Have any of You ever seen one of the rallies in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of our favorite Bright decision ever, Roe v. Wade? (I’m guessing not!) I have. I went several times with my Dull friends, back before I met Lobo and stopped talking to Loser. And I’m here to tell You that unfortunately for us guys who want to protect the so-called right to abortion at all costs, those pro-life rallies on the Mall every January are nothing like the rallies that the pro-abortion people stage. You know those other rallies, I’m sure—the ones full of grim ladies well past aborting age, marching with coat hangers as their emblems, yelling about their “right” to end the pregnancies they’ll never have.
No, the pro-lifers and their rallies are a different world altogether. There are children, families, and teenagers everywhere. There are kids playing Frisbee. Kids holding hands. Kids horsing around and shoving each other. Kids with earrings and tattoos. Kids with rosaries. Kids wearing T-shirts that read, “I’m adopted and thanks, Mom, for having me.” Kids, kids, kids, kids, kids—are You getting the horrible drift here? It’s more like a rave or rock concert than an ordinary political event—I mean it would be, only the kids are a lot more healthy-looking and there aren’t any drugs, of course.
I cannot emphasize enough how seriously bad I is for us Atheists that the face of the pro-life movement is a youthful face. And what do You think pulls all those kids into the pro-life scene? I know You will say indoctrination; but at the rick of annoying everybody all over again, I have to say as a former Christian that You’re wrong. Those kids are in the movement for the same reason that the civil-rights marchers—who are their rock stars—also took to the streets: because they’re totally convinced that in taking a stand against abortion, they’re doing something good for the world.
Why is that? Don’t You ever wonder?
I have, and I think the answer has to do with something we Atheists—and plenty of our Secular allies too—just don’t get yet. It’s this: living around the fact of abortion on demand has changed some people, and the closer they get to the ground, as it were, the more seriously they take it.
I mean, face it! If You’re over fifty, there’s not much chance that anyone would have aborted You. But nowadays it’s different. It’s like anyone who’s even born now, in the Age of Choice, either requires explanation or feels like there’s a reason for it. It’s changed the existential experience of the very question, Why am I here?
I’m not saying this bizarre state of affairs is altogether bad for our godlessness. Some kids, today as ever, do turn effortlessly towards Atheism’s chief transmitter belts among the young, i.e., nihilism and melancholy. In fact, some do it easier than ever. The fact that their generation is the fist truly disposable one—even disposed-of one—puts extra pressure on all of today’s kids to find a meaning in life. Some just can’t. That’s what Goth is for. And a lot of their music. And Norplant. And, of course, drugs.
But other kids, including many of the more serious kids, get pulled instead by those same questions toward Loser. When those kids look at those pictures the rallies, they don’t see what nonbeliever see—a mistake of Nature “fixed” somehow by violent human intervention. No they see something else—what their baby sister looked like four years ago on the sonogram, what they themselves were not very long ago. They see themselves. They see their friends. They see their siblings. And all this propels them away from us, and toward the people who tell them this thing is wrong—people concentrated for one reason or another on Loser’s side.
So many of us Brights just don’t get this part of the struggle! I’m not blaming anybody in particular here. I think it’s one more generational thing. As in my first Letter, where I tried to explain what You all are missing about the Sexual Revolution—like it unhappy consequences for lost of people—I’m trying here to explain something similar. Most young Dulls do not think abortion in an issue; they think it is the issue that proves their Christian morality to be superior. I cannot emphasize this point enough: millions of them are Dulls just because of abortion on demand. They believe—as that hideously erudite enemy of ours Hadley Arkes wrote—that abortion is “the central moral issue of our day, the issue from which everything else radiates.”
