Witness

LITTLE ROCK — Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Democrat-Gazette, spoke at the annual Right to Life march at the state Capitol in Little Rock last Sunday. His column today is based on the text of his remarks.

What a magnificent afternoon. And what a magnificent crowd. I don’t think I’ve been part of such a march since the civil-rights days. What a bright, sunny magnificent day for it.

And what a crowd. Especially you young people. You are our hope.

Thank you. I may not know all of you, but I feel I am among friends.

More than friends, fellow believers.

For we share one common belief that unites all the great faiths: a respect-no, a reverence-for human life. And today, by our presence here, we witness for that faith.

We understand life is the first and greatest of gifts, the prerequisite for all the others. And that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, all of us are created equal, and endowed with the right to life. Which is what we are declaring again today.

Just as so many of us have done every year on the anniversary of the most infamous ruling by an American court of law since the Dred Scott decision.

In 1857, it was human slavery that was being given the sanction of law.

Today it is the destruction of the most innocent, the most vulnerable among us, even before they have seen the light of day.

Back then, slavery was known as The Peculiar Institution.

Today abortion is called Choice.

Euphemism remains the first refuge of those who would rather not look directly at what it is they do.

If ever there were a matter of life and death, this is it. But that does not mean those on the other side of this issue are evil, even if what they approve of is. That is why we must reach out to them, not in anger or enmity, and certainly not in any pretense of moral superiority. They are only what we ourselves would be if we had followed a different path, been exposed to different influences, and gone in a different direction.

I know.

Call this a confession, which is the first step toward repentance and atonement.

When Roe v. Wade was first pronounced from on high, I welcomed it. As a young editorial writer in Pine Bluff, Ark., I believed the court’s assurances that its ruling was not blanket permission for the taking of human life. But a carefully crafted, limited decision applicable only in some exceptional circumstances.

Even Mr. Justice Blackmun, the author of the decision, seemed to believe as much. He had managed to fool even himself. He certainly fooled me. I swallowed that line whole, and regurgitated it regularly in learned editorials. For years.

Yes, it did take more and more effort as time passed to rationalize the court’s decision. It can be a strain, sophistry. But editorial writers can acquire a knack for it. Call it an occupational hazard. Oh, I was sincere. I was in earnest-deadly earnest. I believed what I wrote, and was even kind of proud of it.

The right to life need not be fully respected from conception, I explained. It grows with each stage of fetal development until a full human being is formed. I went into all this in an extended debate in the columns of the Pine Bluff Commercial with a headstrong young Baptist minister in town named Mike Huckabee.

I kept trying to tell the Reverend Huckabee that life is one thing, personhood another.

It’s an engaging argument. For a fatal while. Before you realize where it leads. And that it boils down to a license to kill. For anyone who claims he can confer personhood can just as readily take it away.

It’s really the oldest of temptations: Eat of the fruit of this tree and you shall be as gods, as the Serpent said, with the knowledge of good and evil, deciding who shall live and who shall die.

My motives were compassionate enough. Who would not want to spare mothers the pain of carrying the deformed?

Why not just allow physicians to eliminate the deformity? End of Problem.

Then . . .

Something happened.

It always does. Eventually. It just takes longer for some of us to catch on.

But I couldn’t help noticing after a while that the number of abortions in this country had begun to mount year by year-into the millions.

Perfectly healthy babies were being aborted for socio-economic reasons. Among ethnic groups, the highest proportion of abortions were being performed on black women. Though African-American women make up less than 13 percent of this country’s women ages 15 to 44, they account for 36 percent of the abortions. Eugenics was showing its true face again.

And it isn’t pretty.

Abortion is also touted as a preventive for poverty. To eliminate poverty, all you have to do is eliminate the poor. They are, in the phrase of the advanced, Darwinian thinkers of the last century, Surplus Population.

With a little verbal manipulation, any crime can be rationalized, even promoted.

In these matters, verbicide always precedes homicide.

The trick is to speak of fetuses, not unborn children. So long as the victims are a faceless abstraction, anything can be done to them.

Just don’t look too closely at those sonograms. The way I studied the first pictures of my first grandson. And was awestruck. We are indeed strangely and wondrously made.

By now the death toll has reached some 50 million babies aborted in America since January 22nd, 1973. That’s not just a statistic or abstract theory or philosophical argument. It is a fact, and facts are stubborn things. Some even carry moral imperatives.

And so I changed my mind, and changed sides.

For a still small voice kept asking: Whose side are you on? Life or death? And it answered:

Choose Life.

Which is what we are doing here today.

And our numbers seem to grow every year. As I look around, I have to wonder: What are so many of you doing here? Haven’t you heard? Don’t you know? This issue was settled long ago. Forty years ago! By the Supreme Court of the United States. It is “Settled Law.” We’re just fighting for a lost cause.

So we are told every time we express any doubts. Just as a different generation of Americans was told that Dred Scott v. Sandford was the law of the land, too, and the slavery question had been settled. Once and for all. (As if anything is ever settled till it’s settled right.)

No matter what this Mr. Lincoln said, all the states were now going to be slave states. Case closed. To paraphrase my favorite line from a Ring Lardner short story: Shut up, they explained.

Those old-time abolitionists and Republicans and Free-Soil Democrats and Antislavery Whigs . . . what a motley crew they were. Just as we are here today.

Those abolitionist fanatics were fighting for a lost cause, too. But they understood something the sophisticates of their time didn’t: No cause is forever lost. Not in this ever-changing world. Because no cause is forever won. That’s the nature of politics. Of change. Of ideas. Of life.

We’re not supposed to be around any more, you and I.

We’re all just ghosts, phantasms, political artifacts, living fossils. The remains of an earlier day, of an earlier, archaic way of thinking that once held life to be sacred. We here today are just an artifact of history, a leftover, a collection of dry bones.

Dry bones?

These bones will live again.

And arise. And speak. And march.

Maybe once in a generation a great issue arises. A watershed issue, as they say. One that can no longer be put off, compromised, blurred. One that will not go away.

Slavery was such an issue.

Civil rights was such an issue.

Abortion is such an issue. It will not go away. And neither will we.

If the distinguished jurists of the Supreme Court of the United States four decades ago thought they could end this discussion, they couldn’t.

We have only begun to fight.

We have only begun to speak, to agitate, to witness . . . And we will be heard.

Congresses come and Congresses go. Presidents come and Presidents go. What doesn’t change is right and wrong, life and death. That’s why we’re here today. It’s not as if we really had a choice.

At some point, defending life becomes a moral imperative. That is why we march today. And that is why we will be joined by countless others. We will bear witness, and we will not grow weary. For we will strengthen one another. As we do here today.

Even as we witness, we need to remember whom we’re witnessing to. And that they are not our enemies, just allies-in-waiting. We respect them, and welcome them to join us. As we do today. And will do tomorrow. And next year. Same time, same place. See you then.

’Cause we ain’t goin’ away.

Bless you all.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: [email protected]