds, they took anyone for the Southern cause as conceptually pro-abortion. There’s nothing like a trip through the looking glass.

Grant me here a moment’s digression to say that I had read enough pro-life literature and generic addresses of modern decadence in my time to have seen comparisons aplenty between modern abortion and the work of Dr. Mengele, and despite those sources overlooking the many times worse and more prolific experiments conducted by Soviet scientists, I accepted them as apt enough. I was also familiar with the use made of Holocaust analogies in Judeo-Christian circles, and in spite of the proven falsehood of the WWII narrative, and the blasphemy of the term “Holocaust” when applied to Jewish internment, I have long since accepted that everyone from Francis Schaefer to Robert P. George has taken the Allied propaganda as approaching the authority of holy writ. Though genuine believers are bound at length to repudiate the cult of Holocaustianity, it is nonetheless deeply entrenched within the churches for the foreseeable future.

These analogies in pro-life apologetics are grasping for some axiomatic middle ground between Christian morality and liberaldom, but therein they wind up appropriating social objectives of leftist zeitgeist. And because the pro-life side now grants all the liberal presuppositions from the outset on the matter, they simply cannot comprehend that the Jews with whom they would make common cause find the comparison of nigh sixty million Gentile babies murdered by live dismemberment to the supposed six million Jews killed in gas chambers to be a gross diminution of the latter. More than that, the Jews call that comparison “blasphemy” against the Jews. Really. As the most famed survivor of the camps, Elie Weisel, tells it, “It is blasphemy to reduce a tragedy of such monumental proportions [the Holocaust] to this human tragedy, and abortion is a human tragedy.”[1. http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1991spring/Spring1991_1.php] And we daren’t miss the fact that the word ‘blasphemy’ which they use in this situation is one reserved for defamation of a god. Thus explaining why they would see the death of our sixty million as nothing compared with their purported death of six million. Because they regard themselves as divine and all others as cattle. But no matter how much it offends the Jews, the philo-Semitic pro-lifers simply cannot register it. Weisel continues: “You have to be strong not to pay any attention because those who . . . call you a Hitler and relate it to the Holocaust prove that they do not know what the Holocaust was.”¹ The philo-Semites who affirm the Holocaust (as an analogy of abortion) are yet to comprehend what the Holocaust is: it was the Jews’ Mount Calvary wherein they see themselves as the messianic people atoning for their own sins, and confirming their right to rule all the nations of earth. And in Judaica, the death of any number of Gentiles, no matter how astronomical, cannot approach the weight of a single Jewish death; so while the philo-Semitic Christians see the ongoing infanticide as the same thing which happened toward the Jews, only on a greater scale, the Jews see that as the most detestable sort of anti-Semitism. Far from winning the Jews or persuading leftists to their cause, to compare abortion to the Holocaust so, is actually to deny the Holocaust. And that denial is seen by the Jews as nothing but a rebuke of their faith and their existence. So the pro-life community’s prostration before the Jews is actually seen by the Jews as anti-Semitism. And the pro-life movement is evidently blind and deaf to this fact. Digression concluded.

But glimpsing the evolving pro-life culture up close also coming to identify themselves as abolitionists, and tacitly embracing thereby the humanism which underlay abolitionism from the start, I was honestly taken aback. They are apparently unaware that the nineteenth-century abolitionism with which they are identifying was the joint realm of Unitarians, deists, agnostics, atheists, transcendentalists, and the assorted cults, while the orthodox Christians inhabited the opposite side of the debate, acknowledging that the Scripture sanctions and regulates slaveholding in both Old and New Testaments.

But like the singular strands of a spiderweb anchored at remote points, the pro-life movement is drawing those disparate cords toward a point of convergence at a central nexus, closely entwined, albeit artificially. Two preponderant streams of ideal and activity overlapping with rare volatility are the pro-life movement and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which as we all know is a permutation of the #HandsUpDon’tShoot fairytale.

And just as with the Jewish reaction to Holocaust analogies, blacks monolithically regard the association of their civil rights causes with the pro-life cause as blasphemous.

Yes, blacks are aborting their children at a higher rate than the white community. In some cities, the number of blacks aborted per annum is even higher than those born. But that fact does not deter blacks from support of the leftist agenda in the least.

In hopes, however, of persuading blacks to the pro-life cause, the 99.999% white pro-life movement has conflated the issue of abortion with abolitionism, civil rights, and #BlackLivesMatter. This unconnected albeit calculated comparison is intended to rally the black community in opposition to Planned Parenthood’s eugenicist origins and to align the very un-PC pro-life movement with the high totems of political correctness.

