Elizabeth Wright on VFR and Palin

The black conservative Elizabeth Wright agrees with VFR on the devastating effect that Sarah Palin’s nomination is having on conservatism, and particularly on opposition to illegitimacy. She also likes my stand on immigration and race:

Where do you find a white man these days who professes the desire to see his own race prevail in their own lands, instead of taking delight as Western countries are overrun with immigrant invasions?

Wright is a very rare black individual who is truly loyal to Western civilization, and thus, rationally and sensibly, wants the historic majority people of the West to remain such.

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September 14

Elizabeth Wright writes:

Thank you for your comment sent to my blog re my Palin post. And thanks for your clear-eyed consistency on this subject and especially on immigration.

LA replies:

Thank you, and thanks for your position on Palin as well. We anti-Palin conservatives are an out-of-step minority. But as I show in some recent posts at my site, our numbers are increasing.

September 15

Carol Iannone writes:

Elizabeth Wright has brought up something that I have thought and wondered many times, that in the zeal of the pro-life crowd to avoid abortion, they have managed to help legitimize single motherhood. Because they had no larger vision of social good, they failed to promote as equal in importance to the choosing of life, the having of husband and father. It used to be said that the pro-life movement cared only about getting the baby born, not about caring for the child later. That is not entirely true, because the pro-life movement does make efforts to provide single mothers with material assistance. But it does ring true in the sense that the movement doesn’t seem to care about the spiritual void in the life of a child who grows up without a father, and about the negative effects of illegitimacy on society as a whole.

Recently an editor of First Things, R.R. Reno, celebrated the so-called “pregnancy pact” at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, whereby a group of teenaged girls gave birth after having evidently vowed to have children while still in high school and to raise them together. Reno found this a healthy sign of belief in life and fertility, as opposed to the kind of “sterility pact” made by “those so committed to controlling their own futures that they can’t risk the uncertainties of children.” Reno does add the desirability of marriage as an afterthought in his last sentence but clearly it is the sheer natalism of the bevy of babies born in Gloucester High that most impresses him. Of course trying to exert some control over the future by finishing school and getting a job and establishing a home and getting married before having babies is exactly what society has been rightly exhorting teenagers to do. But such is the logic of the pro-life movement—husbands and fathers would be good, but don’t let their absence stand in the way of having children.

LA replies:

There you have it. R.R Reno’s article expresses in pure form the mentality that led “Christian conservatives” to gush over Bristol Palin’s out of wedlock pregnancy. If there is to be a movement worthy of the name conservatism, it will have to be created or recreated, because the conservative movement is dead. The so-called conservative movement should change its name to the anti-abortion movement, or “the cult of natalism for the sake of natalism,” or “Christians for illegitimacy.”

Carol Iannone writes:

You know, family is what should be emphasized, not preventing abortion alone. The state can provide for single mothers and is doing so in large measure. Or charitable pro-life organizations can provide what a single mother needs, at least to get started. But that’s not what we want as conservatives.

I was thinking, even though Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, God provided a human father in Joseph to complete the Holy Family. It is one of the most beautiful of Christian images. I was looking at some very old illuminated manuscripts, rather crudely done. One of the images repeatedly shown in these manuscripts was after the Fall, Adam laboring arduously in the field, and Eve apart laboring arduously in childbirth. I was thinking how even the iconography of the tranquil, loving, unified Holy Family counters the pain, heartbreak, and separation of these images.

Laura W. writes:

Carol Iannone’s excellent statement is reinforced by the public issue of Palin and her infant son who has Down Syndrome. Palin is hailed for giving birth to Trig. It’s unseemly, suggesting that only the extraordinary person would fulfill the first and most fundamental duty of the parent, the obligation to accept with humility and gratitude what God gives us at the moment of conception. That Palin is effusively congratulated for not having agreed to a widely accepted form of infanticide only shows how irreversibly accepted that infanticide has become, and how the effort to stop it fails to look at its larger causes.

It’s true that Palin’s example here may lead people to stop and question the practice of eugenic abortion, which has hit the population of Down Syndrome children especially hard. But, I don’t think it will have a big effect.

That’s because Palin’s way of life (it’s clear she isn’t planning actually to raise Trig or her other children anymore) doesn’t celebrate parental duty in its everyday forms. It exalts ambition in women. This is the true cause of eugenic abortion—and all abortion. To ignore this root cause is to create, as you say, a bizarre fertility cult. Instead, the abortion movement should be reinforcing the Judeo-Christian traditions of parental duty and selfless care for the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 13, 2008 02:25 AM | Send