Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’
During his long political career, which spans four decades,
Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and
shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may
respond.
Blumenthal’s reaction to American Nazis in Charlottesville
was commendable and necessary;
in any denunciation of Nazism, there must be no ambiguity – no moral confusion.
There are indeed degrees of evil in the world. The bank robber who murders a
teller commits a greater evil than the bank robber who simply robs a bank.
However, using the greater evil to excuse the lesser cannot
be defended on moral grounds. The Antifa movement, like the American Nazi
movement and the KKK, uses violence as a means of moral suasion. The Nazis and
the members of the KKK who hijacked a protest over an attempt to remove a
statute of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville should have been
unreservedly condemned for who they are by all people whose
moral sense is not impaired by political considerations.
These two groups have been with us a long time; we know
them, and we should not pretend to forget or forgive the unrepented sins of their dark past. Both groups have bathed in blood up to their knees. The anti-black,
anti-Semite, anti-Catholic KKK used to hang or terrorize its victims; these
days, they are content to defame and rouse public opinion against them. German
Nazis persecuted and murdered Jews; these days, American Nazis accuse Jews, who
they falsely believe are animated by anti-patriotic globalist pretensions, of capitalist
greed. The shadow of Buchenwald falls
over all of this, and although David Duke is not Himmler – because there are differences
in moral degrees of evil -- the seeds of the greater evil are sown in the
ground of the lesser evil.
The Antifa movement – so called anti-fascists who have
adopted the Stormtrooper tactics of Fascists -- should be roundly denounced for
who they are by those who regularly storm moral mounts and shake their
fists at the gods whenever television cameras are rolling. The Antifa movement
has long been infiltrated by anarchists; in the anarchist dystopia, Senators like Blumenthal would be unnecessary excrescences.
Even for those who agree there is a moral order of greater
and lesser evils, Blumenthal’s too ardent support of the more indefensible
practices of Planned Parenthood is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Blumenthal's position on late term abortions, Orthodox Jews would say, is morally indefensible. Even a Reform Jew like Blumenthal may be uncomfortable with the killing of nearly born babies and the selling of their body parts
to doctors, a process, some may think, that comes uncomfortably close to morally noxious Nazi practices?
The moral position on abortion – most especially partial
birth abortion -- of 3rd District Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro also is confusing,
which is why, she laments in her recent book, “The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable,” her bishop removed her as a trustee of her Catholic High School. Scandal in the Catholic Church is synonymous
with sowing moral discord in the minds of Catholics. And Catholics who are
public figures, so long as they remain in the faith, have a moral duty to
maintain Catholic religious convictions in a morally confused universe. If they
break with their Church on important matters of doctrine, a devil word in the
modern period, they cannot maintain communion with the believing church, lay or
clerical.
Of course, DeLauro has little use for bishops and little
understanding of the historic opposition of her Church to the grave sin of
abortion. She believes as a professing Catholic -- “My faith has always been
important to me…” – that abortion has, within her Church, completely taken over
“the conversation on faith in politics.” And she is inching toward a wholly
indefensible moral position that important moral issues should be decided by the
state, not bishops or Rabbis. DeLauro seems unaware that Catholic opposition to
abortion and infanticide during Imperial Rome was the lever that freed women
from a crushing paternalism in which the paterfamilias of a Roman family exercised
complete dominion over the life and death of his unborn and born children. Abortion,
infanticide and euthanasia, not uncommon in the Roman Empire, are becoming more
common in the Western world as Christian perceptions are replaced by a morally neutral secularism,
both in Europe and America.
The modern notion of human equality, unknown in the Roman
Republic, descends from Biblical doctrine: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile,
neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).” And
the highly romantic notion of the love of children also has its roots in
Christian faith, “But Jesus said, suffer little children, and forbid them not,
to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:14).”
In Heaven, one hopes, abortion is frowned upon, as it is
among bishops in DeLauro’s church. There, one hopes, Nazism, Klu-Kluxery,
Antifa fascism and anarchism will not gain a foothold. Here below, the usual strife
continues. Flawed moralists continue to belch fire from their secular pulpits. Medical
practitioners, unbound by the Hippocratic oath – noxamvero et maleficium propulsabo: “I
will utterly reject harm and mischief”— perform partial birth abortions, after which
dismembered baby parts are auctioned off, while politicians, wrapping
themselves in moral mantels, wink behind the curtain.
Not a church going man, Abraham Lincoln, quoted from Thomas
Jefferson, not a church going man, in his Columbus Ohio debate with Steven
Douglas: “… there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas
Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat -- a man whose principles and policy are
not very prevalent amongst Democrats to-day, it is true; but that man did not
take exactly this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which
our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he
was led to exclaim, `I tremble for my country when I remember that God is
just!'’ … He supposed there was a question
of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any
man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah -- that when a nation
thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His
wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of
this element among us.”
Lincoln’s audience applauded this sentiment of a frail man
leaning for support upon the crutch of an eternal truth. How often, we should
ask, do the political heirs of Lincoln and Jefferson tremble when they consider
that God is just?
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