limits of politics, The

As I write, shouts and war whoops richochet back and forth across the U.S. Senate chamber, and in the hallways outside. Democrats and Republicans are slugging it out over the question of how and whether to punish President Clinton for imputed offenses against the Constitution. The spectacle, never mind the noise, chills the blood.

My purpose is not here and now to lurch into the impeachment controversy-which will certainly have been resolved, one way or another, by the time these words finally see print. This essay is not about impeachment at all; it concerns the 1998 elections and their effect on the pro-life cause in Congress. At least I think that is the nature of our business. The matter could be larger than that.

Of one thing I am increasingly sure: our battles in the 1990s over abortion, euthanasia, presidential conduct, and the like relate to each other in place as well as time. The place is that broad intersection where law and morality meet. The combatants have a certain familiarity: they are elected officials, or if not that, then public policy pundits. They claim to be fighting our battles for us. If they are, it may be no wonder the fighting seems never to end.

Let us, to get the discussion going, and in view of this esteemed journal's mission, talk about human life.

Twenty-six years after Roe v. Wade, the political process remains deadlocked concerning the means necessary to overthrow the Supreme Court's "pro-choice" regime. Pro-life legislators command impressive support but lack the raw numbers to overwhelm their congressional opponents. The 1998 elections, if anything, represented a slight setback for pro-lifers. "We held our own in the U.S. Senate but lost a handful of votes in the House," writes the National Right to Life Committee's PAC director, Carol Long Tobias, who goes on to observe that "Although the House margin is narrower, prolifers continue to hold a majority on most current issues in Congress."

Down went a particularly vehement advocate of "choice," Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, who was defeated by an unabashedly pro-life Republican, Peter Fitzgerald. Another happy flip-flop, this time in Ohio: the geezer astronaut, John Glenn, commonly an opponent of pro-life endeavors, steps aside, and a pro-life Republican, George Voinovich, succeeds him. Pro-life Republican Jim Bunning takes over pro-life Kentucky Democrat Wendell Ford's Senate seat.

Not all pro-life senators survived. In North Carolina, Lauch Faircloth went down, and in New York Alphonse d'Amato, who, hard as his personality might grate on varied sensibilities, could generally be counted on to cancel out fellow Catholic Ted Kennedy's anti-life votes. The victors in both races-- John Edwards and Charles Schumer, respectively-are pro-choice.

In the House, according to Carol Long Tobias, the election left the pro-life side down four seats "on the overall question of whether unborn babies should be legally protected" (not just whether, for instance, partial-birth abortion should be banned).

What all this means, of course, is increased status for the Washington status quo, whereunder nothing much happens, either good or bad, on human life issues. While Bill Clinton remains president, any bill abridging or rearticulating the rights supposedly secured by Roe v. Wade will go nowhere fast. Al Gore's ascent to the presidency, should that occur, would barely change the equation. Gore and Clinton know equally well on which side their bread is buttered. No good can come to them-no political good-through offending the women's bloc, always so ready to throw votes their way or to denounce Republicans.

Not even partial-birth abortion, as Clinton has demonstrated by vetoing bills to prohibit it, gets Congress excited enough to override the veto. And partial-birth covers only a small percentage of the million and a half abortions performed in the United States every year.

Still, the pro-life movement remains a strong, if frustrated, political force. Election polls reassured pro-life activists that their views are not dragging down such politicians as share them. For example, Richard Wirthlin found that, of the 22 percent who said abortion affected the way they voted, 13 percent voted for "candidates who oppose abortion."

A CNN exit poll in the not-exactly-traditionalist bastion of Wisconsin identified abortion as the main concern of 20 percent-82 percent of whom voted for Republican candidate Mark Neumann, who had hammered incumbent Democrat Russ Feingold over Feingold's votes against a partial-birth abortion ban. This tactic clearly helped Neumann-just not enough. Feingold's quirky personality and quixotic campaign, in which he spurned "soft money" contributions from corporations and unions, carried him to victory.

Wirthlin found 51 percent of voters in this low-turn-out election to be more or less in sync with the pro-life cause. These would prohibit abortion altogether or do so except in the Big Three cases: rape, incest, and those instances where pregnancy endangers the mother's life.

