Cultural Coherence
In the little town of 2,000 where I live, vandals trashed the local Southern Baptist church 9 days after the massive April 25 abortion rights march in the nation's capital. They left behind a message: "Hell [hath] no fury like mine." I have no reason to link the two events in terms of cause and effect, but it is clearly the case that they are two coherent expressions of the same current within our culture. Pro-abortion organizations like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights argue that any legal restriction on any abortion procedure is an infringement of the personal freedom and autonomy of women. It would not require an undue stretch of the imagination to envision a clique of drunken adolescents in the thrall of such arguments - kids who in an earlier age would have broken into a neighbor's garage and stolen his beer - deciding that a pro-life religious community like the Southern Baptist Convention, or even just belief in God and the sense of conscience which it ought to invigorate, represents evil in the form of a threat to their personal liberty and autonomy, evil that has no rights which they are bound to respect. When hedonism's freedom from constraint is the standard of virtue, the transcendent God who makes demands contrary to selfishness by means of an informed conscience is no less evil than the human child whose life is only comprehended as the persistently inconvenient byproduct of intense physical pleasure. We Americans have evolved into a higher form of life than those primitives who sacrificed their children on the altars of strange gods. We have become the strange gods themselves.