Monday, November 14, 2005
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
I do not like to say a good thing about a sitting President, but when George finally held his nose and nominated a man, instead of a mouse, to the Supreme Court, he seems to have picked wisely. Samuel Alito is one of the best conservative judges in the country, and while he lacks some of Chief Justice John Roberts’ charm (a quality I find revolting in any serious man), he has spent his professional life with his cards planted firmly to his chest. Although he has left a long paper trail of firm and coherent decisions, he has avoided the grandiose rhetoric and self-dramatizing statements of Robert Bork, and, unlike Justice Thomas, he has not been foolish enough to allow a Straussian assistant to publish nonsense under his name. In his own quiet way, Alito is as baffling to the Demcratic leadership as Roberts was, and even the pundits at the far-left CNN.com concede that opposition to his nomination will really be coming from leftwing lobbying groups that are calling in their chits.
The biggest constellation of lobbyists are, it goes without saying, the infanticide lobby. Why do so many leftists get het up over abortion rights? In the world we live in, infanticide of unborn and newborn infants is far from difficult, and, considering the large number of women who have had abortions (plus their approving boyfriends, husbands, fathers, brothers) no one seriously thinks that the Court is going to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision. Even if some abortion “rights” were restricted, if underage girls had to inform their parents or if a waiting period were imposed, this is hardly the end of the world. In parallel cases—e.g., major surgery, marriage—young people are expected to talk it over with parents and take a little time to reflect. Why is the right to kill one’s own child so special that it trumps all other considerations, even public health rules. Abortuaries are subject to less regulation than veterinary clinics. Is that really how most Americans view unborn babies?
The answer is probably known to everyone who reads this column: reproductive rights, or rather on-reproductive rights: the right and duty to have sex without reproducing. The sexual revolution, a far more profound and dangerous revolution than either the French or Russian Revolutions, was a revolution against human nature and against the most basic elements of human society. However wicked the Cities of the Plain might have been, Sodom and Gomorrah were, to some extent, only a story that foreshadows the nightmare we have come to accept. Do not look for parallels in ancient Greek bisexuality (a much misinterpreted phenomenon) or Roman decadence.
Ordinary people in the ancient world lived as most ordinary people have always lived, dividing their time between worrying about crops and chasing after the children who are supposed to be tending the livestock or working in the fields. The tiny elite classes might become as decadent as they liked without influencing the rest of us whose lives are shaped by natural necessities. Yes, in 18th century Europe an anti-ethic of irresponsible hedonism reached its peak in figures like Voltaire and Sade, but the sexual antics of the Palais Royal were not being imitated by peasants in the Vendée. Only in the 20th century have we universalized the rebellion against nature and God and communicated it to the common man.
God? I do not refer only to the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” or to the punishment of Onan for practicing contraception. Christianity, though some of the early fathers were too skeptical about marriage and sex, has represented an affirmation and elevation and transfiguration of marital relations. When the churches turned first to contraception and then to abortion, they became the church of Antichrist. (I understand that ELCA Lutherans pay for their pastorettes’ abortions.) The deeper meaning of this revolution I glimpsed yesterday, reading about a bizarre Gnostic sect whose members devoted 365 different copulations to 365 different supernatural forces. Contraception was the rule, but where contraception failed, they had recourse to abortions carried out in combination with grotesque rituals. This worship of sex and death, I submit to you in all seriousness, is the diabolical religion of mainstream “Christianity” today.
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