Last Thursday, I wrote about Manichaean rhetoric from the Right in America, and how it’s poisoning our politics by making political disagreements into questions of good and evil rather than questions of the common good. One of the things I wrote was this:
If every matter of public policy is another battleground in the ultimate war between Good and Evil, then compromise anywhere, on any matter, is sin.
Three days later, Dr. George Tiller, a doctor best known for performing late-term abortions, was shot and killed as he served as an usher at his church on Pentecost Sunday. As the dust clears, it’s laid bare a fact that we all know in our hearts from childhood: Violent words lead to violent deeds.
If the Christian Right’s leaders are telling their followers that abortion is like the Holocaust, and that those who perform abortions are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camp wardens, it shouldn’t be any surprise when one of the followers decides that killing an abortion doctor is a good and wholesome act. And given that there’s a history of violence in the extreme sectors of the movement to criminalize abortion – a history of violence that advocates of legal abortion have for years been linking to violent, demonizing rhetoric – it’s even less of a surprise. We shouldn’t forget that Dr. Tiller himself had been shot in the past by anti-abortion extremists; we also shouldn’t forget that terrorist Eric Rudolph, who set off the bomb during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. The assassination of Dr. Tiller is clearly far from an isolated incident.
So what’s the way forward? How do we deal not only with the fact that someone just committed a heinous murder in a church, on Pentecost Sunday, in the name of Christ? What can we do as believers in the Prince of Peace to ensure that no matter where we stand on the issue of abortion, there are no more assassinations like that of Dr. Tiller?
First, we need to tone down the rhetoric. Too often, we demonize people on the other side of the aisle. “She’s pro-choice, so she’s a baby-killer.” “He opposes SCHIP, so he clearly doesn’t care about the poor.” This kind of language presumes bad faith on the part of others and serves to make compromise all but impossible. How could we expect someone who opposes abortion to come to common ground with someone he or she has been told supports a Holocaust, or expect someone who thinks abortion should be legal to sit at a table with someone whom he or she has been taught is a woman-hater? The demonizing rhetoric makes even the simple act of breaking bread – the most basic of human social activities – all but impossible.
Second, we need to have an honest discussion about the issue of abortion. Too often, we’re talking past each other rather than with each other. We don’t trust one another enough to come to consensus solutions or even to talk about the issue. So instead of giving an inch or two here or there, which could lead to good will and good-faith solutions, we entrench ourselves even further in our own positions, believing that any compromise at all with “the enemy” is giving them a beach-head from which to launch an all-out assault. We need to respect that both sides are coming to their opinions out of an honest place of heartfelt concern – and even if we can’t come to a consensus solution (which may, unfortunately, be impossible), we can at least understand one another better, and maybe won’t be so quick to whip out that demonizing language again.
Third, and finally, with that good faith in place, we do need to work towards the common ground we can find. We all agree that regardless of whether or not abortion should be legal, we’d all like to see the number of abortions go down. In a lot of situations, abortion is a symptom of a much deeper social disease – the traps of poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, lack of support that ensnare far too many people in our society. We can come together on things like improving this nation’s rather ghastly foster-care system, which damns far too many children to lives of neglect and abuse.
We can come together on things like improving health care for all children – because even if we differ on whether adults who can work should have a right to health-care benefits, we can all agree that no child should have to suffer from disease or ill-health because his or her parents are poor – no matter where we put the blame for their parents’ poverty. We can come together on things like improving pre-natal care, so that women who are pregnant can have confidence that they’ll give birth to a healthy baby. We can come together and brainstorm ways to reduce unplanned pregnancies – whether that’s through comprehensive sex education programs in the schools with an emphasis (but not an exclusivity) on abstinence, increased access to contraceptives. These are common-sense, common-ground things that we can do to reduce abortion.
Even if we disagree on the particulars of these things – and I know as I write this that we do disagree – we can at least come to the table and hammer out some kind of common ground on the shared understanding that we all want to see abortions decrease. If we start on that basis, if we start with mutual trust and good faith, we’re much less likely to go back to demonizing and hating one another.
But the assassination of Dr. Tiller makes one thing clear – the status quo is untenable. If we go on doing what we’re doing, if we go on making enemies of brothers and sisters, there will only be more violence, more broken hearts, more grieving families, more FBI manhunts. We need to seriously rethink the way we talk about this issue and start trying to see things through the eyes of others. And most importantly, we need to be less Manichaean and more Christian, seeking to follow Christ’s example in putting love before all, in seeing the humanity especially of those we consider to be enemies, in seeking transforming initiatives of peacemaking rather than the perpetuation of verbal violence against one another. Only then will we make progress on this question of deep ethical, moral, and legal import.
It should be noted, especially on controversial issues like this, that Matthew 25 Network bloggers speak only for themselves; the opinions they express are not necessarily the official opinions of the Matthew 25 Network as a whole.