Though this approach of integrating leftist causes and values has yielded little fruit, the pro-life movement continues doubling down on the same, embracing every new slogan and position of leftist social doctrine, everything that paints Western society, even under radical leftist hegemony, as radically right-wing and, therefore, a white conspiracy against minorities.

For context’s sake, and in order to demonstrate what sort of spirit the pro-life movement is summoning when they invoke #BlackLivesMatter, look to the recent interlude wherein liberal wunderkind Martin O’Malley ran afoul of the #BlackLivesMatter lobby by the most innocuous statement imaginable – “Black lives matter; white lives matter; all lives matter.”² The blacks in attendance booed, screamed, and denounced his words as “the language of white supremacy.” They also told us that if we don’t “get it” then we “aren’t human.” And, gelding that O’Malley is, he went on to apologize obsequiously. Then there was the coup affected upon presidential hopeful Bernie “Freedom Rider” Sanders’s speaking engagement where the #BlackLivesMatter activists excoriated Sanders and his fellow socialists at his stump speech in Seattle as “white supremacists.” For what? For not sufficiently subordinating our society yet more radically to the violent black minority. This speaks volumes about the landscape of race relations in our Alienist utopia. And about the total incompatibility of such a movement with Christianity. Because #BlackLivesMatter is code for “whites must be punished.”

If this dynamic were entirely quarantined amongst minorities and the faithless whites who promote them over us, it would make for a decent update of the “Who’s on First/What’s on Second” Abbot and Costello skit, but these anti-Christian dogmas are no longer confined to their own borders; they are championed by those claiming higher law, and who ought thereby to be at the opposite ends of the spectrum with regard to social doctrine. But no, the pro-life movement has become one of cultural Marxism in lockstep with the zeitgeist on just about everything. They have even embraced the cause of “women’s rights” in the name of the female babies.

Unfathomable as it may be, the homogeneous white higher-law advocates have come to grant every dimension of the leftist paradigm except the one thing they claim animates the whole movement – the abortion issue. That is to say, they have abdicated every hill and rampart to the enemy in hopes of persuading the foe to their side on the solitary issue of infant life. In so doing, and for the sake of that single issue, they wind up lending support to the very entities most opposed to the pro-life position and reinforcing the very antichrist socio-legal order which regards that infanticide as among its highest values. In essence, they are endeavoring to smother a fire with gasoline.

Granted, this chimeric abolitionist/civil rights/philo-Semitic/women’s rights/#BlackLivesMatter pro-life movement has, by all their liberal rhetoric, managed to draw a scant few minorities to the movement. But that rhetoric which paints antebellum Southern Christians as the moral equivalents of abortionists, and which emphasizes Margaret Sanger’s dislike of blacks, has not ultimately converted these minorities to respect of the sixth commandment so much as affirmed their already pandemic resentment of whites. It is not opposition to murder in itself which animates them, nor even concern for black babies, but rather the battle joy of facing down what they see as their historic enemy: the white man. The entire narrative of an overarching and covert genocide campaign against blacks and other racial minorities spun by the white pro-life propagandists doesn’t so much win the minorities in question over to God’s Law and defense of the defenseless, but to revanchism. Their participation, then, is but a front in what they perceive as race war.

So in the final analysis, the nearly all white pro-life lobby, in their desperate hopes of mollifying their most visceral opponents (blacks, Jews, et al.), has struck a most Faustian bargain, and are transformed into a deranged hybrid of Social Justice Warriors obsessed with liberal virtue signalling. This determination of white Christians to self-flagellate for the sake of drawing the paltry few minorities they have is inherently deleterious to the movement as it concedes to all the planks of humanism only to ally with those whose motives are contrary to God’s command and glory. And we know this because their allegiance was won based on all the classic cultural-Marxist arguments, and, therefore, is built on ulterior motives which can, at length, only undermine and subvert the cause further. Because to whatever extent this strategy of recruitment succeeds, the movement will shift further away from God’s Law toward human rights, social revolution, black liberationism, etc., all necessarily hastening the dispossession and marginalization of white people. The very people who make up the near entirety of the effort.

In the end, those motivated by #BlackLivesMatter will bellow, as they did against their social justice ally, O’Malley, that assertions of white lives mattering, or all lives mattering, are the language of white supremacy – the very thing which the present pro-life movement is telling them it exists to overturn. Apart from that black liberation narrative, they by and large have no use for the pro-life movement; and the moment it fails to assert the interests of blacks over whites, they will burn it down just as they did Ferguson, Missouri.

God save us from our own wicked hearts and the schemes hatched therein. May He save us from temptations to such Faustian pacts with the gods of the age. And may He yet bring swift judgment on all the covens drunk on the blood of innocents. Amen.

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