SYMPOSIUM: We Have Lost our Rights to the Culture of Death

This article is in response to “I Lost My Daughter to the Culture of Death” by Jason Jones and is part of the symposium, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

Perhaps the most dangerous problem with my generation is the widespread and rampant belief that capital is infinite. We believe the government has endless spending capacity, and that it should therefore spend and spend until the individual achieves enough degrees, bought enough corporate goods, or gone through enough marriages to find a happy life.

Moral capital, it seems, is also believed to be infinite. The problem of our age is not that we have ceased to believe in universal moral rights, but that we have come to believe these universal rights are capable of remaining unmoved and retaining their integrity regardless of our actions.

Jason Jones tell us a very important story, and stories of this kind are much needed in today’s conservative movement. It is occasionally necessary to come out from our ivory towers and show we can still shed a few tears over the really human things. But the most important part of Jason’s story comes early on – long before his conversion if I understand correctly.  When he discovered his girlfriend was pregnant, he said he “knew all of a sudden I’d lost the right to keep on being just a boy.”

If there is one lesson the world needs to hear it is that their rights are only as universal as their morals. The moral bank is not infinite. There are only so many withdrawals a man can make, and someday he may wake up to find that it matters little if rights are universal, cosmological, and unchanging because he is none of those things.

This fact should be commonplace to all of us. It is engrained in our history and in the very way our world operates. The old stories tell us of how man has a right to a garden so long as he does not eat the fruit of a particular tree. Mothers tell us how we have a right to play outside so long as we stay in sight. Our society tells us we have a right to drive so long as we don’t do it while drinking.

Rights may be forfeited. Till we understand this we will never resolve the abortion crisis in our world. I do, however, remain optimistic about the difference a single heart-felt story can make.