There is more than this, however, to Wirthlin's findings. Add together a couple of percentages from the poll and you discover that 53 percent of voters are poised right in the center of the debate. The center-right favors the aforesaid exceptions; the center-left favors sparing three-month-old unborn babies (but not two-month-old or month-old ones). In which finding there is nothing really exceptional. Polls for years have demonstrated this same ambivalence.

As Carl Bowman wrote in James Davison Hunter's Before the Shooting Starts: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars, "While the majority of Americans morally disapprove of abortion in the situations in which it is most commonly performed, many of these Americans nevertheless also seem willing to live with a law that makes it possible for a woman to get an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy almost regardless of the reason." He goes on to note, unsurprisingly, that "most Americans live with a certain moral dissonance."

All of this tallies with Alan Wolfe's recent assertion (One Nation After All) that we live in a time of "morality writ small," where people "make their own morality and do the best with it they can." They may not like what others do, but that's beside the point; if they can well avoid it, they're not going to impose their moral views on some other freeborn citizen of 20th century America.

The concept of abstract Truth-This is how it is, and we hope you like it, but your liking it or not liking it doesn't change things-seems to enjoy less purchase on Americans' minds than at any time in their history. Perhaps in the world's history.

And just what has all this to do with elections-not to mention impeachment? Quite a lot, I suspect. The pro-life movement is rightly intent on winning every election possible. What good would it do to lose elections? All this would accomplish would be to signal the pro-choice lobby that the game was theirs; that the opposition had been smashed. What new schemes of personal liberation would then be hatched, no one on the pro-life side wishes to imagine.

The pro-life status quo represents a number of good and attractive things: the Republican party's pro-life plank, which "moderate" Republicans try every four years to rip out but which acts meantime as a moral gauge and political standard; congressional hostility to at least one gruesome form of abortion, partial-birth; the possibility after the next presidential election of reinstating former bans on spending federal money to facilitate abortion; the possibility of the next president's putting on the Supreme Court more jurists who oppose the logic and consequences of Roe v. Wade.

There is still much more to the matter. As is clear to those who can see past the ends of their noses, the abortion movement and the euthanasia/assisted suicide movement are genetic twins, feeding off the same ambivalence about life's goodness, the same syrupy addiction to "tolerance" in human affairs. A lawmaker's rockbottom duty is the protection of life, born as well as unborn; but if on some days, in some years, all we can do is keep the killer doctors, the Kevorkians, at bay, that counts for something. The political process, in other words, is not, could not possibly be, and should never be allowed to become a matter of indifference to defenders of life. How in the world did abortion become a public issue? Through the actions of government: specifically, the votes of seven members of the U.S. Supreme Court, striking down the anti-abortion enactments of the several states. Roe v. Wade is an act of political aggression that politics is theoretically (practically is another matter) suited to counter. Who stands in the gap against euthanasia? Honorable doctors and nurses, firm-minded clerics, but also prosecutors, legislators, governors.

The magnitude of their task becomes clearer, nonetheless, when one contemplates Bill Clinton and the impeachment process; when one focuses on the political traumas that engulfed the United States throughout 1998. At the start I spoke of that broad intersection where politics and morality meet. What happens when they meet? It depends on what issue you mean, and when the meeting takes place. When politics and morality reinforce each other, the meeting goes smoothly enough. In other words, when moral consensus underlies political judgment and political action, there is not much to fuss and fight about.

That sounds abstract. Let me illustrate. There is moral consensus about robbery-a thing everyone abhors, except for burglars, stick-up artists, and architects of the IRS Code. The moral consensus, based on direct instruction (the Bible, etc.) and intuition (you can't just take something from somebody!) holds that robbery must be prohibited and punished. Legislators from earliest times have nodded their heads in solemn agreement. Robbery we just won't put up with. For people who try it anyway we have laws and courts. The operation of the laws regarding robbery never meets with protest or obstruction. We are united: no robbery. In this particular portion of the intersection where morality and politics meet, all is calm, all is bright.

