Let's Dialogue

Dialogue has happened in the past:

I wonder if any of you are familiar with the Public Conversations Project from the mid to late 1990s. It was a small group of women from both sides of the abortion debate who met to discuss their views. The Globe published an article about it in 2001. I’ll never forget the deep sense of division these women felt even after 6 years of talks. The participants wrote in the Globe, “While learning to treat each other with dignity and respect, we all have become firmer in our views about abortion."

You can read a bit more at these links from Google:

The article (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/BostonGlobe.htm)

One of the facilitator’s websites (http://www.podziba.com/abortiondialoguecase.html)

Ed --

Yes, our society has indeed for many decades been innoculated against any form of absolute truth.

We are truly living in a dictatorship of relativism. We are not free, not really, although we labor under the delusion that we are -- not individually, not as a society, and certainly not pregnant women in "crisis" situations.

Truth has become relative or, if not strictly relative, something that can be the subject of compromise, something that can be discussed only by those in the middle, or at least so those named after the extremely uncompromising Archangel and defender of heaven tell us. Let us find a middle ground, say these "moderates" on the abortion issue. Having to choose between right and wrong, between good and evil, between truth and error is too hard and too contentious, let us not instead find something in the middle. Nevermind that Jesus says He is going to spit out these lukewarm blind wretches and that Dante says that even Hell will refuse to take them.

************

As for dialogue, not discussions that might actually bring "hope and change" today, but dialogue in preparation for the day when real dialogue will be permitted in the legal and political arenas, the day when Roe is overturned and people are once again allowed to govern themselves, there are two tracks that offer the greatest hope for success.

The macro discussion, the society-wide discussion, is NOT one of those tracks. That macro discussion has, as we have seen over these last 36 years, has been what can only be called an abject failure. A disasterous failure. If 45 million slain innocents is not failure, if widespread acceptance and advocacy for killing embryonic human life in the petri dish after 36 years of society-wide discussions on the inherent dignity of human life from the moment of conception is not failure, then I fear to see what failure looks like. While certainly there does need to be some macro-level of dialogue, one should not expect any degree of success, at least not at this time.

Rather, the two tracks of dialogue that offer the greatest hope for success are only the micro-level, namely --

(1) Teaching truth in charity to the young. The young especially, being curious about "where they come from," are very open to the truth of their beginning life in the womb. And up well into the teen years, the truth of the human person is what is needed to innoculate them against the plague that is the utilitarian abortion mentality.

(2) Conversion of good faith pro-choicers. It has long been clear that today's pro-lifers will NOT win the war of abortion. Pro-lifers will not win because they CANNOT win -- there are not enough of us. I say again, pro-lifers will NOT WIN this war. Rather, the pro-choicers will win. Again, the pro-choicers are going to win.

The question is, will the pro-choicers win the war for the pro-abortion side or the pro-life side?

I submit that, armed with truth, the abortion war will be won by today's pro-choicers FOR THE PRO-LIFE SIDE! That is, a sufficient number of pro-choicers will be converted to the pro-life side and they, today's pro-choicers, will be the ones to demand the end of the holocaust of innocents. This war will only be won for the pro-life side when today's pro-choicers demand an end to it. Pro-lifers have been demanding an end for 36-plus years to no effect and we will continue to have no effect for the next 360 years. Only the pro-choicers can end the war, and they can only end it for the pro-life side because we ain't going away, ever.

Remember this -- it wasn't Peter who converted the Gentile world. It was that persecutor of Truth and accomplice to murder, Saul. So too will it be for own contemporary Herod society that slaughters the innocent.

So, the second track of dialogue, if we are to have any hope for success, is with the individual, good faith pro-choicer, the person who does seek the good, but has bought into the lie, which probably characterizes most of those pro-choicers out there in the heartland (the abortion activist, the hardline outright pro-abort, is probably too far gone to have any real success with -- they are "pro-abort" because they do not care about the truth and, so, will not be turned by it).

It is the good faith pro-choicer, the individual who is only nominally accepting of abortion because of an erroneous conception of the truth of humanity, that is the woman or man most amenable to conversion, probably first of the heart, then of the head. And of the two, experience has shown that the one more open to conversion is woman, she who carries the truth within her very body, rather than man, who uses and exploits that body.

Individual young people and individual good faith pro-choicers, those are the two tracks of dialogue who offer the best hope for success.