Catholic 365 has a good piece on a Consistent Life Ethic

Last updated on: December 10, 2016 at 12:48 am by Mark Shea

Catholic 365 has a good piece on a Consistent Life Ethic 2016-12-09T20:45:52-07:00 Mark Shea

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I mostly agree it and don’t have much to add to it. My one quibble is that I simply never ever run into the mythical people who supposed say that the minimum wage (or some other lesser thing) is just as serious as abortion. Literally never.

Conversely, almost every day I run into people who ring the changes on “Because abortion is ‘non-negotiable’ while unjust war/torture/racism/misogyny/the death penalty/the living wage/child labor/mass deportation of immigrants/denying poor people health care/robbing old people of the Social Security many they paid into all their lives/grabbing women’s genitals/33,000 annual gun slaughters/threats to free speech, the press, and religious liberty/and care for creation can all be treated without the slightest regard for either prudence or the Church’s teaching that the Church’s teaching (and Pope Francis in particular) can be treated with scorn.” Just today somebody whose FB pages was bedecked with gooey pious images of the Blessed Mother, Trump campaign propaganda, xenophobia about the Black Menace, and one prolife meme after another shouted at me that Hippie pope Frankie could kiss her butt and signed off “White Power, bitches!” She could detect no contradictions in her thinking.

This has gone on for years. Torture defenders told me the abortion was the *true* torture so who cared about some prisoners. Unjust war defenders told me that the death toll from abortion dwarfed that of the war, so who cared about the war? The death penalty is awesome because it kills the guilty (more or less), unlike abortion. “We can’t *begin* to talk about feeding the hungry or clothing the naked,” said a reader recently, “until abortion is stopped.” (A convenient way to avoid all responsibility for everything, since abortion, like slavery is as old as the human race and will, like all sin, never be completely eradicated.) And on and on it goes, with the unborn perpetually dragged out as human shields to defend every single form of sin and evil acceptable to or promoted by conservatives.

And the ultimate irony is that the liberal bogeyman is perpetually claimed to be “distracting” from the supposed “non-negotiable core value” of defending the dignity and sanctity of unborn life whenever a consistent life ethic is bruited. But the reality is that it is the AABNP conservative who is distracted. The Consistent Lifer says “Be more prolife, not less” and cheers for the defense of the unborn as he or she cheers for the defense of the poor, the prisoner, the torture victim, and the refugee. As the intermittently-popular-with-conservatives saying goes, “All Lives Matter”.

But for the AABNP conservative much of the energy goes to battling the Church, not to defending the unborn. He is constantly distracted from his putative mission to battle the Church on the goodness of the Iraq war, or torture, or boycotting “Hamilton”, or defending Trump’s misogyny, or slandering Francis as a Commie, or ridiculing Laudato Si, or shouting at refugees or any one of a host of things that have one thing in common: they are not defenses of the unborn but they are defenses of American Conservative Culture War obsessions.

A consistent life ethic frees you to just agree with the Church and get back to defending human life from conception to natural death. The AABNP shackles its adherents more and more to the defense, not of unborn children, but of everything the Party of Trump says and does on a daily and hourly basis. Today it’s making excuses for Trump siccing his Twitter mob of bullies and thugs on some union guy and doing nothing to stop their death threats. Tomorrow it’s some other ugly or stupid thing. What it’s not is the gospel or the protection of human life.

Be more prolife, not less. And bravo to Catholic365 for a fine article!

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