Dropping Bombs is Not the Same as Dismembering Babies

This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.

Let’s talk about war without talking about war. Hello friends, welcome to The Case for Life podcast. I’m your host Scott Klusendorf. Before we go any further, I want to ask you to do two things. Number one, hit that like button on social media. It’s important to share this podcast with friends and other people you know who can benefit from this pro-life content. I also want to remind you that we have a course out called Prolife 101 where in just 7 days you can equip yourself to be persuasive in your pro-life convictions.

We want you to take advantage of that. So see our social media sites for information on that. Now, everywhere in the news right now, there’s only one headline that matters, and you’ve all seen it, and that has to do with the US bombing nuclear sites in Iran. And all over the press, you’ve got the left-wing pundits saying, “Oh, this is plunging us into World War II.” You’ve got some Christians saying, “Oh, wow. This is proof that we are on the verge of the end of the world.

Christ is coming back in five minutes and you got all kinds of crazy esquetology going on. But you also have something else going on and that is people that want to use this to discredit the pro-life cause and their objection goes like this. They’ll say, “Well, you’re pro-life. You claim you claim to be against all killing and yet you’re supporting this war.” Now, we can debate whether this is a war. I don’t think it is. I think it was a strategic, very targeted, very narrowly defined military action designed to take out a nuclear threat.

There were no civilian target targets involved. There weren’t ground troops involved, but that’s a different debate. I don’t want to talk about war per se. What I want to talk about is this. If you are pro-life and you support some wars, does that make you inconsistent? And of course, there are journalists all over the place willing to say that. Just pick up a newspaper and you’ll see that. But I’m going to argue today that one, it’s completely beside the point to raise this objection as it relates to abortion.

And number two, no, it does not make you inconsistent. So, let’s start with first things first. And again, this is something we teach you very early in the pro-life 101 course. The three most important words in defending your pro-life view. Always have been, always will be syllogism. Because once you clearly define your pro-life argument, when people try to change the subject, as they inevitably will do, you just bring them back to what you argued and say, “Now, how does your objection refute what I just argued?” So, let’s look at this military action in Iran that just happened.

Suppose your critic says to you, “Oh, there you go. You’re supposed to be against all acts of violence, all killing, and yet you’re supporting this military action. There goes your whole case. Now, what I like to do when people engage in what are called ad homonym attacks, that’s where they attack the person rather than the argument, is to look them square in the eye and say, “You know what? Maybe you’re right. I’m the worst person in the world. I support war yet I’m against abortion.

I’m not only the worst person in the world, I am inconsistent and I’m just not credible on that. Okay, let’s grant that. I’m that bad. How does your objection, even if true, refute my case that abortion is wrong? In other words, suppose I am a bad person. I don’t live out what I claim to believe. How does that disprove the humanity of the unborn? Or somehow make abortion okay. And the answer of course is it doesn’t. So the objection is entirely beside the point, but people will bring it up nonetheless.

And the reason we tell you to stick to a syllogism, and we’re never going to tire of telling you this, so just even if you go, I’, oh, I’ve heard this before. Well, too bad. You can never hear it enough because time and time again I hear proifers get sidetracked chasing these rabbit trails that are nothing more than personal attacks. Stick to the main thing. All right. I’m a terrible person. You’ve made your point. I’ll agree with you. And by the way, as a Christian, I’m probably far worse than you imagine because my standard for what makes me a good person is actually different than yours.

And the standard that I’m judged by is far more stringent than the one you would put me up against. As a Christian, I have to be perfect to meet the standard of God’s righteousness. And I don’t come anywhere close. The only way I get into heaven is because I’m judged by Christ’s merits, not my own. But say it’s true. I’m really as bad as you say. And I could always argue I’m worse than you say. But my argument could still be a good one.

Because arguments stand or fall on their merits, not the person making them. A point we come back to again and again on this show. And we’re never going to tire of telling you this because it seems to be the number one thing that trips up pro-lifers. I mean, I just look at the comments I get, people that write me and say, “Well, how do I answer somebody that says I hate women? Who says, I support capital punishment. Therefore, my whole case against abortion is is no good.

Or who says, hey, you’re not standing with the protesters in LA and Denver and Seattle who are opposing ICE agents. Therefore, you really don’t care about humanity. You just care about American fetuses. And I get these desperate emails from people wanting to know, “What’s my oneline combat or comeback?” Well, they’ve already bit the hook. They’ve accepted the premise that the argument is about them. Let me make this very very clear. The debate over abortion is never about you. It’s not about them.

It’s about one question. Who has the better argument? And who has the better argument comes down to this. Who has made a case? Number one. Number two, who has done the better job supporting their case? Everything else is a distraction and completely beside the point. So, let’s talk about this. Are you actually inconsistent if you oppose abortion but support some instances of war? And the answer is no. And this is where our Catholic friends make a very helpful distinction that pro-lifers would do well to learn from.

And that distinction is this. Catholic moral theologians draw a distinction between intrinsic evils and contingent ones. And I think this is very helpful for us to make sense of things like war and how it might differ from something like abortion. In Catholic theology, an intrinsic evil is something that is wrong on the face of it. For example, things like rape, murder, torturing toddlers, spousal abuse, things like that are never going to be justified. They are wrong on the face of it.

