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The first and greatest human right is the right to life. Without that right, none of the other rights are even possible. The authors of the US Declaration of Independence certainly got this correct when they spoke of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The full opening sentence of the Preamble says this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

God himself is the source of these inalienable rights, and governments have been established by God to protect and promote these core human rights. But when we want to undermine or do away with these rights, we resort to undermining the language as well.

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay about how we cover up great evils with nice words and misleading language

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. … Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

One quite obvious set of euphemisms has to do with the abortion issue. We speak of ‘terminating a pregnancy’ or of ‘removing a clump of cells.’ What folks do NOT want to hear is the actual truth: an abortion kills a young son or daughter in the mother’s womb.

But as the West becomes increasingly leftist, secular, and hostile to God and His values, then you can expect to see basic values being turned on their head. What America once did with its defence of life has now been fully reversed in France. It has become the first nation on earth to make abortion a constitutional right. It has been formally incorporated into law. One write-up says this:

France made history by becoming the first country to embed a fictitious “right” to abortion in its constitution. Lawmakers from both chambers of parliament convened on Monday and easily passed this horrific amendment. The bill in this liberal nation garnered an overwhelming 780-72 vote in favor, prompting nearly the entire joint session to rise for a prolonged standing ovation. Leading pro-life campaigners were saddened to see politicians clapping for killing babies.

French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to safeguard abortion against any potential future attempts to protect women and their babies. Following the vote, Macron announced that the amendment would be formally incorporated into the constitution on Friday, March 8 — International Women’s Day — during a public ceremony in central Paris. He emphasized the vote’s significance as a source of “French pride” and a “universal message,” expressing his sentiments on social media.

Imagine celebration, cheering and rejoicing in a law that officially condemns to death countless unborn children. And how utterly ironic that they will do this on International Women’s Day. One, at least half of all abortion victims are female, and two, Macron and Co cannot even tell you what a woman is!

How far have we fallen as nations. All this makes a complete mockery of the French national motto of “Liberty, equality, fraternity”. There is no liberty for the unborn in France. There is no equality for the unborn in France. There is no fraternity for the unborn in France.

Co-belligerency

I have often spoken about the matter of working with others on limited objectives – even others who do not share many of our religious or political values and beliefs on other matters. We can sometimes work with others on things like the abortion fight without agreeing with them on these other things.

But this also can be discussed in terms of the other direction. That is, conservatives and Christians will often work with most parties and politicians who are also conservative and Christian. But what happens when on key issues like this, they let you down?

I have just once again helped a team of committed Christians put together yet another Christian Values Checklist – this one for the Tasmanian state election to be held on March 23. Having done so many of these checklists over the decades and seeing the continual downward spiral – certainly of all the major parties – many of us are coming to recognise that they might not be of all that much use anymore.

Instead of pushing a party, we should instead just push individual candidates. The truth is, on most of the core values for conservatives and Christians – certainly the life issues – the Liberals and Nationals are becoming almost indistinguishable from Labor and the Greens. A small handful of pro-life members can be found in the main parties (although not in the Greens), but if we want to see a culture of life replacing our culture of death, depending on the Libs and so on to save the day is just not going to cut it.

A brand-new article in The European Conservative by Sebastian Morello (thanks for the tip, John) offers a Christian response to this ghastly decision and also discusses the matter of political alliances. As to what this vote means, he says this:

Like so much in the modern world, whether it be “love is love”, or “trans people just want to exist”, or “my body, my choice”, what we have here is something that can be chanted and yelled to avoid articulating the reality of what is being referred to. Such deception must be deployed if “progress” is to continue, for the realities that these slogans orbit are so wretched and repulsive that they amount to the stuff of Dr Mengele’s dreams.

Three miles away from the half-burned Cathedral of Notre Dame, a closed off blackened remnant of a dead civilisation, consecrated to the virgin who fled to Egypt to protect her baby, the killing of babies was celebrated into the night at the Eiffel Tower. Jubilations erupted around that great metal spike built “in gratitude”, as Eiffel himself put it, to the French Revolution and the modern age it inaugurated. Here, at this shrine to “progress”, people hugged each other and partied to honour their country for being partly defined by its commitment to the violent murder of human babies.

But it is the closing words of his article where he calls for a rethink on political alliances that I want to emphasise here:

For the readers of The European Conservative, however, it is probably time to rethink what we mean by the current “emerging conservative alliances” — of which the National Conservatism movement and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), for example, have made much use. Open your eyes: in France, the so-called “far-right” Rassemblement National and Reconquête supported the constitutional enshrinement of abortion. If you are a Christian, then those parties are your enemies and should be condemned by you as such.

After all, we cannot criticise the UK Conservative Party for all its progressivism and then support such parties on the Continent despite their progressivism. Those who traditionally called themselves “conservatives” are being made hypocrites by so-called “conservative parties”. A radical response is required — something quite different from that to which we’ve grown accustomed.

Conservative or “right-wing” politics cannot treat issues like abortion as “areas of reasonable disagreement”. If it is now somehow “conservative” to exercise indifference towards the killing of babies, or indeed to outright support such murder of the innocent, then to hell with conservatism — literally. Let me be clear: I would rather progressives increased their global usurpation until we are all living under a single tyranny of interminable “progress” than watch Christians support and advance the false witness of a pro-abortion political “Right”.

It grieves me to say it, for I was formed in the crucible of Burke, Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, Le Play, and other such critics of modernity who really believed that political successes were possible in the modern age. Indeed, I have always believed in throwing oneself into the political struggle, and that in the end conservatives may win out as modernity eats itself. But I now see more clearly than ever that the political changes we witness are mere intimations of a much deeper battle over the territory of the human heart, a conflict which rages on between the Principality of Satan and the Kingdom of Christ.

The conservative-liberal, Right-Left divide means almost nothing now. There are those in the Principality of Satan and those in the Kingdom of Christ, and that is now the only division that has satisfactory explanatory power. Of course, there are those who have yet to pick a side, but no one can remain neutral for long in such a conflict. As we come to realise that politics is no longer about the good of the polity, but is the mere expression of a battle between the children of Satan, who wage war on human nature, and those of the God who so loved human nature that he assumed it into his divine personhood, we will have to adopt a completely different approach to our engagement with the “political struggle”. It will likely mean not choosing to be campaigners and activists, but crusaders and martyrs.

Yes, things are looking quite bleak in the West. For some time now, I have been saying that conservative Christians cannot put any faith or hope in politics, in parties, and even in messianic leaders. The Liberals will not save us. The Republicans will not save us. Trump will not save us. Putin (as some conservatives foolishly think) will not save us. At the end of the day, this really is a matter of God versus Satan. So forget about Republicans versus Democrats, etc.

This does NOT mean I am calling for a withdrawal from politics and the culture wars. I am simply saying that without a complete and total reliance on Christ and His Kingdom – perhaps more so than we ever have seen of late – thinking that we can somehow make much of a difference in this increasingly dark world will only be a fool’s dream.

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Originally published at CultureWatch. Photo: Charles Hutchins/Wikimedia Commons