Wake up, Know-Nothings, and pull your heads out of the sand! It's not a dirty little secret that the policies of "liberals" are anything but liberal; and this despite their often rosiest of intentions!
It's no accident that the celebrated author, Flannery O'Connor, once wrote: "In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. And tenderness leads to the gas chamber."
[Hat tip to Nina Bryhn]
PP, you love to damn Planned Parenthood based on eugenics quotations from 100 years ago. I guess that's a lot more fun for your audience than starting in on the sins of the, um, Roman Catholic behemoth. But institutions can change for the better—thanks be to God—even Planned Parenthood and your Church. Comparing anti-abortion crusaders with anti-slavery abolitionists? Yes and no. I guess they shared traits of stubborn self-righteous certitude. You say things don't turn out as Liberals wish? The record for Crusaders is hardly more glorious. There's nothing easier than judging historical figures by today's wisdom—and few exercises more hypocritical.
ReplyDeleteproblem with attribution to Sanger: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/margaret_sanger_2.htm
ReplyDeletehttp://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/08/004-walker-percy-and-the-christian-scandal-20
ReplyDeleteThe key excerpt from Anonymous' last linked article is this, which makes the needed point exceptionally well (thank you) -- and the quoted words are Flannery O'Connors from their sources:
ReplyDelete“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness [i.e., Christ] its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” The important point is that tenderness is not the problem in itself, for tenderness properly oriented is a desirable deportment toward creation. But when that manifestation of disoriented tenderness occurs again as dissipated by an almost universal acceptance of abortion, Mother Teresa is right to say (as Percy quotes her): “If a mother can kill her unborn child, I can kill you, and you can kill me.” Since Mother Teresa spoke these words, we note, euthanasia as a public policy has been submitted to plebiscite in our own country. The issue, then, is not tenderness, no better example of which is among us than Mother Teresa's, but the distortion of that sentiment by separating it from its source in Christ, which separation Flannery O'Connor characterizes as sentimentality.
By the linked article before that, Anonymous suggests a possible mis-quote or imprecision in the words attributed to Margaret Sanger. I read this article, and several others, BEFORE posting this piece. I agree that there is some imprecision. Sanger would not have used the word "Blacks" but rather "Negroes," for example. But if you take the attributed words as representing her agenda and ideological commitment, there is no problem at all. See, for example, this analysis: "Was Margaret Sanger Misquoted?" (Egnorance, February 17, 2012).
Dan Clark is a friend of mine from college days, with whom I now share a hopefully-friendly disagreement on this view.
ReplyDeleteWhile there is a more detailed exchange between us on Facebook, I limit my response here to the following (edited) remarks in reply to his dismissal of the post as a "cheap shot":
One person's "cheap shot" may be another's "argument." If you explain neither why it should be disqualified as a "cheap shot," nor respond with a counter-argument of your own, some might be tempted to conclude that you fall into the pervasive trendy-lefty camp, which, at a loss for sound arguments in the face of counter-evidence and sound reasoning, reverts to mere ad hominems. So I invite you to back up your claim that Planned Parenthood has changed (or is capable of changing) for the better, like the Catholic Church.
(There is this troubling difference: the C. Church, for all its corruption, was founded to bring sinners to repentance, sanctity, and life, against the grain of their fallen inclinations, while P. Parenthood was founded to indulge their fallen inclinations, allow them to avoid responsibility, and to kill the unborn, particularly those of "populations that we don't want to have too many of," to quote Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, New York Times, July 7, 2009).
I don't imagine that your suggestions of "hypocrisy" or remarks (now repeated several times) about the "sins of the Catholic Church" qualify as "cheap shots," though, considering that their source embodies the soul of charity, peace, and nonresistence, although I must admit I'm not quite sure how.
Peace -- PB