Kathy Shaidle has made some very valid points (if in a harsh way) about pro-lifers and the pro-life movement. (See here, here, here, here.)
Basically, Kathy Shaidle's point to pro-lifers is this: stop the glurge. Stop passing out the plastic fetus dolls, the crappy mommy-don't-kill-me verse (couldn't agree more!), stop the whole ma tante schtick (to use a French expression) and be a little more sophisticated.
I feel a little hurt on behalf of the little old ladies who protest abortion. I meet these people at Campaign Life Meetings, and I have a feeling of it "not being fair". I realize what Kathy is trying to say: what we pro-lifers have been doing, collectively, hasn't worked very well in Canada, and we should try something else, otherwise we will get the same results.
But it's hard to ask people to stop being what they are. The very reason they fight abortion is that persona of theirs.
Maybe we should be pushing the non-grandma types to do this.
It's difficult to get them to be anything else, because the truth is the pro-life culture is very poor. I realize her whole blog is about improving that culture, and she is certainly to be commended for steering people in the right direction.
But how can little old ladies be something else, if they have no alternative?
I practically don't watch TV anymore, and I don't go to movies. In my eyes, just about everything is either boring or full of sinful ideas. And I'm not Ned Flanders. But I value modesty of the eyes, a sense of truth, moral absolutism and very rudimentary concepts like that. If I have to betray those values to have to get culture, I'm just not going to be a consumer. I've stopped reading novels. Too much junk in the them.
I understand the problem with that. A society can't live by commandments alone. We need narratives in our lives. We all live by narratives, and the absence of a consciously pro-life culture-- I'm talking literature, entertainment and art-- means that we are without a powerful tool to foster a collective cohesion and provide a safe and sophisticated way of reaching out to the unconverted and open-minded.
Right now, it's a difficult time to want that pro-life compatible culture, because there just seems to be few genuinely good producers of pro-life cultural products out there. And that's not to say every product has to have a consciously pro-life theme, but it has to be compatible with pro-life/Judeo-Christian values.
What we have, for the most part is Christian stuff. And, to be honest, I find most of it unsatisfactory. Oh, every now and then, there will be a song on CHRI I like, or maybe the odd movie. But I find it all so intellectually facile, so disconnected from our Western cultural tradition, that it's not satisfying to the mind. It may provide a moment of passing enjoyment, but it lacks that "wow" factor to make me want to plunk down $20 or $30 or $40 bucks for it. I want something sophisticated-- written by people who studied literature in University (and have rejected post-modernism for the most part!)
In the absence of such culture, we will continue to see what culture we do have, which is little fetus feet, little old ladies hocking prayer cards, and that sort of thing. It's a bit unfair to dump on them for grabbing on to what's available and what they like.
Perhaps the solution would be in the formation of artists and writers. I consider myself a poet, and I've put out a self-produced chapbook of poetry, which some of the those "little old ladies" really appreciated at a Campaign Life meeting (even after the folks in charge were a bit reluctant to allow it on the literature table because of some of the "raw" language). A cultural movement is built on a lot of bad artists and writers. Look at CanLit. No one took it very seriously thirty years ago.
Maybe we just need to band together and start being each other's audiences.
I would really like to start a dialogue on the points I've made. If you are a pro-lifer, I would greatly appreciate it if you blogged some of your thoughts. Let's generate some discussion on this issue in the pro-life blogosphere. I think it's really crucial to the future of the pro-life movement in Canada (probably the US, too).
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