CoL III: The Phrase Itself

Part III: The Phrase Itself

Ok, now, now about this optimistic, cheerful, euphemistic phrase ‘culture of life’ which Pope JPII coined, and which the Pro-Life position chants like as if it’s one of the prayer of the rosary.

For JPII, Benedict, Bush and the Pro-Life supporters, this phrase is code for “life begins at conception, at conception a soul comes into being, abortion is murder, contraception is a hubristic human intervention against divine wil," and so forth. The Rights of the Unborn are based on these assumptions. Let us note that they are assumptions without meaning that they are not serious points of discussion. Now, let’s admit that ‘rights’ is the wrong word. Rights are invented and legislated by people, and apply only in their full sense upon attaining the age of majority in a nation – no matter whether one’s reasoning for them is inspired by religious or secular humanist influences.

What we mean here is ‘protection.’ And by ‘protection’ we mean legal protection, which, really, isn’t protection at all. Words on paper do not, cannot, and will never stop humans from taking action. Our moral dispositions do that. What the words on paper, the law, can do and does is codify the steps a society may take to punish a perpetrator of, and only of, those acts the law considers out of bounds. So, for example, some insecure and easily angered man who beats or shoots his pregnant wife and kills her is guilty of two murders in many states: of the woman, and of the child she carried. The existence of this law does not (tragically) make insecure, power hungry, paranoid, control-obsessed, violent men stop killing or hurting women. It’s just says that when they do, they will do more time in a box with other evil men because their personal morality and the law are at odds on this point.

In the case of JPII, and now Pope Benedict the (is it 15th?), the phrase ‘culture of life’ is the principle on which the Church suggests that condoms should not be distributed by NGOs in Africa, where two whole generations are being decimated by AIDS and other factors inhibiting of health and well-being. (Bless Bono.) Nevermind the as yet unpredictable but almost certainly biblical level of social and cultural decimation this syndrome and these deaths are causing. No condoms.

In the case of Bush and the religious right, the phrase means Abstinence Only Sexual Education and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or short of that, for instance, the elimination of judicial bypass in the case of minor girls (e.g. a 2005 amendment to the Texas State Constitution, thanks to all the liberals who chose not to vote last November).

Serious and related questions arise. What, really, is a culture of life? What are its characteristics? And what do we mean by life? (next post)

The popes and president mean mixed DNA which seems to indicate "ensoulment" rather than recombination of proteins. This is insufficient for a number of reasons I will now, in a jumbled fashion, present.

Given that we don’t, as a society, understand what we mean by ‘life’, I’ll skip that. Science defines life in some very particular ways, but too few people understand much about science, so this is immaterial. (Note: the scientific definition, and another look, and another just for fun) Anthropologists have other definitions. Theologians still others. And there’s our not-very-clear intuitions, and I just don’t have time to sort all that. I have to do what just about everyone does on these points in the end: consult my intuition and my conscience.