Politics and Truth: America Is at War with Babies

Two recurring motifs of the presidential campaign dominate: the lying and the assumption that hardly anyone can doubt the social utility of killing babies in the womb.

By: Msgr. Richard C. Antall, published on October 28, 2024, Crisis Magazine/Opinion

Two recurring motifs of the presidential campaign have given it a surreal atmosphere for me: the lying and the assumption that hardly anyone can doubt the social utility of killing babies in the womb.

Recently, billionaire Bill Ackman was defending ex-President Trump to a hostile reporter on a news show. The “journalist” disingenuously praised Ackman as someone devoted to the truth. Since this was so, could he explain how he could support the ex-president’s campaign to return to the White House? The ex-president had repeatedly talked about pressuring manufacturers to stay in this country, one of which denied his claim saying it was a “black and white” lie. 

Trump had indeed pressured some companies, if not the one mentioned, said Ackman, and Harris constantly tweets falsehoods on X. An example was that she said her opponent would ban abortions nationwide. That was not true and Trump was unequivocal about that, said the billionaire. The hostile commentator said something about the relative importance of some misinformation and a host concluded, “Both sides lie.”

“Mendacity,” cried Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Our culture seems to be built on it, and our politics especially. The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima had a character say, “The essence of politics is this. Listen. There is no truth in politics. Politics knows that there is no truth in it. So politics is required to make a counterfeit of truth.” The counterfeiting of “facts” is perhaps the most striking of the campaign we have been exposed to, and this has been aided and abetted by an elite that is in control of so much of the access we have to news and opinion. 

Things are happening that have never before been seen, like Britain’s Labour Party sending over volunteers to help Kamala Harris’ campaign. Where is the outrage? The skepticism of a British philosopher about whether there would be sound of a tree falling in the forest if no one was there to listen has become a reality. All sorts of events, contradictions, scandals are ignored and become practically noiseless, like the philosophical tree, because people are not allowed to hear of it.

There has been shamelessness in American politics since its beginnings. But never, perhaps, with such sanctimony. To use a phrase from Camille Paglia, we are witnesses of a national “hypocrisy sweepstakes,” and the torturing of the truth has speeded up as we get to the end of the election extravaganza which resembles the tactics of the Romans during the campaigns for the tribunes of the plebeians.

Future Plutarchs will have fun with the various promises and the audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret—“slander boldly, something always sticks”—we have seen buzzing along the misinformation highway, including the secret admiration of Trump for Adolf Hitler, conveniently recalled in the last weeks of the campaign by a former chief of staff. 

We have hecatombs of aborted babies, whose organs were part of an inhuman commerce; but we have to make sure that people do not think this election is about defending human life. I understand the fear of politicians to offend a segment of the population rabidly pro-abortion. We can only hope (and I think Cardinal Burke has that same hope) that the silence and shying away of some figures is not an indication that the radical position is now a consensus.

There was a time when aggressive support of abortion was not considered consensus. Even Clinton, who vetoed the law prohibiting partial-birth abortion, had suggested his desire was that abortion be “rare.” Now it is almost as if society sees the fetus as a threat to a way of life. Instead of “the communists are coming to take over,” we have to make America safe for the willful destruction of human life. 

We definitely live in a contradictory time. Even Dickens could not describe the tensions and confusion of modern life. Pregnancy as a threat to freedom and happiness competes with technology that includes operations on fetuses. We have couples investing in test-tube conceptions and frozen embryos, sometimes as career moves. Chris Rock, at one point, could make a comedy routine about women deciding for a Cancun vacation over carrying a child to term. Couples have plans for their first pet or pets, when the nature of conjugal life would logically beg a different direction.

Tom Holland’s famous history of the Persian empire has a chapter on the bloody eugenics of the Spartans. While other Greek cities practiced a stealthy exposure of infants that were not wanted for whatever reason, the Spartans were transparent about the Apothetae, the hill on which the babies died. No threat of rescue, like what happened to Oedipus or Cyrus or other figures of legend. Holland says Spartan mothers were quick to examine their baby boys by bathing them in wine. If that triggered a spasm, a prediction of seizures, the boy went to the hill of death. We have become another Sparta about the issue. The vetoing of laws insisting that failed abortions (live births) be attended vigorously to preserve the life of the child would have seemed normal to the Spartans.

There has been this society-wide brainwashing or intimidation. The media have convinced leaders to tread softly about the defense of life. It is literally a shame that the candidates many of us pro-lifer support appear to be weak; it is a sad index of cultural values and either the lack of courage or conviction about abortion. Obviously, Kamala Harris has staked out her place on the Apothetae shamelessly and become a spokeswoman and advocate of the death of fetuses, and so I cannot see how anyone can forget about that in the polling booth.

Catholics celebrate feast days recalling the conceptions of Jesus and Mary. Can they ignore conception as the beginning of all human lives? Only once have I heard an ad (about Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio) decrying a politician’s votes for partial-birth abortion and describing the practice as “horrific.”

Pro-lifers in this election are at a Kipling moment, “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” Patience and the prudence recommended by Cardinal Burke have to guide us. Like the rabbi in the old Hasidic legend, we have to say to each other, “Be strong, be strong, be strong.”

Monsignor Richard C. Antall is an author and pastor of Holy Name Parish in the Diocese of Cleveland.