By Dave Andrusko
I have no idea what is required reading in high school English/literature classes these days. For those of us of a certain age, “1984,” and Orwell’s allegorical novel, “Animal Farm” were required reading.
Every teenager, let alone every college student, was familiar with “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” and “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows” (from “1984”) and “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” and “Four legs good, two legs bad (from “Animal Farm”).
As a pro-lifer who reads a great deal of what passes for argument in pro-abortion circles, the extended Orwell quote that means the most to me comes from “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.”
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. … Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. … If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
Read state and congressional pro-abortion Democrats as they evade grappling with infanticide by neglect and what better example could you possibly have of “largely the defense of the indefensible”?
When we are told that the same unborn child doctors will administer anesthesia to for fear the baby would otherwise suffer will not feel pain if her arms are pulled out of their sockets and their limbs crushed in an abortion, don’t you think you are in a time when “telling the truth will be a revolutionary act”?
As a culture we are hyper-sensitized to any real or perceived act of discrimination. Yet unborn babies are outside our line of moral vision so bigotry towards them is acceptable. For too many, they are almost blasé. When that little one is diagnosed with Down syndrome and the parents are encouraged to end her life because she is not “perfect,” what is that if not lethal intolerance carried to the ninth degree?
Orwell also said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
And the obvious is that we must restate over and over is that owe that unborn child the same love, protection, and sacrifice whether she is “wanted” or “unwanted.”