Single issue? You betcha!

Some today consider World War II the last good (or noble) war our nation fought. I suspect it is easier to say that if you don’t remember the horror and deprivations of the war. It also implies that the U.S. was unanimous in support for WWII. The intent of such statements today is to suggest that the conflicts since have been the misbegotten and self-serving schemes of the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations or some other wicked cabal of accomplished Republican males. Oh yes, those who believe this are out there.

But what makes the war of the 1940s a “good” war? We were attacked, yes, but that’s happened since. The reason most commonly cited has to do with facts unknown to most combatants until late in the war. The spectacular “Band of Brothers” video collection calls one episode “Why we fight.” It tells the story of 101st Airborne units liberating some of the Nazi death camps. To many of us, that discovery sums up all the reasons why WWII was a necessary fight for freedom, civilization, and life.

Was that a good enough reason? Was it a single issue? In a way, it was a single issue that blanketed many more: genocide, imperialism, racism, military aggression, and the deepest imaginable human evil, to name a few. The right of men to live?in peace, at liberty, or however?but to live, ennobled a war in which millions of now-honored dead gave all they had. Those still living gave up their innocent youth, and years of personal peace, for the same cause.

These thoughts flood my mind when pro-life voters are called “single-issue” voters, as though this is some trivial side issue, like a national energy policy. Some Republicans get frustrated with the “values voters” and their repetitive insistence on justice for unborn humans. They fear that libertarians or moderates might not support the party on the issues they consider more important. Democrats hide their pandering to the profit-driven abortion industry behind a “holistic” ethic of life that includes various social programs, a ban on capital punishment, near pacifism, environmentalism, and, yes, “legal, safe, and rare” abortions for any cause by even the most horrible means. If a child is born alive after a botched abortion, he still has no legal protection. He is an unprotected fetus until a majority of lawmakers and justices say he isn’t. So far they haven’t.

“Safe, legal, and rare,” then, is a kind of cynical smokescreen for “whatever, LEGAL, and whatever.” It sounds similar to “Arbeit macht frei” (work will make you free), a phrase that graced the entryways to some of the Nazi facilities where people were worked to death, starved to death, or simply put to death by the millions. There was nothing true about it. It masked their intent and even fooled a few people for a short time.

Today’s single issue, life, is not dissimilar to the cause that sparked the American War Between the States. Was it worth it? Were the Yankee abolitionists single-issue people? Yes, they were, in the same way. In fact, it was the very same issue, the most basic rights for human beings who lived within the realm of our laws. Slavery was our problem and worth the horror and sorrow of that war to purge it from our borders. I don’t hear people saying that slavery or civil rights for all Americans is too small a thing for us put highest on our political agenda. Certainly no politician would be so foolish.

The Nazis’ attempted genocide of Jews was accompanied by a eugenics (another horrible euphemism) program that worked to eliminate other mongrel races, cultural groups, disabilities, and religions. And by “eliminate” I don’t mean persuasion, assimilation, or cure; I mean murder. Today’s big issue sweeps with it the question of human cloning, genetic manipulation, the value of elderly people, the lives of special-needs children, population control, and even issues of racism and sexism. Is that span of issues big enough yet?

The value and holiness of human life is a theological issue if you believe that God is the source and owner of human life, that his image is reflected in humans. It is a moral issue if you believe there is a right and wrong to our behavior toward the innocent and helpless. The sanctity of life is a political issue if courts and lawmakers and governors and presidents can pass or legitimize laws aimed at protecting the inalienable rights (I don’t think privacy was on that short list) of humans.

From every direction, this is the issue that will describe the righteousness of our nation. This is true as surely as the Holocaust will live in the minds of Germans and Israelis as long as there are Germans and Israelis. The enslavement of people in the United States tortured and judged our nation for the first 80 years of its life, and we have writhed painfully in the aftermath of its hard remedy for 140 years since its application.

America will bear a mark for generations if her legal indifference to some categories of human life ends today. Every election cycle we pass through with no legal remedy for this normalized and for-profit cruelty intensifies the judgment we face. So long as citizens have the right to affect laws, and elect lawmakers, we are in the defendant’s chair. The clamor over other, lesser, issues will not divert the Judge’s gaze. Our earnest ignorance or willful wickedness will not excuse us.

I’ll ask more than one question as I vote for president and other elected officers this year, but I will certainly ask the one question that outshouts all others. So long as one candidate seems (or testifies to be) more pro-life or anti-slavery or anti-genocide than the next, he’s my candidate. We harshly judge those who did not do so at other times in history. We are hypocrites to expect less of ourselves.