I did not plan to spend another day responding to Tomi Lahren’s half-baked pro-abortion crusade. But then she went on Fox this morning and claimed that it would be “religious judicial activism” to overturn Roe v. Wade. Her decision to wield this inane yet popular Leftist talking point provides me with the opportunity to describe why it is inane. I would be remiss if I did not take advantage of it.
There are, again, several levels of wrong to dissect. I will try to go through all of them now:
1) It is not judicial activism, much less religious judicial activism, to overturn judicial activism. The main legal argument against Roe is not that abortion is a moral travesty — though that is one argument — but that Roe itself is a constitutional travesty. The Supreme Court found in the Constitution a right to abortion, even though abortion is never mentioned anywhere in the document, nor did any of the Framers even hint that they had prenatal homicide in mind when they wrote it. The Court recognized this obstacle so it inferred a right to abortion from the right to privacy found in the 14th Amendment. The only problem, of course, is that the 14th Amendment says nothing about a right to privacy. The phrase “right to privacy” appears nowhere in the Bill of Rights at all. And even if it did, it would require a galactic leap of logic to get from “I have a right to privacy” to “I have a right to directly kill this biological human life.”
So, the Court founded its right to abortion, which is not enumerated, on another right that is not enumerated, and which, even if it were enumerated, still would not logically apply to abortion. This is why Roe should be overturned: because it is a legal decision that only the ignorant, the drunk, or the severely concussed could think reasonable or justifiable. Even if you are pro-abortion — especially if you claim to be a “constitutionalist” who is pro-abortion — you ought to oppose Roe and call for its overturning on the grounds that it was a fantastically bad decision made by people who “found” abortion in the Constitution because they believed, personally, that it ought to have been in there.
2) As Michael Knowles points out, many of the great human rights fights and victories in American history have been motivated, on the part of many of the people fighting for them, by Christian convictions. Is the legitimacy of slavery abolition somehow undermined by the fact that the vast majority of abolitionists were Christian? Must the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. be scolded for “pushing religion” on the country? Should those who fought to topple Nazism and Communism apologize for the expressly Christian character of their motivations? Or do we recognize that though their motivations may have been Christian, their aims, and the results, were humanitarian and democratic?
3) Putting aside the individual motivations of any particular pro-lifer (who may just as likely be an orthodox Jew as a Christian), the real point is that the pro-life position itself is not grounded in Christian teaching. It is consistent with Christian theology. It is even required by Christian theology. But one need not be Christian to be pro-life, and the government need not be a Christian theocracy to outlaw the murder of unborn humans.
Pro-lifers make two basic claims. The first is scientific: an unborn human being is a human being. The second is moral: a human being ought to be treated with dignity and respect. As a Christian, I am quite flattered that the Left wants to make dignity and respect into trademarked inventions of Christian theology. But Christians do not have or claim unique ownership over the conviction that human life has value and thus rights. It is, however, a conviction grounded in a non-materialist view of life. You need not be a Christian to be pro-life, but I cannot see how you can be pro-life unless you accept that human life is a sacred creation of a Holy God.
Is that what is meant by “pushing religion”? If so, then the entire doctrine of human rights is theocratic and should be abolished. The foundations of our country, which are not necessarily Christian but are necessarily theistic, should be dug up from the roots and thrown in the incinerator. The Bill of Rights — which cannot exist without human rights, which cannot exist without intrinsic human worth, which cannot exist without God or at least some sort of god — must be discarded. But then the basis for the “right to abortion” has been discarded, too. It seems you can’t disqualify the argument against abortion legalization without disqualifying the argument for it. You can, on the other hand, disqualify the argument for it without disqualifying the argument against it, on the basis that human rights exist but killing children does not and cannot fall under that umbrella.
4) So who, really, is making the religious case here? The pro-life case is grounded in biological science and a moral law comprehensible to any rational person. The pro-abortion case is grounded in cultish dogma and a moral law that is comprehensible only to Nietzscheites, satanists, and Tomi Lahren.
The pro-abort believes that a biological human person may not be a person, but merely a partial person, or a potential person, or a semi-person, and that its status hinges on the desires and feelings of its mother. There is plenty of science to debunk this view but none to support it. Yet the pro-abort holds to it based purely on faith. It may be true that because a Christian is a Christian he therefore believes that an unborn baby is a person. It’s also true that the biological reality of the case happens to agree with his Christian beliefs. The biological reality does not agree with the faith of the pro-abort. So biology must be thrown out. Only his faith remains.
The pro-abort also believes that it can be morally acceptable to kill a defenseless and innocent human organism on three conditions: First, that he is inconvenient. Second, that he is not yet born. And third, that he is the biological child of the person who is having him killed. Whereas traditional morality finds all murder abominable and the murder of one’s own child as the greatest abomination of all, the morality of the pro-abort finds all murder abominable except for the murder of one’s own child. Again, I can only call this a religious belief. It certainly is not a logical one. I cannot even call it a sane one.
Now we begin to understand why the pro-abort wants us to stop “pushing our religion.” Because they are determined to push their own, and they don’t appreciate the competition.