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The new holidays
What’s at the heart of the current effort to abolish Christmas? Planned Parenthood’s “Choice on Earth” holiday card, which proclaims death instead of birth and the triumph of the will instead of the Peace of God, may provide a clue. Posted by Jim Kalb at December 27, 2002 03:46 PM | Send Comments
If I received such an abomination of a “Christmas card” (if it can even be called a “Christmas card,” which in fact it can’t), I’d return it to the person who sent it, with a note saying I didn’t want that polluting my home at Christmas. Posted by: Unadorned on December 27, 2002 7:03 PMLike Satan himself, I’ll bet Planned Parenthood sincerely wishes that Mary would have aborted Jesus… Posted by: Jim Newland on December 27, 2002 8:10 PMThis “Christmas greeting,” with its perversion of the (divine) peace that passes understanding into the (human) choice to do what you want, perfectly captures the spirit of the majority decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “[T]he most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” In Planned Parenthood, God as the true source of order in existence has been formally replaced by the human self, which is now free to define existence and the universe according to its own desires. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 27, 2002 8:24 PMA failing of the anti-abortion leadership is continuing to name anti-abortionists as pro-lifers. Pro-life is abstract; anti-abortion is concrete. The sine qua non of the pro-life movement is stopping the killing of the unborn and not stopping suicide. Using an abstract name surrenders rhetorical ground to pro-abortionists, who attempt to obscure what is at issue with names such as Planned Parenthood and pro-choice. The pro-abortionists see the transparency in the name pro-life and are contemptuous of it because it is grandiose. Using the name pro-life seems an attempt to appeal to a greater good when hardly anyone feels suicide is as horrific or frivolous as abortion. The Catholic Church and other religions probably have sound theological grounds for equating abortion with suicide; therefore, I am not criticizing any religion for using the name pro-life. My point is that in the hurly-burly of politics, the concrete is potent and should be used by us, laypersons. I know we are in a touchy (a gross understatement) realm here, so unresponsiveness is understandable. |