gracchusdixit

From the day, 40 years ago, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, evangelical Christians, in both their Protestant and Catholic incarnations, have steadily tightened their grip on our political life.  That is because Reagan popularized and legitimated their radical ideas, and they, in turn, embraced and enlisted him in their counter-revolutionary crusade against the liberal mores of the modern world.

Ronald Reagan was an improbable apostle to spread the gospel of the evangelical counter-revolution.  He rarely attended church.  He divorced his first wife to marry another, violating the strictures of the Presbyterian denomination to which he nominally belonged.  He displayed no evident personal interest in spiritual or theological matters.  And his public expressions of religious sentiment were, on the best of days, scarcely more than empty platitudes.  There is, in sum, no evidence that Ronald Reagan was especially pious or devout.  

He was, however, nothing if not a shrewd politician and, as such, he was keenly aware of the political potential of appealing to, and exploiting, religious feeling.  More to the point, the political b-movie in which he played a starring role—America’s quasi-religious crusade against “godless communism”—required a supporting role for the Christian god.  For without that god in the script, there could have been no godless villain; and without that villain, there would have been no need for the heroic protagonist Reagan had cast himself to be.  

Even as he played his part in this political psycho-drama, it is not at all clear that dear old “Ronnie” understood how the tale was going to end or how far it might go.  On the contrary, if he were still with us today, it is entirely possible that he might actually be horrified by the complete capitulation of the Republican Party to its evangelical wing.  

Nothing epitomizes that capitulation more starkly than the so-called “pro-life movement,” which was birthed in 1973 in reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade.  That ruling established, for the first time in our history, that women have the right to make their own reproductive decisions.   The “pro-life movement” was formed to overturn that decision, to abolish and criminalize abortion under all circumstances, and, for good measure, to quash any possibility of ending the suffering of those who are terminally ill or cognitively dead.  The capitulation of the Republican Party to this cause is now so complete that any candidate who dares to disagree with the “pro-life” agenda knows that his or her political life will quickly suffer its own premature death.

The foundational argument of this movement is that “life is sacred” and inviolable—always and absolutely, without exception or reservation.  From the start, this argument has been riddled with moral inconsistencies, logical contradictions, and rank hypocrisy.  

To begin with, many “pro-lifers” are entirely comfortable with the notion of condemning their fellow human beings to the electric chair, gas chamber, or hangman’s noose, not to mention contaminating the planet or exterminating millions of God’s other creatures.   Moreover, few “pro-lifers” pay much attention to the question of what actually constitutes a meaningful human life.  For most of them, it would seem to suffice that a sperm bumps into an egg, a droplet of condensation clings to the tube of a respirator, or a vestigial electrical charge continues to register long after life has been extinguished.  Most of us, I suspect, have a more expansive notion of what it means to be a human being. 

Then there is the uncomfortable question of what really motivates the “pro-life” movement.  For all their talk about the sanctity of life, it has long been clear that those who oppose abortion are as determined to suppress the sexual and reproductive choices of women as they are to save the “unborn”.  They insist that pregnant women bear children they do not want and cannot afford to rear, yet they won’t raise a finger to help them.  They oppose contraception on the grounds that any attempt to prevent pregnancy is morally impermissible, even though contraception would, by definition, prevent the “crime” they say they abhor.  They insist that legal “personhood” begins at the moment of conception, which is absurd on its face.  And they do all this in the name of “traditional family values,” which is a scarcely concealed euphemism for a social structure that has, for centuries, allowed men to dominate and control the lives of women.  

This blatant hypocrisy may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it didn’t end with him, and now, in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic, its fraudulence has become inescapably obvious.  

Just days ago, the Republican Lieutenant-Governor of Texas argued that older Americans should be prepared to sacrifice themselves to save the “American way of life” for their children and grandchildren, by which he meant an economy that allows those children and grandchildren to go on spending and consuming until there is nothing left to consume.  Right-wing economists immediately chimed in, as did the anchors and paid talking-heads on Fox News.  Donald Trump, ever attentive to his own self-interest, proclaimed that “the cure can’t be worse than the problem,” insisting for a time and against all medical and scientific advice, that the country should “re-open for business” as soon as possible, an act that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Let’s be crystal clear.  What “pro-life” Republicans are saying, what Trump has been asserting, what his evangelical supporters are affirming, is that human life is not, in fact, “sacred” or inviolable—always and absolutely, without exception or reservation.  Confronted with the prospect of losing money, they have changed their tune.  Now, they are openly asserting that human life is negotiable, that human life is a mere commodity, fit to be weighed on a scale that balances benefits against costs.  

I do not know how or when this pandemic will end.  I do not know how many lives will be lost.  But I do know this.  Those who demand the sacrifice of human lives for the sake of the Dow Jones Industrial Average cannot credibly insist that the “sacred life” of an embryo must be preserved no matter what it costs a woman.  

The foundational argument of the “pro-life” movement—that life is sacred and inviolable under any and all circumstances—has crumbled under the weight of its own moral contradictions and hypocrisy.  Nothing can put this Humpty-Dumpty back together again.