Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 117 (November 2001): 2-5.
Alas, First Things seems intent on remaining merely a scholarly magazine hovering above the fray on the topic of abortion. A more apt name would be Safe Things. You have tried twice now in less than a year to steer clear of being a magazine that moves the pro-life agenda forward.
As I began reading Carson Holloway’s much-needed rebuttal (“Serpents, Doves, and Abortion,” June/ July) of James K. Fitzpatrick’s act of cowardice regarding abortion that appeared in an earlier issue (“A Pro-Life Loss of Nerve?” December 2000), I was heartened to see the author’s diplomatic skewering of Fitzpatrick’s argument. It appeared at first that your publication was attempting to recover its integrity with a second look at the topic. Unfortunately, after aborting Fitzpatrick’s poor reasoning, Holloway himself produced such eager justification of the status quo that it too ought to be critiqued in some future issue.
Instead of searching for an effective approach to stopping abortion, Holloway sets out to find “other reasons why pro-lifers do not and should not turn to violence.” As if the problem were not abortion, but the possible violence of the anti-abortionists!
Holloway madly scrambles away from having his arguments construed as a “preemptive surrender to all manner of future evil.” Is it not enough that his arguments are a complete surrender to all manner of current evil?
Jim Gooding
Dearborn, Michigan
The analogies used by Carson Holloway and James K. Fitzpatrick concerning the use of violence against abortionists don’t quite hit the nail on the head. The analogies—a madman running through a maternity ward killing babies, genocidal actions that could possibly be thwarted by military intervention, etc.—have to do with situations in which there clearly would be a threat to the public.
But abortion as homicide does not fit into this category. I can defend myself against someone threatening my life, and the law will generally allow this. But usually neither I nor the public in general is threatened in any immediately obvious way by a woman who aborts her fetus. Possibly if the father were to use force to prevent the abortion of his own child the situation would be sufficiently public for the law to come down on his side. Possibly if I knew that my physician was performing abortions, I would have grounds for considering this a sign that he or she could not be entrusted with saving my own life in a critical situation; but the appropriate response would be to change physicians, not to use violence on my physician. And even if the majority were convinced that abortion is immoral, there are limitations as to what can be accomplished by legislative prohibition, as Richard John Neuhaus indicates (“The End of Abortion and the Meanings of ‘Christian America,’” Public Square, June/July).
One might consider contraception immoral, but the law can’t effectively prohibit the use of contraceptives in the bedroom, as was indicated in the Griswold v. Connecticut decision (1965) that paved the way for Roe v. Wade (1973); and it would be impossible to enforce laws against private drunkenness, or even against the private use of alcohol, as was discovered in the Prohibition era. It would be useless to make a law that would be ignored by a significant segment of the population, unless we were willing to recruit and pay for a massive increase in police personnel, and edge precariously in the direction of a police state.
I think the only chance for effective and enforceable legislation against abortion would have two requirements: a constitutional amendment declaring the fetus a person, while allowing exceptions for abortion in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s life, which are stumbling blocks for many who are otherwise pro-life. In such a legal milieu, actions might be taken against physicians for performing abortions where there were clearly no such extenuating circumstances. But the law would have to stop short of prosecuting a woman using an abortifacient pill to expel her fetus. This would seem to be a unique and anomalous case of purely private homicide.
Professor Howard Kainz
Department of Philosophy
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
It requires not careful scrutiny but only a minimally attentive reading of my article to see that I offer no “eager justification of the status quo,” that I do regard abortion as a serious problem, and that I am concerned with how to combat it effectively. It seems completely to have escaped Mr. Gooding that the formulation of some credible ground on which to reject the use of unlawful violence might itself be a necessary element of “an effective approach to stopping abortion.”
Indeed, his letter is based on the assumptions, never defended by any argument, that violence is the only effective way to stop abortion (hence his belief that my repudiation of violence amounts to a “complete surrender”) and that those who fail to see this are not only in error but also morally corrupt (hence his doubts about FT’s “integrity” and his supposition of James K. Fitzpatrick’s “cowardice”). Yet the truth of such assumptions is far from evident and is in fact denied by most pro-lifers. Mr. Gooding is disappointed at FT’s aspiration to be “merely a scholarly magazine.” He needs to learn that it is incumbent not only on scholars but on all human beings to defend their positions by reasonable arguments.
If I understand Professor Kainz’s letter correctly, he thinks that a private citizen’s use of force to stop an abortion would be impermissible even in a society in which the law does in fact forbid abortion, because abortion is not “a threat to the public.” This simply assumes, without argument, that the unborn are not, like the hypothetical babies in the maternity ward, part of the public that one may act to protect when the agents of the law are not present and cannot be summoned in time. But why would we deny them such a status if we are positing a society in which the law does in fact protect them? Perhaps Prof. Kainz’s misgivings arise from a misapprehension of what form such “force” would take in such circumstances. It would almost certainly not have to be lethal, but would probably only involve restraining an abortionist intent on breaking the law until the authorities could arrive.
Prof. Kainz’s comments on the limits to the effectiveness of law, and particularly law that does not enjoy overwhelming public support, are well taken. He goes too far, however, in suggesting that laws that forbid what a sizable minority are determined to do in private must either be useless or a threat to all liberty. A reasonable purpose of law is not to eradicate evils, but sufficiently to discourage them. (The former would require a police state; the latter does not.) Thus a law against the sale and use of abortifacient drugs could simply be applied when violations come to light, and it would not be necessary to destroy privacy by actively ferreting them out.
