Gone With the Wind

 

In David O. Selznick’s classic film about the American Civil War, one of the principal characters, Scarlett O’Hara, engages the Tarleton brothers with the following dialogue:

 

Scarlett: Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war; this war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides... there isn’t going to be any war.

Brent Tarleton: Not going to be any war?

Stuart Tarleton: Why, honey, of course there’s gonna be a war.

Scarlett: If either of you boys says “war” just once again, I’ll go in the house and slam the door.

Brent Tarleton: But Scarlett, honey...

Stuart Tarleton: Don’t you want us to have a war?

 

Of course there was a war, and it was, like most wars devastating and took tragic tolls on human life even though many Americans characterized by the Tarleton brothers may have initially welcomed the conflict.

Rick has just brought to our attention another report about another grave conflict in the United States by focusing on the American President’s address before Planned Parenthood in which Mr. Obama defended once again what now are called “rights”—the right to take an innocent human life. The President employed rhetoric, “an assault on women’s rights,” to critique those organizations and states who prepare and execute policies designed to regulate abortion. [President’s entire address is HERE]

Real wars involving real assaults against innocent civilians do bring casualties to the conflict. What the President failed to do in his speech before the members of the Planned Parenthood organization was to identify the real victim of abortion politics and the ensuing conflicts emanating from these politics, the over fifty million young Americans whose lives have been snuffed out by the very “right” he champions.

If he were really interested in discussing and debating the real casualties of the conflicts over abortion with the alleged right he defends so freely and enthusiastically, he should have mentioned the deaths of our young brothers and sisters who have been the real casualties of the abortion wars.  But instead, the President defended women’s questionable Constitutional rights, but he did not mention that there are other ways of protecting their authentic rights with moral legitimacy—that there are other ways of avoiding assaults on the authentic rights of women. Rather, he allowed the sacred memory of the victims of abortion to be forgotten. Sadly, he chose not to speak about them or the rights which objective reason grants to them. Why? Well, after all, they, too, like the subjects in Selznick’s film are gone with the wind.

 

RJA sj