Last Night, my wife and I posed a logic question to our children. We introduced them to the term “pro life”, and explained that it was a label used by people who oppose giving women the choice to terminate pregnancies, because they believe this to be murder.
We then asked them to consider a bunch of other policies related to “Life” (or death, as the case may be.)
We asked them, “would you say it’s ‘pro-life’ to oppose health care, or food assistance, or housing assistance, to the poorest Americans?”. “Um… no...”, they said, uncertainly, wondering if this was some sort of trick question.
“OK, how about if you support access to assault rifles, and the gadgets to turn them into machine guns, and you don’t even want the police to have to be told when people buy all that stuff? Does that sound like you’re “pro-life”, like you are concerned about stopping murders?” “Of course not,” came the reply.
“How about climate change, and thinking about the hurricanes that just hit... Do you think it’s “Pro-life”, or not, to try to stop putting as much greenhouse gasses in the air to at least slow down global warming and climate change, which scientists think are making those hurricanes bigger and more deadly?”
By this point, there was no response — because the answers to all of these questions seemed so obvious to our 9-13 year old children it was really confusing to them why we had to ask them in the first place.
Hey kids.. I’m with you. Not only is it really confusing why we have to talk about questions with such obvious answers, but it’s really, really sad. Especially when our inability to answer them correctly leads to so much death.
However, we said, we have to ask these questions, because most of the people out there claiming to be “pro life” oppose basic access to health care, any sort of gun control, and doing a damn thing to address climate change. And those policies kill people.
Last night, our kids learned a lot of good new vocabulary words. Unfortunately, every day we surrender the narrative of “life” to these false prophets in our midst, our kids learn another world all too well:
Hypocrisy.