Pro-life: More than just abortion
How conservative views promote life
By Ross Lingenfelder
From the March 2007 Print Edition
As a family, we used to go camping in Yosemite National Park, where I would marvel at the trees, search for the deer in the meadow, and listen to birds sing early in the morning. At home I would spend hours in our garden planting new varieties of peppers and weeding out all the miscellaneous vegetation that made its way to our yard. One of my favorite activities was catching and inspecting the spiders that helped to protect my plants from all of the other insects that ate their leaves.
From a very early age my parents trained me to have a great respect for life. As destructive as snails can be to basil leaves, I still hated to kill them. Yes, weeds took all the precious nutrients from my grapefruit; yet I still could not bring myself to kill those meaningless plants. Alas, I would transplant the weeds to a different section of the yard.
Over Christmas break it occurred to me what the foundation of my belief was. As Andrew Sullivan stated, “all conservatism begins with loss.”
What more do we have to lose than life?
I am a conservative because I love life. I respect America — I love America — because it has done more than any other nation ever has to protect and stimulate life. I despise the former Soviet Union and Mao’s China because they destroyed lives, in numbers known only to God.
The United Nations’ dangerous policy toward evil in the world disgusts me; I admire America’s ideal of international relations. Never once — not one single time — has the United Nations been able to successfully prevent a major political disaster in which thousands or millions were killed. It failed to prevent death in Korea, Vietnam, Suez, Rwanda, Iran, Colombia, Iraq, Kosovo, Venezuela, Cambodia, Kashmir, Darfur, North Korea, Israel, Congo — to name a few. In these situations, the greater world community chastised America’s actions to protect life while praising the United Nations, which turned a blind eye toward evil.
Life is best protected when the inhuman mass murderers are stopped, not appeased.
As Americans, to keep and bear arms is our right, but to own a gun for protection is our duty. A liberal would have you believe that pepper spray is an appropriate and effective tool with which one can prevent an attack. Certainly one would not want to cause any serious damage to the rapist, robber, or other deranged freak. After all, this individual is only committing a heinous crime because of “institutionalized racism,” say our gauche friends who blame all problems on race. It does not occur to them that such logic puts the blood of innocents on their hands. A rapist with a decommissioned arm will have a much tougher time attacking a woman than one who has a foggy memory of the taste of pepper spray. Life is protected when the murderer finds himself cold and six feet under rather than sitting on appeal for 30 years.
America’s use of the death penalty exemplifies morality. Too many innocent lives have been lost when convicted murderers serve their time then go on to kill again. Lives of those who matter most, those innocent individuals who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, are protected when murderers are put to rest.
So often I find myself in awe at the magnificence of capitalism, which further promotes life. America’s economic system nourishes life to such a magnitude that it boggles the mind. Never once in a time of peace has a free-market, capitalist nation experienced famine. Ever. Even in the depths of the Depression, sustenance surpassed subsistence. Now, compare that to the communist nations that starved millions of people to death. The ones who survived suffered prolonged periods of criminal-level rationing and pitiful variety.
I remember the exact moment when I realized that our nation would soon liberate the Iraqi people from the evil of Saddam Hussein and commit itself to non-proliferation. That was more than four years ago. I supported the objectives of the war then and I support the objectives now, though I disagree with the president’s management of the war. Nothing weighs heavier on this conservative’s soul than knowing that there are people in today’s world who cannot know freedom. How better to protect life than to remove the tyrants in this world who despise liberty? While not a religious man, I am often asked how Republicans can claim to be religious, yet support war. In Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3, 8 (KJV), the Scripture tells us, “To every thing there is a season … A time to kill, and a time to heal … A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
I doubt that anyone knows why America has such distaste for oppression. Maybe, as a friend once explained it to me, it is because America just despises evil. What is obvious, however, is that a conservative’s view on the above and on a number of other issues support this same thesis: America cherishes life.
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