The "rootlessness" of the anti-abortion movement?barnhart wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 7:50 amWe shall see, it's hard to make accurate predictions about the future. I think you are underselling the capacity of people to acclimate, same sex marriage was the subject of similar fervor until it no longer held the capacity to command votes, then the world of political agitation moved on to others issues rather quickly.
If the anti- abortion movement survives, I predict it will revert back to the Catholics where it started because there it is rooted in more comprehensive anthropology of the purpose and meaning of humanity. Individual Rights are a sharp political weapon but it cuts both ways because it's ontology is rootless, it can be employed by all sides of any issue.
Historically, Protestants had to be guided into the anti- abortion movement as a path to fight feminism. Phyllis Schlafly was a key player because she was building a coalition to oppose the ERA and needed a wedge issue to unite Protestants and Catholics. Before that, Protestants looked at abortion through the lense of Privacy and Rights of the mother. The largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists, made that switch in the late 70's. Before that they were more entrenched in Individualism and tended to view things like Equality for women before the law as good things.
Back to the subject of this thread, I think the rootlessness of the anti-abortion movement has made it vulnerable to political demagogues who lack a robust anthropology of human purpose and ride anti- abortion as a wedge issue until it is depleted, then abandon it. There were candidates available with well rounded, consistent pro- life resumes backed up by lifestyle and philosophy, but they were consistently rejected.
So abortion isn't the existential moral issue that we were all led to believe from tens of thousands of church pulpits across the land? Everyone except Catholics is just going to move on to the next shiny thing? That people who oppose abortion on moral or religious ground are just going to say that it is fine that half the country is doubling down on abortion rights because that's just "states rights" or something?
I have my doubts.
I think he has it exactly backwards. And he is conflating government and morality. One thing that Anabaptists understand is that morality does not derive from government. It never has and never will. Government is simply about the exercise of power. The fundamental construct of American democracy is that people have inherent freedoms (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, etc.) and that the government is by definition limited in its ability to infringe on those inherent freedoms by the Constitution. The 1st Amendment, the 2nd Amendment, the 5th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and so forth.HondurasKeiser wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 10:02 am
This just happens to dove-tail with something I was reading this morning by the inestimable David Bentley Hart:We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically “good” because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.