Aaron Wolf had been a prolific columnist and editor with Chronicles Magazine. He died one month ago, leaving behind a wife and six children.
One of his last pieces comments on the failure to pass an "infant born alive" Act in Washington. We are now in the midst of a similar failure to override Governor Cooper's veto of comparable legislation in Raleigh.
Here are Wolf's prescient observations:
The bitter irony of the failure of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act of 2019 is that pro-life Republicans brought their bill to the floor in the hope that they would highlight this monstrous incongruity, and Democrats simply stood their ground with no fear of electoral penalty because everyone, deep down, already knows exactly what is going on when an abortion occurs.
Everyone knows that abortion means killing a human being. Those who support “abortion rights” simply justify it. They play games with semantics because they do not wish to think about the bloody results of abortion or speak about them publicly. They are horrified at hidden-camera videos that show Planned Parenthood selling baby livers and brains to biomedical researchers not because they have learned something new by viewing them, but because they believe it is a human right not to have to think about that which they find unpleasant. In fact, they are perfectly content with the principle behind everything revealed in those videos: If abortions are going to occur, and the babies will be dead anyway, why should the living not benefit?...
What the War Between the States had left in place of our constitutional order has been eroded by the incorporation of the Constitution into the states. Stripped of the context of tradition, “Due Process” and “Equal Protection” become cute, vague terms that fit whatever agenda the left wishes to push, and it remains only for the idea to occur to someone in Hollywood or at the New York Times to devise a new right that must be defended at all costs and ultimately incorporated into the laws of every state. This modus vivendi can go only in one direction: leftward...
Big government is, quite simply, the fulfillment of the promise of liberal democracy. We literally can’t shake it. The illusion of self-government that accompanies any democracy causes men to develop an acute awareness of the inequalities that all people face because of unchanging human nature; and thus comes an obsession with individual rights. This obsession grows in accordance with the size of the group of individuals—neatly organized for us by poll—against which any one individual may compare himself. And so the consolidation of the American nation under a national government and by means of a national media culture that follows us wherever we go via ironically named smart phones causes jealousy and resentment to be ever-present hindrances in time of trouble. Local, state, and regional identities, and those vital mediating institutions mentioned so favorably by Burke and Tocqueville, once quelled resentments and fostered duty and loyalty. They have been neutralized.
A base as massive as ours will always tend toward baseness—unless it has a profound religious sensibility to keep it in check. And Christianity, being the one true Faith, cannot be replaced by a mere civic religion, neopaganism, nationalism, racialism (white or nonwhite), or citizenism; God is not mocked. Yet Christianity does not know how to operate apart from those mediating institutions which it instinctively creates and inspires: The Church must create culture, for She seeks to cultivate saints.
Conversely, the death of America’s mediating institutions—of family, school, university, neighborhood, community, local government, arts and letters—is the direct result of the Church’s failure to uphold the natural order, to cultivate virtue, to create culture. Cultural Marxists cannot march through Christian institutions.
Today, “conservative” Church leaders seek shelter under the wings of liberal democracy, repeating the bromides of the Enlightenment, touting abstract “religious freedom” as if it were written by the finger of God on tablets of stone. Instead of saying “Thus saith the Lord,” they apologize for the Church’s failure to defend human rights. They speak not as prophets but as Jacobins.
Infants—whether they wait unaware of the uncertainty of their fate in the warmth of the womb of women zealous of individual rights, or whether they lie helpless on a clinic table while mothers and doctors have “meaningful discussions”—should not be bit players in political theater. That they are tells us something about the wretchedness of our “sacred” political theories and the composition of this thing we call the American nation.
Democrats and Republicans, liberals and “conservatives”—all talk about the importance of our American democracy, and each accuses the other side of threatening it. But what if democracy is our problem?
What if our infanticide-friendly national culture is the inevitable result of the individualism and atomistic isolation that democracy fosters? “[N]ot only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors,” wrote Tocqueville,
but it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries; it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens finally to enclose him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
Clearly, there is no better way to escape into the solitude of one’s own heart than to hide one’s descendant from oneself by killing him in utero—or even on the clinic table when he no longer poses any threat to the “health” of his mother. Or does he still, even after he has been successfully “born alive”? Does a breathing child not serve as a living testament to undeniable and unavoidable hierarchy and duty, subverting the sovereign self and his “individual rights”?
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