March for Life post 1

 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the lion, and the sheep shall abide together, and a little child shall lead them.

 The calf and the bear shall feed: their young ones shall rest together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

 And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp: and the weaned child shall thrust his hand into the den of the basilisk.

 They shall not hurt, nor shall they kill in all my holy mountain, for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters of the sea.

                                                                                   - Isaiah 11:6-9 

There's something about animals and kids. They go together. When I was little, almost every picture book that was meant to trick children into sleeping was about saying good-night to all the animals. We'd say good night to, oh, for example, the baby donkey and the baby crow, the puppies, the pigs, the lambs. Then, as a sort of grand finale, there'd be a young representative member of our species getting shied off to bed along with the lot. 

Even the Bible juxtaposes children and animals. Look at the "peaceable kingdom" passage quoted above, which seems to find its fulfillment for a brief, short space in the narrative of the Nativity, when the savior of humanity bedded down in a stable for his first night on earth. When I was very little and my sister Clair was littler, she was discontented, I guess, with all the pre-existing Christmas carols, so she went and wrote her own: "The sheep and the donkey, the camel and the lamb / The cattle and doves are nice. / But Mary and Joseph put Jesus in a manger." Cattle and doves are nice, but a baby is nicer.

That picture jumped into my head, unreasonably, after I'd read a Salon article that my friend Joe Jablonski at Gaudium Dei linked to on his Facebook page. (He's about to write a post about it which will go into a lot more detail.) The article "So what if abortion ends life?" begins with the line, "Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word 'life.' " It then proceeds to explain, at some length, why we don't have a better word than "life". Pretty devilish clever of us to use the word we mean.

And here's the catch: Mary Elizabeth Williams, its author, was a Salon.com writer that I really liked, due to the fact that she had, in the past, showed a little human compassion towards the much-maligned Duggars, wondering aloud why they shouldn't grieve a miscarriage and even eloquently defending their decision to photograph their stillborn baby. In her article "Stop judging the Duggars", she asked, "So what if they're expecting again? A family of 20 is just another side of reproductive choice." Apparently, knowingly sanctioning the killing of human beings is the side we're accustomed to.

I'm not really sure whether to be relieved or terrified, reading the new article. Upside: we admit that children are being killed. Downside: we're fine with that.

"Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal," writes Williams. "That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always."

"All life is not equal." Think about that. Let those words stand against the arguments of those who say we don't need religion to be good. Religion says that human beings have souls, and without it, we suffer a level of detachment that leads us to rate human life in terms of convenience, because, really, are we any better than animals?

Don't read me wrong. I love animals. But if I'm going to see a scene with all the animals stopping and staring at something, I badly want it to be a man and a woman and a baby, not the words, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."