April 29, 2008
Having just fished in troubled waters, by jumping into Marcus Epstein’s debate with his critics over Planned Parenthood and its agendas, I feel obliged to state my views in a more nuanced way than I did yesterday as an addendum to Marcus’s commentary. First of all, I should make clear that I”m no fan of the would-be social engineer Margaret Sanger, and there is ample evidence that Sanger hoped to limit the reproductive possibilities of the white working class, made up but not exclusively of ethnic Catholics. (As far as I can determine, Sanger would have been just as happy to keep Southern Baptist sharecroppers from reproducing as she would have been to place ethnic Catholic factory workers on the road to extinction.) Furthermore, I find abortion an abhorrent practice, and I have never (to my knowledge) voted for a pro-choice politician in any election. And contrary to what some of my critics may believe, I applaud Pope Benedict XVI for his unequivocal stand against the outrageously misnamed “choice” of feticide.
Having stated where I come from on certain moral issues, let me also point out that I agree with Marcus and Dan McCarthy concerning the stupidity of the pro-life movement and of such fatuous representatives of this cause as Ramesh Ponnuru, who try to build their defense of unborn life on abstract egalitarianism or misapplied natural rights arguments. Such an arsenal of arguments belongs to the cultural Left; and one of the weaknesses of the present debate is that the bogus Right continues to fall back on the “equal right” of the fetus or of the unborn infant in engaging those who don”t recognize the fetus has any such right. The late Murray Rothbard was correct when he derived an individual right to abortion from the mother’s right to the property of her womb. Moreover, the unborn child cannot have a right to life, which it cannot claim for itself and which it has no knowledge of as an individual. But the mother, viewed from a different perspective, would be committing a moral enormity by killing what seems to be at the very least an empirical life. This is where the argument should be joined, on the status of the fetus as a recognizable human life, which the mother has no individual right to destroy, and certainly not as a lifestyle inconvenience or as something interfering with her feminist self-actualization.
But I am writing this primarily to express my disagreement with any misleading comparison between Ms. Sanger and contemporary feminist, pro-choice advocates. For all of her moral mistakes, Margaret Sanger had no desire to destroy the white race as the “cancer of humanity,” to elect to the American presidency a leftist black politician, to open the borders of her country to be overrun by Third World populations, or to empower Muslims or Rastafarians at the expense of Christians. Unlike the present Left, Sanger was not a cultural Marxist; and in her mind, she thought she was improving the genetic stock of Euro-Americans by calling for certain prophylactic measures. While Sanger was not a particularly admirable individual, she most certainly did not represent the egalitarian, anti-white poison that has invaded Western politics and society. Not all enemies are the same, and Sanger bears about as much relation to the multicultural, antiracist, anti-anti-Semitic, anti-homophobic Left as Hamas does to the fascism of the 1930s. For the record, I have never encountered abortion-happy liberals who are out to destroy the black population while claiming they wish to help women overcome the legacy of a patriarchal society. All pro-abortion maniacs I have known, with the exception of certain rightwing Greens, emit the same egalitarian, antiracist spray as Ponnuru and the Right-to-Life movement.
Marcus is on target when he reminds us that the pro-life movement can”t blow its nose without appealing to the (cultural Marxist) shibboleth of “antiracism.” Nor can the Pope address political questions without bringing up the leftist fantasy of “human rights,” any more than FOXNEWS can criticize the Reverend Wright’s anti-white racism without couching its partisan Republican statements as concern about anti-Semitism. If I read Marcus properly, he seems to be saying, however obliquely, that the egalitarian, antiracist Left has taken over the pro-life movement, and that the social engineering, onetime feminist Margaret Sanger looks, comparatively speaking, like a genuine reactionary, even if not a particularly appetizing one. On all of these points, Marcus is factually correct, although his critics may be justified in suspecting that what he is really up to is bashing the Catholic Church. I shall let him and his respondents hash out this issue on their own.
Finally I would like to register my irritation at those who speak of withdrawing from this website because they do not wish to have any more truck with “neo-pagans” or imaginary “Judeophobes” (perhaps in the mold of Marcus). Sid and his friends are not likely to find other websites as congenial as this one. Perhaps they should try hanging out with the neocon zombies on NROnline in order to appreciate the company of our contentious, or at the very least sentient, group. Our murmurers would do well to forget about their annoyance over a disagreeable response to one of their response in order to stay with the enemies whom they know as opposed to other, less interesting ones.
