We Must Be Radically Pro-Life
Let’s clear something up right off the bat: when I say “radical”, I am not referring to the maniacs who bomb abortion clinics, murder abortion doctors, or vilify post-abortive women.
I use the term “radical” for two reasons. One, to differentiate between a truly pro-life world view and the purely antiabortion ideology of the GOP. And two, because the term “Whole Life” isn’t as catchy, nor does it mean anything to most people unfamiliar with Catholic Social Teaching.
To be radically pro-life is to be exactly as the title dictates: for life — totally, completely, and without reservation. It means to see the preservation of all human life, from the unborn to the elderly, the innocent to the guilty, as the greatest good. It means to exhaust every possible effort to avoid killing at all costs — even it cases where it can be lawfully justified. It means realizing that abortion is only a fraction of a much larger ideology that seeks to protect and sustain life to the fullest extent possible.
It’s a radical belief because it flies directly in the face of strongly held convictions from both the left and the right. It requires the believer to look at both the unborn child and the convicted murderer and declare that both have the right to live. Moreover, it challenges an idea that is flawed to the core yet deeply rooted in American society — that bloodshed is an effective, even honorable, option for achieving good and solving our problems.
Looking at the state of our country today, we could use more of this radical ideology.
I’m writing this just a couple days after a terrible 72 hours that saw the deaths of two black citizens and 5 police officers. Due to the saturation of op/eds and blogs about these events, I had almost decided to not write anything.
But then I saw the memes. And the pundit clips. And the snarky social media updates. You see them every time something like this happens.
“He was a felon.”
“He was resisting.”
“He was an armed robbery suspect.”
“He’d been in jail 5 times.”
“He had a bunch of traffic violations.”
Few people may not actually say it, but the message is so obviously clear: “He was flawed. He was a sinner. He deserved what he got.”
And this is wrong.
It’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to in order to justify killing someone — especially when it comes to minorities. So long as we can make someone out to be a “bad guy”, we can turn their death from a horrific event into something to be celebrated. And we do it gladly.
Whenever a man is shot and killed, we spend more time defending his death instead questioning whether or not he should have been killed in the first place. Rather than mourn with his family, we show them a list of arbitrary reasons why he needed a bullet. As a good friend of mine once said, “Our default approach to violence is never to ask “How do avoid violence as far as humanly possible?” but is instead, virtually always, “When do we *get* to use violence?”
We don’t actually believe all lives matter. We just say it to deflect the guilt or to avoid the uncomfortable task of evaluating our world view. In reality, we readily and proudly believe that some lives are less than others. For some, it’s the unborn and terminally ill; for others, it’s minorities and criminals.
But by devaluing any life, we perpetuate the very ills that lead to tragedy, and when said tragedy is actualized, we have the audacity to ask ourselves why it keeps happening.
The answer is that we truly live in a culture of death, and all the problems that exist within our society, the very real problems that lead to the killing of innocent men — racism, the abuse of power, a violent hatred for the police — are exacerbated by it.
The only way to disrupt the cycle is to be radically pro-life, to see huamnity as something sacred and not something that simply is. We have to put an end to this de-facto moral code that determines who is and isn’t worthy of living and find the courage to reject violence in all its forms.
To do this, of course, requires actual transformation— a change too many of us are unwilling to make. We prefer to hide behind the right to die, the right to kill, rather than stand for the right to live. The Culture of Death rules, and we are its cowards. But if we want to see true change, we must become radicals.
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