Posted on 01/06/2014 8:06:50 PM PST by OddLane
On Wednesday of this week, January 8, 2014, we will mark the fifth anniversary of the death of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. At the time of his death, many observed that he was irreplaceable. Certainly no one has replaced him. He was the great Christian public intellectual of the second half of the Twentieth Century. In a published tribute to him shortly after his death, I noted that he had begun his career as a liberal and was lionized by the liberal movement. But then something happened:
Abortion.
It became something it had never been before, namely, a contentious issue in American culture and politics. Neuhaus opposed abortion for the same reasons he had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. At the root of his thinking was the conviction that human beings, as creatures fashioned in the image and likeness of God, possess a profound, inherent, and equal dignity.
This dignity must be respected by all and protected by law. That, so far as Neuhaus was concerned, was not only a biblical mandate but also the bedrock principle of the American constitutional order. Respect for the dignity of human beings meant, among other things, not subjecting them to a system of racial oppression; not wasting their lives in futile wars; not slaughtering them in the womb.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirrorofjustice.blogs.com ...
At the same time, more than a few notable liberals were outspokenly pro-life. In the early 1970s, Massachusetts “Senator Edward M. Kennedy, for example, replied to constituents’ inquiries about his position on abortion by saying that it was a form of “violence” incompatible with his vision of an America generous enough to care for and protect all its children, born and unborn. Some of the most eloquent and passionate pro-life speeches of the time were given by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In condemning abortion, Jackson never failed to note that he himself was born to an unwed mother who would likely have been tempted to abort him had abortion been legal and easily available at the time.”
My how those two changed.
Mark 8:36.
I love First Things magazine...
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