Not so with life issues-and with a great many other issues as well; issues revolving around what are often termed "lifestyle choices." A lifestyle choice is the choice to live one's life a certain way. Not just any way. A burglar's choice of profession would not fit in this category; that choice would infringe the peace and security of others.

A lifestyle choice, in the argot of the 1990s, is one that affects the chooser alone. The chooser is lord of his own life so long as he leaves others to their own devices-respecting in others the freedom he asks for himself. His actions may invite shrugs or frowns, but unless they go much too far, they do not invite judgment.

By a painful and sometimes zig-zag process, the culture over the past 30 years has defined choices regarding sex, and sexual expression, as life-style choices par excellence-matters pertaining to the individual and the individual alone.

This is curious, given that sex, though private and personal in nature, is rarely solitary, affecting only one person (the examination of pornography, for instance). Pregnancy results from the union of two people. What is more, it produces a third. This makes pregnancy, on any reasonable showing, a social occasion-one, that is, in which society takes an interest. Thus, prior to Roe v. Wade, the states made it their business to protect that third life by banning abortion. The Supreme Court was able to overturn these laws only after a process in which the new view of lifestyle was assimilated at the highest level. Pregnancy, which had formerly been social, became intensely individual-a matter for the woman and the God in whom she might or might not believe.

It became individual to an extent: not the full extent by any means. The Wirthlin poll cited above reminds us that popular culture doesn't go nearly all the way with "It's my choice." Just 13 percent of voters said the choice should be the woman's, every time and any time-never mind the father's wishes, never mind what used to be regarded as the baby's rights.

As with abortion, so with euthanasia/assisted suicide. The killing of real live outside-the-womb human beings stirs reservations that seem not to pertain in the cases of unborn babies, without names, almost without pasts. Still, Dr. Kevorkian (and his friends at 60 Minutes) are whooping it up for unfettered lifestyle choice. The quest for autonomy in death might not seem to relate directly to the quest for autonomy in sex. In fact, the latter gave rise to the former; it raised indelicately a once-scandalous contention, that, to put it bluntly, what's mine is mine. As the public adopted that viewpoint, legislators, who supposedly represent the public, started likewise to adopt it, at least for legislative purposes.

Point No. 1: It's hard to get things done in democratic politics without the people on your side.

Point No. 2: The great secret weapon of democratic politics is opinion.

Precisely here the ongoing presidential soap opera pops up on our TV sets. Autonomy in the matter of bearing an unborn baby isn't the only kind of autonomy fashionable today. The whole rubric of "sexual choice" offers fascinating possibilities in the 1990s: to "terminate a pregnancy" or to have an affair. Indeed, to have that affair with anybody anywhere, including the Oval Office dining room. Put "choice" at the center, without guidelines for making a choice, and self-expression takes all manner of forms. Why not Monica? Why not the presidential suite? Isn't satisfaction of personal desire the big thing?

It clearly is for this president. What has confounded efforts to deal with this mind-set is the same woolly public tolerance evident in the abortion debate. Maybe I-John Q. Public-would not behave in this way, but who am I to condemn an alternative viewpoint on the delicate question of autonomy? Republicans who voted to impeach did so knowing "the polls" were heavily against them. They could only hope the polls overstated the voters' irritation with attempts to bring Clinton to book.

The polls on Bill Clinton throughout 1998 pointed to a familiar split: personal opposition versus unwillingness to "condemn." The senator or congressman "personally opposed" to abortion, but unwilling to lift a finger against it-hostile and obstructive, in fact, to those who do lift fingers-is a familiar Washington type. Though some of these figures are Republicans, most are Democrats: Roman Catholics as often as not, striving to keep their credentials in the Church even while defying its human-life teachings.

Here, at the intersection of politics and morality, battle smoke blurs the landmarks. What we stand for, the majority of us Americans, is . . . tolerance. What we need-critically so-is the restoration of norms and standards and an end to fuzzy, feel-good thinking about the equivalence of certain key ideas. The point may be unremarkable. I remark it by way of trying to demonstrate the limitations of politics.

