You Can’t Protect Some Lives and Not Others

One of the biggest hypocrisies of the far political right and evangelicals is that they claim to be "pro-life" yet other than being anti-abortion yet care nothing about children once they are born and nothing about the poor and less fortunate and they certainly care nothing about the lives of racial minorities.  Indeed, there political agenda applauds putting migrant children in cages, seeks to cut child nutrition programs and shred the social safety net, marginalize and stigmatize LGBT individuals and cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Once a child exits the birth canal, all bets are off in this false "pro-life" agenda.  A column in the New York Times stresses this reality and the need for those with a "consistent ethic of life" to demand change in our political parties and not be silenced by the most extreme elements of the far right or the far left.  In the process, perhaps political polarization could be lessened and more of a focus on the well being of all citizens, not just the wealthy, could be the result.  Given what the Republican Party has become, this is perhaps wishful thinking, but the effort might be worth making.  Here are column excerpts:

With over a year to go until the presidential election, I am already dreading what this next political season will feel like — the polarity, the vitriol, the exhaustion, the online fighting, the misinformation, the possibility of another Trump nomination.

People like me, who hold . . . . a “consistent ethic of life,” and what the Catholic activist Eileen Egan referred to as “the seamless garment” of life, don’t have a clear political home. A “whole life” ethic entails a commitment to life “from womb to tomb,” . . . a consistent ethic demands equal advocacy for the “right to life of the weakest among us” and “the quality of life of the powerless among us.” Because of this, it combines issues that we often pry apart in American politics.

Of course, not all Christians, and indeed not all Roman Catholics, share this view. It is however a common idea expressed in Catholic social teaching. Similar views have also been championed by many progressive evangelicals, mainline Protestants and leaders in the Black church. Yet no major political party embodies this consistent ethic of life. I find it strange that a view that is respected by so many religious bodies and individuals is virtually absent from our political discourse and voting options.

We, as a nation, are seemingly at an impasse, split on abortion, immigration, guns and many other issues, with no clear way forward. Maybe the only way out of this stalemate is a remix. Maybe there needs to be a new moral vision that offers consistency in ways that might pull from both progressive and conservative camps. To embrace and articulate a consistent ethic of life, even while inhabiting the existing political parties, helps create the space necessary to expand the moral imagination of both parties.

In decades past, it was entirely possible to be a pro-life Democrat or an anti-gun Republican. Roman Catholic leaders could support both traditional sexual ethics and radical economic justice for laborers and those in poverty.

The most polarizing issues of our day are divisive precisely because they are moral in nature. They derive not from different ideas about the size of government or wonkish policy debates but are rooted in incommensurable moral arguments. To move forward, we have to rebundle disparate political issues, re-sort political alliances and shake up the categories, so that those who now disagree on some things may find common cause on others, and so that people committed to a consistent ethic of life might actually feel as if they have at least a modicum of — a possibility of — representation.

In the conservative churches I grew up in, single-issue “pro-life” voters became part of the Republican coalition, and eventually they came to embrace the party platform as a whole, regardless of how well it cohered with an overall commitment to life outside of the womb. . . . “You can’t protect some life and not others.”

The political scientist Morris Fiorina writes in “Unstable Majorities” that the common perception that the American people are more polarized than ever is an illusion. What is true, however, is that the Republican and Democratic Party platforms have become more polarized and, in Fiorina’s words, more “sorted” than they have been historically. The most devoted members of the base of each party maintain that polarization, but they don’t reflect the majority of voters, or even a majority of those who identify with the dominant parties. This party polarization and intensive sorting have created an artificial bundling of platform positions that does not necessarily reflect the moral vision of most voters.

This artificial bundling is, however, constantly reified, Fiorina says, by the strident discourse of party leaders, elected officials and the most vocal members of the base, which creates what he calls a “spiral of silence.” . . . “Left unchecked, this dynamic leads the majority to believe that there are no dissidents, whereas members of the dissident minority believe that they are alone in their views. As a result, both majority and minority members of a group come to believe — erroneously — that the group is politically homogeneous.”

As the saying goes, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” There is no reason that the current bundling of political issues must continue interminably. Those of us who feel morally alienated from both parties must speak up and offer hope for a different sort of politics in America.