Just One Issue

A business acquaintance and I were talking about the current financial crisis last weekend when he asked, "You're voting for Obama, right?" "No," I said, "I'm staunchly pro-life." "But that's just one issue," he said.

Was slavery just one issue? Was the holocaust just one issue? Whenever a government declares an entire class of persons (based on skin color, religion, or size and place of residence) undeserving of the protection of the law—that's the issue which trumps all other issues, more important than the economy, foreign policy, or any other human rights issue; for without the right to be born, all other rights are moot. The right to life is the very condition of all other rights.

How can one declare the annual slaughter of 1,250,000 innocent human beings just one issue? It never made sense to me. I suppose that this mentality is virtually unanimous among liberals (what's liberal about killing babies, by the way?) because of an Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon—where “every man surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender” (G.K. Chesterton). Or, as C.S. Lewis wrote, "The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."

For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce

Abortion is the issue this year and every year in every campaign. Catholics may not turn away from the moral challenge that abortion poses for those who seek to obey God’s commands. They are wrong when they assert that abortion does not concern them, or that it is only one of a multitude of issues of equal importance. No, the taking of innocent human life is so heinous, so horribly evil, and so absolutely opposite to the law of Almighty God that abortion must take precedence over every other issue. I repeat. It is the single most important issue confronting not only Catholics, but the entire electorate.
—Bishop James Timlin, Pastoral Letter on Respect Life Sunday 2000