France, Murder, and Human Rights

On the horrific new law in France:

The first and greatest human right is the right to life. Without that right, none of the other rights are even possible. The authors of the U. S. Declaration of Independence certainly got this correct when they spoke of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The full opening sentence of the Preamble says this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

God himself is the source of these inalienable rights, and governments have been established by God to protect and promote these core human rights. But when we want to undermine or do away with these rights, we resort to undermining the language as well.

In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay about how we cover up great evils with nice words and misleading language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. . . . Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

One quite obvious set of euphemisms has to do with the abortion issue. We speak of ‘terminating a pregnancy’ or of ‘removing a clump of cells.’ What folks do NOT want to hear is the actual truth: an abortion kills a young son or daughter in the mother’s womb.

But as the West becomes increasingly leftist, secular, and hostile to God and his values, then you can expect to see basic values being turned on their head. What America once did with its defence of life has now been fully reversed in France. It has become the first nation on earth to make abortion a constitutional right. It will be formally incorporated into law today. One write-up says this:

France made history by becoming the first country to embed a fictitious “right” to abortion in its constitution. Lawmakers from both chambers of parliament convened on Monday and easily passed this horrific amendment. The bill in this liberal nation garnered an overwhelming 780-72 vote in favor, prompting nearly the entire joint session to rise for a prolonged standing ovation. Leading pro-life campaigners were saddened to see politicians clapping for killing babies.

 

French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to safeguard abortion against any potential future attempts to protect women and their babies. Following the vote, Macron announced that the amendment would be formally incorporated into the constitution on Friday, March 8 — International Women’s Day — during a public ceremony in central Paris. He emphasized the vote’s significance as a source of “French pride” and a “universal message,” expressing his sentiments on social media. https://www.lifenews.com/2024/03/04/france-becomes-first-country-in-the-world-to-make-killing-babies-in-abortions-a-constitutional-right/

Imagine celebration, cheering and rejoicing in a law that officially condemns to death countless unborn children. And how utterly ironic that they will do this on International Women’s Day. One, half of all abortion victims are female, and two, Macron and Co cannot even tell you what a woman is!

How far have we fallen as nations. All this makes a complete mockery of the French national motto of “Liberty, equality, fraternity”. There is no liberty for the unborn in France. There is no equality for the unborn in France. There is no fraternity for the unborn in France.

Co-belligerency and good and bad partners

I have spoken often about the matter of working with others on limited objectives – even others who do not share many of our religious or political values and beliefs on other matters. We can sometimes work with others on things like the abortion fight without agreeing with them on these other things.

But this also can be discussed in terms of the other direction. That is, conservatives and Christians will often work with most parties and politicians who are also conservative and Christian. But what happens when on key issues like this, they let you down?

I have just once again helped a team of committed Christians put together yet another Christian Values Checklist – this one for the Tasmanian state election to be held on March 23. Having done so many of these checklists over the decades and seeing the continual downward spiral – certainly of all the major parties – many of us are coming to recognise that they might not be of all that much use anymore.

Instead of pushing a party, we should instead just push individual candidates. The truth is, on most of the core values for conservatives and Christians – certainly the life issues – the Liberals and Nationals are becoming almost indistinguishable from Labor and the Greens. A small handful of prolife members can be found in the main parties (although not in the Greens), but if we want to see a culture of life replacing our culture of death, depending on the Libs and so on to save the day is just not going to cut it.

A brand-new article in The European Conservative by Sebastian Morello (thanks for the tip John) offers a Christian response to this ghastly decision and also discusses the matter of political alliances. As to what this vote means, he says this:

Like so much in the modern world, whether it be “love is love”, or “trans people just want to exist”, or “my body, my choice”, what we have here is something that can be chanted and yelled to avoid articulating the reality of what is being referred to. Such deception must be deployed if “progress” is to continue, for the realities that these slogans orbit are so wretched and repulsive that they amount to the stuff of Dr Mengele’s dreams.