Democratic politics, however vital to our society, will take a modern American just so far. Organize, theorize, propagandize: still the voters have to agree. How is Congress going to abolish abortion unless the sovereign voters agree to its abolition: something (if the polls are accurate) they are far from agreeing on?

The anti-abortion crusade of the past quarter century has been vital in keeping alive intellectual opposition to abortion, but the crusade's failure so far to triumph in the political arena shows the character of the opposition. The task is only in part to chase from office the hollow men and women unwilling to attach supreme value to human life. The task is at least equally-- I would argue more-to reinstill in American culture a sense of reverence for life.

The enterprise has its political aspects. The great megaphone that politics affords sends out the message loud and clear; it does not, alas, always send the message in compelling form. The polls show (to the extent that polls actually "show" things) that non-pro-lifers fear pro-lifers are trying through politics to ram their lifestyle down others' throats. Politics, for all the "bring us together" talk it inspires on heated occasions, is divisive and polarizing: Them versus Us. A public already disposed toward lifestyle tolerance gets the idea that this town isn't big enough for the two of us, see? There is clearly nothing wrong with shaking up people who need shaking up-e.g., prochoicers-but the tangible results do not always count as progress.

What's needed? Probably more example of personal concern for life by pro-lifers-like Marvin Olasky and his wife, organizing a crisis pregnancy center at their Austin, Texas, kitchen table and adopting, shall we say, castoff children so as to love them. Ideas, though, must also change, according to the mysterious processes by which new thoughts sink into human consciousness, causing humans suddenly to see the world differently. We have seen how it works with Darwinism and Freudianism. It needs now to work in reverse: anyway to the point at which the glory of life achieves preeminence over some claimed entitlement to autonomy in life.

The task is cultural, broadly speaking. It is more precisely theological. At this sublime task the churches have lagged. Not that some churches-the Roman Catholic Church is notable here-have failed to speak up for unborn life. The larger failure is more subtle: it is that of failing to connect all the dots in the great diagram of life, showing the diagram as one master work of God. With masterworks, you defer to the Master's wishes. You defer gladly, joyously, gratefully, as a matter of fact.

The churches of the late 20th century, in their totality, don't quite get it. To this God business there is clearly something, or grown men would not don round white collars and work, often enough, for subsistence pay. But religious thought and practice over the past century and more has encouraged, sometimes unwittingly, a dangerous teaching. It is that, as children eventually outgrow their happy homes, so modern folk understand things formerly closed to them, like the true meanings of equality and autonomy. Understanding these things-the teaching continues-people should be left alone to try out their insights. And pity the politician who gets in the way!

If ideas inform and shape politics, and if we want politics dramatically changed, we need then to reshape the relevant ideas. What is more, I think precisely that is happening. Pro-life scholarship flourishes, not least in this journal, which in the present issue mourns the passing of its founding father. Religious teaching about life is stiffening. The rise of Bill Bennett as omnipresent and influential critic of the do-your-own-thing culture shows that there is ready public acceptance, in some quarters anyway, of the relevant message.

The whole Clinton culture debate has opened eyes to the consequences of drawing out too far the principle of untrammeled autonomy, whether in sexual activity or in regard for speaking the truth. The so-called Christian right, though offensive to the new culture, and only partly effective in changing the politics of abortion, has focused attention on the grim particularities of abortion-most of all these days, the partial-birth procedure.

There can be no formula or program for the reshaping of an intellectual consensus. Nevertheless, the need for such a reshaping is clear and compelling. God needs to be put back atop the pyramid of life in order to afford that direction and sense of purpose so conspicuously missing in the world He made.

It's hard to get things done in democratic politics, I have said, without the people on your side. If many Americans in 1998 already favor the pro-life cause, nonetheless they need company-lots and lots of it. The politicians will listen well enough to such a great company. That is the thing politicians are especially good at-listening.

William Murchison, our senior editor, is a nationally-syndicated columnist at the Dallas Morning News and a popular speaker on a wide range of current religious and cultural issues. His latest book is There's More to Life than Politics, out last fall from Spence Publishing Company (Dallas).

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Winter 1999
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