Progressives in America have an old familiar political shtick that goes something like this: "If you call yourself 'pro-life' but you don't support free healthcare, free childcare, free education, debt relief, free housing, and gun control, then you're not actually pro-life!"
In effect, the argument says you must support every possible policy that progressives can think of—literally every one—or else you should not consider yourself sufficiently in favor of life. And rarely is that argument more in play than directly after a brutal mass shooting, as it was this week.
There is such a deeply, unnervingly surreal quality to these arguments, coming as they do from some of the most vociferous proponents of abortion-on-demand. These are the people who sincerely, legitimately believe that it is perfectly acceptable for a 40-week-old unborn baby to be pulled apart by forceps. They have been absorbed so deeply into this violent ideology that, when pressed, they appear rather uncertain as to whether it should be illegal to kill 10-year-olds.
The argument, of course, is patently false: You can easily be pro-life and pro-gun rights at the same time. There is not a single pro-lifer alive today who does not desperately want to stop these mass shootings. We are as horror-stricken by the massacre of children as is anyone else—that is, of course, why we're pro-life.
But that is the strange and unreal political dichotomy of it all. Call it whatever you like—hypocrisy, stupidity, just plain evil—but it is the case that if you stand a pro-lifer and a pro-choicer next to each other, only one of them wants to end all child-killing in the country, while the other actually wants to enshrine a certain type of child-killing into the Constitution.
The difficulty for pro-lifers, then, is we are the only ones fighting a two-front war: We are working to save lives both in and outside the womb. Our grueling lifelong job is to bring about a fully realized culture of life, one in which all children—all lives—are protected at every stage of life, from conception to natural death.
That is no easy task. The culture of death is extraordinarily strong and pervasive. There are hundreds of thousands of abortions in this country every year, and there are many violent killers moving among the low shadows of the country, looking to do psychopathic harm to grade-school children. There is no immediate, easy path forward to end this all.
But we cannot lose sight of the broader goal—the ending of all child-killing, at whatever age. That means a very strong resolve for taking unpopular opinions. Pro-lifers do not make any friends in the broader culture by being unequivocally pro-life.
And it further means paying no mind to the merchants of death who make a mockery and a political sideshow out of things like elementary school shootings while simultaneously encouraging the dismemberment of hundreds of thousands of children every year. We can see this repulsive ruse for what it is, and we will not be taken by it.
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