As an elected official for much of my patently wasted youth, I attended innumerable political and civic events. If pressed, today I can recall some of these events, due to the purpose or the participants. Yet, there are a precious handful of political gatherings that are not remembered for the cause or celebrants, but for an unexpected lesson learned or a long-held belief proven—especially those truths of eternal relevance.
While I cannot recall the reason for the event, I will never forget accompanying my mother, a city elected official, to a (likely) non-partisan event in our hometown. Having made the rounds of the room, we both sat down at our table. My mother saved an empty chair for her friend, our state representative. We weren’t worried, as she was likely stuck in the state capitol for a vote that ran late.
The state legislator was a solid Republican, though I (and my mother) disagreed with her on one fundamental issue: abortion. I suppose the present political equivalent would be U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine). Back then, it was far more common for elected officials differing on this issue to remain cordial and, especially within the same party, cooperate on a host of other issues without the rancor we currently witness.
Still, the political maxim remained in effect: when two allies agree on the vast majority of issues, the few where they disagree grate more than the plethora of differences they have with opponents. Mea culpa.
When the virulently pro-choice state representative arrived, she was elated. My mother inquired why. “Joan,” she responded, “my daughter-in-law is having our grandbaby!”
I looked up from my cardboard mostaccioli. “Don’t you mean ‘grandfetus?’”
There was no response, though for a moment the realization of her monstrous support for abortion flared in her eyes—then dimmed and dulled back into cold-blooded ideological dictates.
This “teachable moment” isn’t memorable because the state representative changed her pro-choice position. To my knowledge she never did. In fact, this episode is memorable because she did not. What, then, was learned and affirmed?
In the blessed, daily course of human existence the truth of the heart will out. In that one moment, the adamantly pro-choice representative was a grandmother, joyously announcing the impending arrival of a grandchild that she already deeply loved; and already lived in her daughter-in-law’s womb. And all was right with a world that made moral sense.
Then powerfully rearing its heinous head, ideology proved itself the enemy of sanity. There was a recrudescence of all the cynical rationalizations for permitting the destruction of her grandchild prior to birth. Caught betwixt the reality of her grandchild’s existence and her position that this child and all others similarly situated—could be legally destroyed on demand, she shut down and could not respond to my remark. But again, in the end, the loving reality that had, for a beauteous moment slipped her lips was smothered into silence by her hideous pro-abortion ideology.
Thus, today, when Joe Biden and his pro-abortion minions slander pro-lifers as “extreme” and “archaic,” I believe ultimately the truth of the heart will out.
It is they, the supporters of exterminating innocent human life up to and after birth who are extreme, and worse.
It is they who abide and abet the abortion industry’s selling of aborted unborn children’s bodyparts who are extreme and worse.
It is they, who while claiming to be on the “right side of history” are on the wrong side of history, medical technology and, yes, science.
It is they, who at a time when the human hand can reach into the womb to heal or to kill the innocent, deny that there is no choice but life.
And it is they, whose archaic, barbaric, extremist pro-abortion ideology renders them blind to this reality; and deaf to an unborn child’s cry from the heart to live and be loved.