SYMPOSIUM: Taking Stock of Truth - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

SYMPOSIUM: Taking Stock of Truth

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.

Jason Jones’ story is heart-breaking and heart-warming in equal measure. To hear of a little girl deprived of the chance to join the rest of the human race in the adventure of life should strike sorrow into our souls. We can and should step into the Mr. Jones’ shoes and feel with him the shock of hearing that Jessica had been torn apart in what should have been the security of her mother’s womb.

But he knew an even deeper horror on that day, one that I think is harder for our generation to feel. It was betrayal—not just that had Jessica been killed by her grandfather, but that the law protected the murder. The highest court of this great nation had approved her death, and it has since allowed over 50 million abortions in the four decades since Roe v. Wade.

We’re so used to abortion that even those of use who see something morally objectionable in it have a hard time feeling the visceral shock of colossal injustice that drove Jason Jones to go door to door pleading with the people of Hawaii.

The responsibility of caring for a fragile human life drove Mr. Jones and his girlfriend to grow up awfully fast. That is the proper human response to coming to know truth. As he comments, speaking both to the collapse of Nazism and Communism’s lies and to the hope for building a culture of life: “We were born to know the truth, and something in our soul is repulsed by lies. This awakening takes work and it takes time. But it is ultimately unstoppable.”

Good art—art attuned to the contours of the moral universe we live in—can help rekindle our imaginations to hate lies and love truth. If we are truly horrified by abortion’s betrayal of basic justice, we can have hope of ending it.

Trip Lee’s beautiful and gracious words of wisdom to a young mother and father contemplating how to care for the new life they’ve conceived have repeatedly renewed my commitment to defending the unborn. Let his music renew and reinvigorate your moral imagination:

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