Stand up for life
“In front of us flames. In the air that smell of burning flesh ... We had arrived -- at Birkenau, reception center for Auschwitz.”
So goes “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s acclaimed account of his Holocaust experience, a horrifying book that unfortunately has some relevance today.
“Men to the left! Women to the right!” Wiesel remembered a camp guard saying.
“Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion ... Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother.”
He recalls seeing his father weep, something he never thought possible.
Just days after Wiesel’s passing, and my own rereading of his book, USA Today ran a headline: “Women are rising in the West,” about Hillary Clinton’s pending coronation as presidential nominee of the Democratic party.
But at what price, a woman president?
The milestone is one that has supposedly been a long time in coming, the ultimate symbol of gender equality. But can we ever have equality if we allow the most innocent among us to be treated as disposable inconveniences?
The line from “Night” that screams out for our attention is: “Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... those children in the flames.”
There’s a poison in the cultural air we breathe, and pretending otherwise is what has gotten us into political scenarios with no good choices. Many people cite Clinton’s unfettered loyalty to Planned Parenthood, her promise of faithful leadership to it and its agenda. But Donald Trump, too, has extolled the good it does, showing his own unfamiliarity with the pro-life movement, the human rights issue of our time.
People talk with a desperate hope about their support for Donald Trump. He will blow things up, they say. They are attracted to his impatience and anger with a dysfunctional political system. But is it destruction we need, or renewal? Is it death we need, or life? Should we take a moment this summer to consider what looking away from death has meant in contemporary history?
Carly Fiorina, a former Republican presidential candidate, recently spoke at the Napa Institute about the current political scene. She pointed to the hope that is young people -millennials -- who are more pro-life than their elders, but who might not necessarily identify themselves with the pro-life movement or cause. They won’t do so, she says, because “they get all this pushback.” These times -- over four decades of legal abortion by judicial fiat, which has been doubled down on in recent weeks by the Supreme Court -- call for honesty, bravery and clarity. People need to be fearless in proclaiming that unborn human life is still human life and to prioritize the issue -and do so with love and hope.
Living at a time of much confusion about human nature and our relationships with one another, hitting reset on the miserable politics of abortion could just bear fruit beyond abortion laws and reality. It just could be a watering that could give new life to a whole host of other issues. Being welcoming rather than mandating sexual revolutionary values may just free us from the miserable politics and brutal experiences many women who feel they have no support to choose life know.
I was in the presence of Elie Wiesel just two months ago in New York City. He reminded us of the evil that drove anti-Semitism, which caused the extermination of so many Jews and others. Today we face a time where assisted suicide and abortion are presented as necessary -- not even seen as evils, it seems, by so many in power. Consider that gone are the days when Clinton’s husband talked about abortion as something that ought to be “safe, legal, and rare.”
You may not agree with everything you read here. You may feel quite fatigued by it. But in a culture where headlines every day involve terrorism or urban death, we need a new embrace of life.
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online and founding director of Catholic Voices USA. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)