George Neumayr: Abortion is Un-American

Along with Victor Davis Hanson, George Neumayr is an American writer who has achieved the highest level of conceptual clarity.

Here he addresses the central moral issue of American civilization:

Monday's March for Life served as a reminder that for all our renewed rhetoric of freedom America, 32 years after Roe v. Wade, continues to deny freedom to unborn babies. The fire of freedom of which President Bush spoke last week still hasn't illuminated the shadows and penumbras under which more humans are aborted each day in America than were killed on 9/11.

President Bush, in his remarks to the March for Life attendees (piped in via phone from Camp David), used a word rarely heard these days: civilization. The proof of civilization, he said, is whether the strong protect the weak. By that standard, many democracies don't qualify as civilizations, including our own if it betrays the principles of America's founding.

As democratically elected savages like Adolf Hitler illustrate, democracy is not an automatic guarantor of civilization. Separated from moral truth contained in a rule of law, democracies can be as tyrannical as the most rapacious undemocratic governments.

America should only be on the side of "democracy" if it produces civilization; otherwise the tyranny America seeks to end will spread through the very rhetoric of democracy it uses, should the bin Ladens and Hitlers be democratically elected to power. The Founding Fathers, it is worth remembering, didn't call King George III a tyrant because he was a monarch; they called him a tyrant because he violated basic human rights. They knew democracy could devour itself through its own tyrannies unless it was subject to a truth higher than democracy itself.

A nation that kills its own children is a democracy without civilization and a people without a future -- literally. Not surprisingly, pro-life events such as the March for Life are popular with children, the survivors in the random lottery of life Roe v. Wade conducts year by year.