The elephant named “sex” sitting in the living room

“And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child,
how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion?
As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves
that love means to be willing to give until it hurts.
Jesus gave even His life to love us.
So, the mother who is thinking of abortion,
should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans,
or her free time, to respect the life of her child.
The father of that child, whoever he is,
must also give until it hurts.”
Mother Teresa

(image from the web)

Here is another excerpt from Peter Kreeft’s book How To Destroy
Western Civilization And Other Ideas From The Cultural Abyss
or perhaps we should just call this part 2 of yesterday post,
God Blessed Texas….

“It’s the unmentionable elephant in the living room.
It’s sex.
Religious liberty is being attacked in the name of sexual liberty.

The current culture war is most fundamentally about abortion,
and abortion is about sex. Abortion is backup contraception,
and contraception is the demand to have sex without having babies.
If storks brought babies, Planned Parenthood would go broke.

Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and Evangelical Protestants
are the only groups left in the West who oppose the Sexual Revolution
and uphold traditional sexual morality.
Everyone else assumes, without question or controversy,
that contraception has finally “liberated” sex from its servile connection
with baby-making and has turned it into a purely personal,
“recreational” option.

Our liberty is being denied because it threatens their liberty,
Religious liberty threatens sexual liberty.
Our religious freedom of conscience threatens their sexual freedom
of conscience.

It’s not their behavior that we threaten, it’s their conscience.
They want us to approve their
behavior, at least implicitly, by paying for it.
We are the last people in our culture who say no, who judge,
who dare to play the prophet. Prophets are always unpopular.
There’s no profit in being a prophet.
Prophets are lights that are a bit too bright.
They show up the artificiality in the air-brushed Playboy fantasies.
They threaten the fun. Prophets are X-rays that show cancers
to patients who are living in denial.

If Jews and Christians could just erase two of the Commandments,
the ones against adultery and lust, the new post-Christian culture of
Western civilization would have absoutely no problem with religion.

They call us “judgmental” and “authoritarian”,
but it’s because we are exactly the opposite,
because we do not claim the authority to contradict our
Creator and Commander,
because we do not dare to be so judgmental as to judge His judgements
to be mistaken, because we dare not erase or change the line
He has drawn in the sand.
We cannot compromise our consciences because we believe our
conscience are His prophets, not society’s.

It’s not that we seek to impose our sexual morality (or any other part of morality)
on others by force.
We propose; we do not impose.
We seek only liberty of conscience for everyone, including ourselves.
No one wants to send sexual storm troopers into fornicators’ bedrooms.

But they seek to impose their sexual morality on us.
They do not merely propose, they impose.
They want to force us to compromise our consciences or be punished by
a fine (or something worse).
Why?
We can tolerate them; why can’t they tolerate us?
Why are they so threatened by our minority view?

Because they know it is not a minority view,
but the majority view in all times and places outside
twenty-first-century Europe and North America
(for example, every culture in history and “backward” cultures like
Africa and Latin America still today)
and the view of all the great religious of the world.
If our principles were merely quirky,
like the principles of a small Native American tribe that
sees the hallucinogenic peyote as a regions sacrament or the principles
of the Amish that see electricity as evil,
the Establishment would not be threatened by tased principles
and would readily grant these fringe groups the right to be exceptional
for the sake of conscience—as they do.
The do not insist that the Amish pay a penalty for not using electricity.
But they do insist that we pay a penalty for not paying for abortions.

Why?
Perhaps their consciences are still alive, after all, and feel guilty about killing
their own unborn children. How could they not?
If they can get us to compromise our consciences,
they won’t feel so bad about having compromised their own.
“Everybody does it” has always been a very effective and convenient excuse for
any kind of evil, even slavery or genocide.

That’s what this is not just about contraception or abortion or whether
every human biological life is intrinsically valuable.
It’s about whether every human conscience is.