Written on the Heart?

Speaking for sensitive secularists everywhere, David Harsanyi asks : “How many Americans instinctively turn to the pro-choice camp because pro-life proponents aggravate their secular sensibilities?”

Since he doesn’t “hang with” Catholics, Baptists, and Lutherans (I’m compelled to wonder: does he actively avoid these and—I presume—other denominations or does he pursue a personal DADT policy when it comes to the religious beliefs of his drinking buddies?), he thinks their prophetic pro-life witness is a turn-off.

Hmm.  I wonder how he would have responded to the Civil Rights Movement in the Sixties.  Would all those Revs have been a turn0ff, enough to drive a fellow into the waiting arms of the KKK?  Probably not: the KKK, after all, only disliked a few denominations, not all of them.

To his credit, however, Harsanyi isn’t satisfied with a cultural pose that even someone as ham-handed as me can lampoon.  He asks, and observes:

Does life really begin on the say-so of a single person—even the mother? Does her position or mental state change what a fetus is or is not? That kind of elastic calculation grinds against reason. Even our intuitive reaction to motherhood agrees. As Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who is an ob-gyn, once explained, “people ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite.”

He assumes that “reason” can settle such questions.  Perhaps so, but not mere logic.  Why does he find killing a human being abhorrent?  Why does he think that life-or-death decisions have some much weight and significance?

I’m tempted to answer that “someone” has written something on his heart .  I don’t think his understanding of reason is as impoverished as he lets on.