By Judie Brown
Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote that Americans “realize [that] their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation’s founders never imagined.” He suggested that this is why the “conservative dragon” is awakening. But as we know, the word conservative does not necessarily mean pro-life.
And if we take a closer look, we can see there are larger dragons in our midst, monsters that devour the minds of the unconcerned in ways that nobody could have foretold. It makes one wonder how bad things have to get before people act in defense of truth.
There is the Planned Parenthood monster—an organization that preys on expectant mothers, especially since the flawed Dobbs decision came down. One report states that “Planned Parenthood of Northern New England provided abortions to more than 3,000 patients from ‘every corner of the country.’” The article listed the top 10 states where expectant mothers can legally kill their babies.
In Texas, a Christian biology teacher named Dr. Johnson Varkey was fired because he taught his class that “human sex is determined by chromosomes X and Y.” Dr. Varkey was teaching basic science that is now disputed by the dragons of deception because, according to the community college, his teaching “pushed beyond the bounds of academic freedom with [his] personal opinions that were offensive to many individuals in the classroom.”
In other words, the gender dragon is destroying those who do not agree with the false teachings it spews forth. If this reminds you of the public view that abortion is a choice, not an act of murder, you can well understand why the dragons are in charge. As the saying goes, it’s “my way or the highway.”
These two examples of today’s version of moral relativism tell us a great deal about the challenges we confront daily. They also remind us of the truth in these words written by Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate:
Openness to life is at the centre of true development. When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man’s true good. If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of a new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away.
This worst of all dragons—self-centeredness—in all its horror and bloody reality comes into view once we contemplate those words. We have become a society of automatons—moving mechanical entities that imitate human beings. If it feels good, folks do it no matter who has to die, what has to be ignored, or fundamentally, what nature expects. Too many people are all in for all the wrong reasons. That is perhaps the largest, most destructive dragon of them all.
In polite company, it is called hubris. But for us in the pro-life vineyard it has a more obvious name: evil. When above all else, the dragon of self becomes common practice, nothing good will come of it.
Perhaps this is what Pope Benedict meant when he wrote:
All people feel the interior impulse to love authentically: love and truth never abandon them completely, because these are the vocation planted by God in the heart and mind of every human person. The search for love and truth is purified and liberated by Jesus Christ from the impoverishment that our humanity brings to it, and he reveals to us in all its fullness the initiative of love and the plan for true life that God has prepared for us. In Christ, charity in truth becomes the Face of his Person, a vocation for us to love our brothers and sisters in the truth of his plan. Indeed, he himself is the Truth.
By following Christ—the light of truth—the dragons slink off and die.