 

Three miles away from the half-burned Cathedral of Notre Dame, a closed off blackened remnant of a dead civilisation, consecrated to the virgin who fled to Egypt to protect her baby, the killing of babies was celebrated into the night at the Eiffel Tower. Jubilations erupted around that great metal spike built “in gratitude”, as Eiffel himself put it, to the French Revolution and the modern age it inaugurated. Here, at this shrine to “progress”, people hugged each other and partied to honour their country for being partly defined by its commitment to the violent murder of human babies. https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/abortion-as-a-french-constitutional-right-a-christian-response/

But it is the closing words of his article where he calls for a rethink on political alliances that I want to emphasise here:

For the readers of The European Conservative, however, it is probably time to rethink what we mean by the current “emerging conservative alliances” — of which the National Conservatism movement and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), for example, have made much use. Open your eyes: in France, the so-called “far-right” Rassemblement National and Reconquête supported the constitutional enshrinement of abortion. If you are a Christian, then those parties are your enemies and should be condemned by you as such. After all, we cannot criticise the UK Conservative Party for all its progressivism and then support such parties on the Continent despite their progressivism. Those who traditionally called themselves “conservatives” are being made hypocrites by so-called “conservative parties”. A radical response is required — something quite different from that to which we’ve grown accustomed.

 

Conservative or “right-wing” politics cannot treat issues like abortion as “areas of reasonable disagreement”. If it is now somehow “conservative” to exercise indifference towards the killing of babies, or indeed to outright support such murder of the innocent, then to hell with conservatism — literally. Let me be clear: I would rather progressives increased their global usurpation until we are all living under a single tyranny of interminable “progress” than watch Christians support and advance the false witness of a pro-abortion political “Right”.

 

It grieves me to say it, for I was formed in the crucible of Burke, Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, Le Play, and other such critics of modernity who really believed that political successes were possible in the modern age. Indeed, I have always believed in throwing oneself into the political struggle, and that in the end conservatives may win out as modernity eats itself. But I now see more clearly than ever that the political changes we witness are mere intimations of a much deeper battle over the territory of the human heart, a conflict which rages on between the Principality of Satan and the Kingdom of Christ.

 

The conservative-liberal, Right-Left divide means almost nothing now. There are those in the Principality of Satan and those in the Kingdom of Christ, and that is now the only division that has satisfactory explanatory power. Of course, there are those who have yet to pick a side, but no one can remain neutral for long in such a conflict. As we come to realise that politics is no longer about the good of the polity, but is the mere expression of a battle between the children of Satan, who wage war on human nature, and those of the God who so loved human nature that he assumed it into his divine personhood, we will have to adopt a completely different approach to our engagement with the “political struggle”. It will likely mean not choosing to be campaigners and activists, but crusaders and martyrs.

Yes things are looking quite bleak in the West. For some time now I have been saying that conservative Christians cannot put any faith or hope in politics, in parties, and even in messianic leaders. The Liberals will not save us. The Republicans will not save us. Trump will not save us. Putin (as some conservatives foolishly think) will not save us. At the end of the day this really is a matter of God versus Satan. So forget about Republicans versus Democrats, etc.

This does NOT mean I am calling for a withdrawal from politics and the culture wars. I am simply saying that without a complete and total reliance on Christ and his Kingdom – perhaps more so than we ever have seen of late – thinking that we can somehow make much of a difference in this increasingly dark world will only be a fool’s dream.

[1695 words]

12 Replies to “France, Murder, and Human Rights”

  1. Imagine how the Hebrew felt under the lash of the Egyptians especially as they had known slavery for over 400 years. Many would have given up hope but the few kept their faith. God does not necessarily identify with religion but looks to the faith of everyone and in all generations. Those who lose faith also lose their soul. In Cecil B DeMille and his production of the Ten Commandments, a slave was mortally wounded by an Egyptian guard and Moses caught him as he was collapsing into the mud pit. The Hebrew lamented to Moses that God was closing his eyes for the last time without answering his prayer. Moses asked him what did you pray for? and the dying Hebrew answered -that God would allow me to see his redeemer before he died. The Hebrew did not know that the man who held him in his arms was God’s Messiah. The lesson is – never lose faith.
    John Abbott

  2. I am grieved that the France I have loved and visited often as a boy growing up in England has fallen as far as it has by enshrining in its constitution the supposed “right” to murder its unborn.
    “Let us abandon our embarrassment about giving to this epoch its proper name: the final reign of Satan,” writes the commentator, Sebastian Morello, in the First Things article from which you quote.

