Polite Discourse with the Unspeakable

Several blogs, among them Countercultural Father , have recently pointed out a perceived need for respect and courtesy when arguing with those who support abortion. It has been suggested that they will never be convinced of the rightness of the pro-life cause if they are vilified with insulting slogans or expressions like 'murderer'. Polite persuasion will work better. Their correspondents seem to agree.

They have, it seems, like racists, nazis, proponents of legalised pederasty, slave-traders and holocaust deniers, a right to their point of view.

With me so far? Good!

Pornography, contraception, and abortion are big business. Abortion feeds off unreliable contraception, the demand for which is stimulated by pornography. Nice little earners.

As to slavery, William Cowper wrote a poem in which he decried slavery, but said he felt bound to support it, as he liked plantation sugar in his tea, as did so many of his compatriots. A source of comfort for the evil men who were able to profit from cheaper sugar, and cotton. Slavery helped make Britain richer. Dulwich College was founded with the pofits of slavery. Cui bono indeed.

Nazism, too, was big business, supported by German tycoons who could smell a fast buck a mile off, and had a gluttonous appetite for slave labour. If there is a moral distinction to be made between between the enslavement and murder of innocent Jews and the very profitable murder of unborn children, someone should perhaps explain it to me, for it is beyond my feeble powers of comprehension.

You can argue that abortion is not murder because it is legal. So were the massacre, destruction, ruin and enslavement of nations which Germany wrought on Europe. The Nuremberg Laws and the diktats of Hitler were, after all, German law.

Would you have conducted your dealings with the unspeakable - people like Hans Frank, Joseph Mengele, Marie Stopes, or Margaret Sanger, with courtesy? I think and hope not.  What would be the point? The hope that through courteous discussion you might change what they were pleased to call their minds? I don't think so. Better speak the noble truth and tell them to their face what they were. It might even have served a secondary purpose and forced them to try to think.

In the UK, the end of the slave trade, one of the vilest blots on the nation's history, came about through the work of abolitionists like Wilberforce and his supporters, who were fortunate and successful because the country they addressed with reason, passion, and rhetoric was still receptive to reason, passion, and rhetoric, and still to an extent a Christian nation.

The modern UK, with its wrecked education, its addiction to sensation, fatuous television, catchpenny lying newspapers, and in possession of the powers of reasoning of an imbecile, would be immune to Wilberforce. Britain is forever largely a prey to slogans, catchphrases, advertising, the tenth rate, and the comfortable, and incapable of recognising, not just the truth, but the possibility that the truth can be ascertained.

In the USA, the end of slavery came about through heroes like John Brown, and through civil war.

Polite discourse will not stop the evil of abortion.

Sadly, I do not know what will.