Finally, Prof. Kainz’s proposed pro-life constitutional amendment is incoherent in theory and untenable in practice. It would be difficult, to say the least, to square a constitutional assertion of the personhood of fetuses and maintenance of the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision for equal protection of the laws with a constitutional authorization of the use of deadly force against some such persons simply because of the conditions under which they were conceived.
It was a pleasant surprise to read the article “Rabbi Weinberg’s Agony” (June/July), written by a friend whose work I have admired, David Singer, on an important subject, the unique life and philosophy of a great twentieth-century rabbi, Yehiel Jacob Weinberg. Singer correctly posits that the vast Torah scholarship and piety of Rabbi Weinberg, combined with his receptivity to some aspects of this-worldly culture, may serve as an inspiring model for contemporary Jewry. Lacking, though, in Singer’s analysis and in much of “modern Orthodox” theorizing is the recognition that “modernity,” although not without some positive aspects, refers in large part to an era in which a combination of religious, cultural, and political forces have moved Western society from a God-centered to a man-centered worldview.
If “modern Orthodox” Jewish leaders are to “work through the modern experience” (an inevitable and, in my view, commendable endeavor), they must be prepared to condemn its evil doctrines and practices with courage, consistency, lucidity, and, of course, theoretical sophistication.
By analogy to Catholicism: the Church was urged by John XXIII towards “aggiornamento.” This “modernization” was to “open windows to the world.” Yet what has been forgotten in far too many Catholic circles, with disastrous results, is that these “open windows” must still retain the screens provided by the antimodernist writings of Pius IX (Quanta Cura, 1864) and Piux X (Lamentabili and Pascendi, 1907) in order to keep pollutants out.
Orthodox dialogue with the modern world must always remember the grave philosophical errors and immoral practices that undergird it and have produced the desacralized West we know today.
Rabbi Weinberg was, and I’m sure Mr. Singer is, mindful of this fact. Nonetheless, as we proclaim that bits and pieces of modernity should figure in our Orthodoxy, we must always remember and state that its essential beliefs must not.
Rabbi Meyer Schiller
Spring Valley, New York
After reading Michael Linton’s article on the National Endowment for the Arts and cultural rights (“The Blight of Cultural Rights,” June/July), I at first found myself in agreement that the NEA should, at long last, be abolished. On reflection, however, I changed my mind.
There seems to be something missing in Professor Linton’s argument. He asks if it is legitimate that tax dollars be spent on the work of gay artist David Wojnarowicz. The dilemma, he suggests, is that Wojnarowicz’s notion of culture is clearly different from, say, that of an evangelical Christian. The solution to the whole problem is to abolish the NEA, since it can never be the harbor of a particular culture—it would always be offending someone.
On the surface this seems a reasonable solution. Who is to say what culture or set of values is truly American? No matter what work was produced by a government agency, it would be a given that someone would find it against his deepest convictions. What Prof. Linton misses is that the government cannot not take a position. He is falling victim to the myth of the center. The myth is that there is some way that a government (or corporation or church or individual) can avoid having a position. They cannot. They all have positions. Granted, it might not be as blatant as when manifested in a work of art, but nonetheless it is there. Whenever a government agency builds a building, or funds a study, or passes legislation, a cultural and moral position is taken. This is unavoidable. The NEA becomes the whipping boy as it is the most public and literally visible example—art is values objectified, morals made into objects. But the government as a whole, too, manifests values in every action it takes (including the action of deciding not to fund the arts). Those values are always at odds with some measure of the populace. A genuine solution then to the tripe that is funded by NEA grants is not to abolish the program but for sensible citizens to do what they do in all other areas of government—fight to make sure that the true and good are pursued and cultivated.
Rod Miller
Hendrix College
Conway, Arkansas
Professor Miller is quite right. (With three daughters at our dinner table I am regularly reminded of holes in my arguments.) Yes, when the government does something, a position is taken (although I get a bit nervous when we talk about art having a moral dimension). And “we” of orthodox religious views can opt for fighting “to make sure that the true and good are pursued and cultivated.” Certainly that is necessary with regard to abortion, religious liberty, and bigotry.
But I’m not sure that it’s edifying with regard to things like the NEA. I have many friends and colleagues in the “queer left” whose friendship I value and whose work I esteem. But when we fight over spots at the government trough we all turn piggish. And anyway, for some reason talking about the love of Jesus just doesn’t get through when you’re snarling about somebody else getting “your” grant. The dilemma is that as citizens we are responsible for how our taxes are spent, but as children of God we’re to fundamentally work for His kingdom. With respect to the culture wars, if there were no NEA that area of political contention would be removed and both sides could back off a bit.
In his remarks on my recent Nation article “Freedom from Religion,” Richard John Neuhaus asserts (While We’re At It, June/July) that while I favor “a thoroughly secular state in a thoroughly secular society,” I acknowledge that “parental choice in education, faith-based social initiatives, and ‘the right’s sexual-political agenda’ do not violate the no-establishment provision of the First Amendment.”
He got it half right. I do believe that assaults on secular culture—like the right’s sexual conservatism and conspicuous public displays of piety by politicians—are destructive and dangerous but not unconstitutional. In my article, however, I distinguish between a secular ethos and a secular state—“one that does not fund or otherwise sponsor religious institutions and activities.” In my view the latter restriction is indeed required by the First Amendment; and I specifically cite “parochial-school vouchers, charitable choice, and George W.’s new federal office” as violations.
Professor Ellen Willis
Department of Journalism
New York University
New York, New York