In a major advance for the pro-life cause, Carly Fiorina has won California’s Republican primary, and will now challenge Democratic incumbent, Senator Barbara Boxer, this November. Boxer is an abortion extremist without parallel in the U.S. Senate. (Click here for my April 2008 article, “Denial is a Senator from California.”)
It’s interesting how some “pro-choice” voices in the media are reacting to this development. Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift warns that California voters may ultimately reject the pro-life Fiorina, given that Fiorina’s stance will be seen as “so yesterday.”
Hmmm. “So yesterday?”
How is it that respecting the sanctity and dignity of the unborn can be seen as “so yesterday?” As far back as, say, 2,000 years ago, humanity received the most lasting pro-life statement in all of history and eternity, as the Virgin Mary, when faced with the prospect of a most-crisis pregnancy, one that invited not only public humiliation but death by stoning, said yes, and chose life. That was yesterday.
Or, go back to, say, the 1930s, when even Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, whose organization sought birth control and hideous racial eugenics, denounced abortion as “an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn.” (Sanger wrote this in the January 27, 1932 edition of The Nation, page 103, in an article titled, “The Pope’s Position on Birth Control.”)
So, when Eleanor Clift talks of pro-life views as “so yesterday,” how yesterday is she talking about? Maybe she means literally yesterday … like the day before today. Even, then, though, countless millions of Americans were pro-life.
What “progressives” like Eleanor Clift really mean is that any traditional value is outmoded and subject to their ever-evolving change and fancy.
The one consistent institution that stands athwart history stemming that tide is the Catholic Church. As Chesterton put it, the Church is the one thing that saves us from the degrading slavery of being children of our age.
And that’s something so yesterday and so today and so tomorrow.
