The pro-life plank and Republican resolve
By Alisa Craddock
web posted July 7, 2008
There are those who want to strip the pro-life plank out of the Republican Party platform and are pressing hard for it. This would be disastrous for the party and for the country. Christians will not vote for a party that is hostile to their moral values, and if the party were to strip its pro-life position, they would in essence be declaring war on Christianity, as just about every other corner of our society has. Open hostility to Christianity and its wise and necessary moral compass would ultimately result in a complete secularization of society. But a society without a moral foundation based in belief in a higher power does not simply revert to natural law. It reverts, instead, to barbarity and hedonism. You or I (if I were not a believer) might not do so, but enough people would over time that the culture would suffer irreparable decline. It is happening already. The calculated, deliberate secularization of our educational system and the efforts to instill "value neutral" relations among peoples in this society is producing not only an increasingly secular population, but one that is morally debased and openly hostile to Christianity. The hostility can only get worse. The efforts of people in positions of power to either pervert the Gospel to suit certain ends, or to eradicate it will eventually turn into open persecution. The further we move away from a belief in a creator and divine law, the more anarchic our society becomes. Do I really need to spell this out? If you're 50 or over, surely you have watched it happen, watched as our foundations have crumbled and our culture has coarsened over the last 40 years.
The pro-life plank is not merely a "concession" to Christians; it is a necessary element of our country's survival. Abortion and other anti-life agendas violate not only the law of God, but also the founding principles of this government. In my column Sexual Liberty vs. American Liberty: the Politics of God, Family, and Country, I remarked on the study by Anthropologist J. D. Unwin that showed a direct correlation between sexual opportunity and culture condition. In a nutshell, Unwin found that where regulation of sexual activity outside of marriage prohibited the satisfaction of organic desires civilizations grew and prospered proportionally. Where sexual regulation was relaxed or non-existent, those cultures either failed to develop or declined unto eventual collapse. According to Unwin's research, it takes about 3 generations or 100 years from the time one full generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist upon prenuptial and post-nuptial continence for the civilization to collapse. Unwin's findings were so consistent that he asserted that if he knew the sexual regulations of a given society, he was able to predict accurately the pattern of its culture. Additionally, historians have noted throughout recorded history the decline of many civilizations, and how decadence, hedonism and rampant deviancy are consistently found in the factors most leading to their demise. It quite simply weakens the civilization until it dies, like prolonged drug use weakens the man, or pornography addiction, overwhelming its moral center and making it vulnerable to conquest or predation by those ever ready to grab for power.
What is driving the "sexual opportunity" in our culture is abortion. Although contraception is the effective root cause, abortion is the "sin that cries out to heaven" for its barbarity, and it is this guarantor of the sexual opportunity that is destroying us. It is, quite simply, naive to pretend we can hide from the destructive consequences of moral decay and carry on as though it does not matter, so long as we take care of the economy and have a strong military. Economic hardship by itself does not destroy a moral people. In fact, it can be argued that it strengthens them. Sybaritism does destroy, and a combination of the two is an open door to Marxism. Christianity, and the moral stability it brings, is deeply embedded in the character of this nation and its institutions. It is tightly interwoven with our freedom, and it is a shield against tyranny. Abortion, though outwardly appearing to extend freedom, was actually an attack on freedom (whose proponents and their allies have steadily chipped away at authentic freedom in the name of protecting the almighty right to have absolute power over one's own body, even when that body is the incubator for somebody else's) and a fanatical (impossible) idea of equality.
Freedom is not the right to do wrong. Freedom is having the liberty to choose to do right. Under a dictatorship such as Cuba or China, citizens do not have the choice to live a moral life, to do what is right. Under Adolf Hitler, doing what was right (such as protecting the innocent from Hitler's Storm Troopers) would get you killed along with them. As we move farther away from the truth of our moral foundations, we slip deeper into despotism. Our country is divided, not because of racism, or heterosexism, or any other "ism", but because of different ideas of what it is to be free. The Democratic Party has abandoned Christianity and its moral foundations. The Republican Party must not follow suit. Without its foundation in traditional social values that builds up families and creates a wholesome culture and a stable society for rearing the next generation, without Right Reason, the GOP ideology will become as perverted as the ideology of the Left. It will, in fact, become no different from the Left. That would spell disaster for our nation. The GOP must keep its pro-life platform as a matter of national interest. It may even be a matter of national security. The anarchy that is fomented even now from a "value neutral" society makes us ripe for conquest, particularly from within our own political system. 
Alisa Craddock is a columnist and activist in the culture war, a convert to Catholicism, and describes herself as a Christian Libertarian. She may be contacted at alisa.craddock at hushmail.com.