  3. Yes, thank you, Bill! What has happened in France is truly horrific and I mourn for the lives of precious unborn children that will be lost because of it. And as you said, the British Conservatives are heading the same way- I’ve heard that there’s going to be a free vote in the House of Commons over the decriminalisation of abortion too. There have always been radical libertarian elements in centre-right political parties that are opposed to social conservatism and the so-called nationalist conservatives are no better at all.

    Frankly, I’m not surprised to see that the ‘national conservatives’ in France voted for their radical constitutional vandalism and the addition of abortion as a ‘constitutional right.’ In New Zealand, our so-called ‘national conservatives’ in New Zealand First sacrificed any parliamentary opposition to the deathmongering End of Life Choices Bill by agreeing to put it to a referendum, which the pro-euthanasia libertarians won. The libertarian ACT Party similarly betrayed pro-lifers by voting en bloc for decriminalisation of abortion. When it comes to the culture of life in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the centre-right parties are completely undependable. The same contagion is spreading to the United Kingdom. And when was the last time you heard the Liberal/National Coalition speak out against abortion or euthanasia?

    True, there are individual MPs within both the centre-left and centre-right that happily buck the trend. And we should be thankful for that. I only wish they were more numerous, as they were forty to fifty years ago, but in order for that to happen, there would need to be a wide reaching cultural change in order for it to reach political fruition.

  4. Yes, politics lies downstream from culture Rhona, but culture lies downstream from religion. Unless there is a radical return to God and biblical Christianity – including heaven-sent revival – the West may well be on its last legs. While I will still keep fighting for life and other core goods, my main prayer is for God to break through our sin-soaked and blood-soaked lands.

  5. ‘All this makes a complete mockery of the French national motto of “Liberty, equality, fraternity”.”
    If I recall correctly, the original motto, from the dreadful French Revolutionary days, was actually the much more grim ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death’. And by death, they really mean death of anybody they find unacceptable, and indeed, they gleefully killed a lot of people then, including many Christian representatives which they viewed as enemies and obstacles to their plans. And now with this abortion law, modern France in some ways is being par the course with their original motto and its death intentions.
    Reportedly, surveys showed that over 8 out of 10 people in France support this abortion law (https://evangelicalfocus.com/europe/25717/french-evangelicals-lament-that-abortion-has-moved-from-being-an-exceptional-measure-to-the-top-of-norm-hierarchy). France has been sick ever since those Revolutionary days.

  6. Rhona MacKenzie (above) is entirely justified in having a low regard for right-of-centre political parties across the English-speaking world — and particularly in France after the horrific new abortion law there.

    These parties have betrayed the principles of what used to be Christian civilisation. They have surrendered to abhorrent ideologies and the Culture of Death.

    However, you remind us of an important point, Bill, that a God-sent Christian revival in the West is the essential pre-condition for any improvement in the political realm.

    Professing Christians should live their faith more authentically, e.g., study their Bibles, pray regularly and seek fellowship with other Christians.

    Politically, what can Christian voters do in the meantime?

    First, they must resist being seduced or bamboozled by pre-election political campaigns and advertising.

    Secondly, they should assess political candidates, not according to their party labels, but according to whether they are Christian or heathen.

    It’s as simple as that.

    And by ‘Christian’ I don’t mean parliamentary candidates who merely mouth Christian-sounding platitudes.

    To win my vote, a candidate must have a solid record of pro-life and pro-family advocacy.

  7. Yeah Bill – Physically – whoosy & dizzy with dismay – How my spirit grieves that cheering on of such a travesty – killing our beautiful, innocent generations-to-be. For the 1st time in my life (coming up 60yrs) – I have issues with my heart – (which is quite surprising seeing I’m in tip top shape) – I’m ready for whatever God has planned for my health. However, Spiritually I am rocked to the core by this precedent – this must decimate God’s heart SO greatly. Brothers & Sisters, I had to walk away from this article and come back to it – the evil we are seeing in these last days…..is beyond belief….And it’s not far from our shores – predominantly fallen Victoria.

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