With abortion vote, Ireland forsakes sound judgment and right reason
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Pity the fate of a poor Irish stranger,
That wanders so far from his home,
That sighs for protection from want, woe, and danger,
That knows not from which way for to roam.
Yet I'll never return to Hibernia's green bowers,
For tyranny tramples the sweetest of flowers,
That once gave me comfort in loneliest hours—
Now they are gone, I shall ne'er see them more. (Broadside Ballad entitled Poor Irish Stranger)
To my mind, slavery has never meant just the spectacle of bodies bent to hard labor in the fields. Free men and women also must toil. That is the lot of all humanity. Rather, it means souls tortured by burning anger and indignation against injustice, which they are helpless to act upon; consciences racked by the defiling knowledge of their complicity with the very evil that abuses them. Though shamed by the fear that deters them from rejecting it, their habit of submission eventually stupefies and deadens the pangs. Slavery also occasions anguished prayers to the almighty God, begging him for deliverance from humiliating subjection to evil, until the strength of faith almost gives out and prayers are tempted to cynicism and despair.
This is the essence of the slavery the Obama faction now means to impose upon our health-care workers. Because some people wish to do and benefit from evil, others must become its tools and instruments, against their will. Because some wish to escape responsibility for the nascent life invoked by their cries of sexual ecstasy, others must accept complicity in the murders that carry out their will.
When I was still a child, I felt a special sympathy for the people of Ireland. It was akin to the way I felt about the people of ancient Israel. As the descendant of people subjected to violent tyranny, what I read about these peoples, or saw represented in documentaries, movies and TV shows, moved my heart to compassion and righteous indignation. As I grew older, I came to understand that, at some stage in the history of many peoples, they have endured such periods of violently imposed degradation. Perhaps the grimmest proof of the tragic darkness that lurks in human nature derives from the fact that some of these very same peoples go on to inflict on others physical and emotional atrocities very like those they had endured.
So, the Boers of South Africa saw themselves maltreated by the English; and, instead of learning to hate all such indignities, proceeded to use the methods employed in their humiliation to humiliate black Africans, ill-fated to become subject to their power. If only people learned to pass along the help they get from others as surely as they pass along the unjust, abusive pain.
God understands this aspect of our fallen nature, however, and provides against it. So, the proverb (Proverbs 26:27) says: "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." In the end, the weight of the evil that we do becomes more than we can handle. Then evil conscience consumes itself with evil, devouring those it misdirects.
Now the people of Ireland fall prey to the spreading spiritual holocaust of abortion. I fear this Biblical fate awaits them. I fear it also awaits the people of the United States if we do not repent of the war the errant (in)Justices of our Supreme Court have declared against what is, self-evidently, our own humanity. As this genocidal war continues, the human heart must harden, like the heart of Pharaoh, against the plea of those who, in the name of freedom, freely commit their spirits to become bond slaves to an evil that encompasses our natural extinction. For the life-giving Spirit is driven to reject its complicity with that which makes the whole body a self-inflicted wound. So, the Lord says in Genesis 6:3, "My Spirit shall not abide in judging humankind forever." When judgment ends in execution, the penalty flames body and soul in Hell (as Jesus warns in Matthew 10:28). For what else is the meaning of existence when only the painful loss of life remains — to be endlessly recalled, eternally regretted.
Too bad they have thus completely forsaken the common sense of what was once their Catholic creed.
The announced intention of the Irish prime minister sure confirms this woeful implication of the recent Irish referendum. Therefore, I found myself recalling the words of the street ballad (quoted above) Bob Dylan once set to music. Have the Irish now built prosperity at home, only to dwell there as strangers to their benevolent spirit? That spirit hungered for justice and thirsted to do right. Now, self-estranged, will they obdurately inflict on their posterity a penalty of death more deeply steeped in innocent Irish blood than tyrant hands have ever been before? For this sickening "freedom" to reign over the extinction of a human race in every sense their own, will they viciously embroil in evil the very institutions supposed to care, to heal, to save?
If so, the only sense in which they still deserve the "Catholic" name derives from the fact that they now consent to represent concretely the encroaching slavery-in-conscience of all humankind. Too bad they have thus completely forsaken the common sense of what was once their Catholic creed — the sense that natural passions, unleashed from the life-instilling purposes of God, inevitably enslave us — body, mind and soul. Thus severed from God's rule, they extinguish with each evil exercise of licentious power the God-endowed, true liberty, wherewith Christ, our now and future King, forever intends to make us free.
Dr. Alan Keyes served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under President Ronald Reagan, and ran for president in 1996, 2000 and 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, and writes at his website Loyal to Liberty.
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