You don’t need an argument to show they’re wrong. We know this intuitively. It’s selfevidently the case that these things are wrong. And if something is a contingent evil, it must always be opposed. No question about it. There are, however, other kinds of evils that we call contingent evils. An intrinsic evil is always wrong. A contingent evil might be wrong, but we’ve got to look at factors like circumstances, like what is the context involved? Then we make a decision about whether it’s right or wrong.

So, for example, was it an intrinsic evil or a contingent evil for Hitler to intentionally bomb central London for the purpose of trying to kill as many children and civilians as he could to bring terror into the hearts of the Brits during the London Blitz of 1940 and ongoing? And of course the answer there is yes. That was an obvious evil because the intent there was to kill civilians and to win the war with an act of terror essentially. But could there be other wars that are not on that same plane?

And the answer is yes. For example, what about a war where a country has attacked an otherwise peaceful lawabiding country? A country that is not harming anybody else, but an invader comes with the intent to take their resources, enslave their people. If the defending country declares war on the invasion force, have they committed the same wrong as Hitler in bombing London? Obviously not. In other words, in acting to defend themselves, they do acts that are consistent with being at war. Shooting people, killing enemy soldiers, and what have you.

But it’s not the same. And here’s why. With a contingent evil, you may foresee that there will be things that are done that you don’t desire, like civilians being killed, but you don’t intend their death. For example, if you bomb a military target and your intention is to take out a nuke site like what we just did in Iran, the intent there was to take out the three leading nuclear producing facilities that Iran has, which by the way they have threatened again and again and again to use to wreak terror on Western countries.

Okay? They’ve not been secret about this. Iran has been very clear that not only do they want death to America, and they say that virtually every time they get a chance to open their mouths, the ruling elites in Iran, driven by really bad worldview, we might add, are determined to upend the Western world as we know it. That’s their stated goal. And that’s not debatable. It’s evident to anybody who has ever listened to these people for more than five seconds. And I think that people like Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State, and others are right to call them barbaric animals.

That’s what they are in terms of their moral compass. Now, is acting to remove a nuclear option for people sworn to destroy your own country the same as intentionally landgrabbing a nation, subjecting its population to slavery to you and you know taking all its resources by force simply so you can enrich your own country. And if you think those two are morally parallel, you clearly are not making good distinctions between contingent evils and intrinsic ones. If I’m acting to destroy a country just for my own purpose and for my own benefit and I have no threat from them coming my way and they are behaving themselves, they’re living their lives as they want to live them and I am not threatened by them.

But yet I take them over just to get something I want and their government stands in the way of that. Well, then you can make an argument that’s unjust and that would be a wrong way to commit war. But not all wars are the same. And so for the critic of the pro-life view to say, “Oh, you’re against all killing, therefore you should oppose all wars. If you think abortion is a fundamental wrong, how come you don’t think war is a fundamental wrong?

So again, the first step is to point out even if you are that bad, it doesn’t refute your pro-life syllogism that it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. All it does is make the argument about you, which is a non-starter. Because even if you are the worst person in the world, even if the attack against you is true, it does not refute the argument you’re putting forward, that argument stands on its merits, not you, the person making the argument.

But then you point out that they are failing to distinguish between contingent evils that we must that we that may be wrong based on context and intrinsic evils that are wrong on the face of it. Things like rape, murder, attacking another nation just to get their resources and enslave their populations, for example. So, it’s the failure to think clearly here that trips a lot of proiffers up when critics try to muddy the waters with these broadside attacks that do nothing to refute the truth of the pro-life position or establish that abortion is somehow okay.

It does none of the none of that. All it does is try to make the pro-lifer look bad without doing the hard work of refuting the pro-life argument. Now, we’re going to take a break in just a minute. When we come back, you might be surprised to hear this, but pro-lifers sometimes make them the same mistake when they attack the character of abortion advocates rather than sticking to the argument. I’m going to talk about that when we come back. We’ll see you on the other side of the break.

Welcome back everyone. Delighted to have you with us. Just before the break, I talked about ways pro-lifers mistakenly attack the character of their opponents and we shouldn’t be doing that. So, I’m going to talk about that, but just a moment before we do, one way you can guard yourself against bad arguments is to take our course that we’re offering called Pro-life 101. In just one week, you’ll be adept at recognizing the facious arguments put forward by opponents of the pro-life view, and you’ll learn to avoid making those same kinds of arguments yourself.

Now, before the break again, we talked about the ways pro-lifers can sometimes engage in this practice of attacking the person rather than dealing with the argument or distracting people from what the real issue is. Let me give you the one that really gets under my skin. And if I had a way to write a $5,000 check so pro-lifers would never use it again, I’d write that check right now. Here’s the argument I hear again and again from pro-lifers. And sometimes, quite frankly, it’s almost obnoxious.

I’ll finish a pro-life talk and somebody will come up to me and say, “Why didn’t you use the most powerful pro-life argument?” Oh, what’s that? I’d love to hear it. And here’s what they tell me. You didn’t mention that Margaret Sanger was a racist and that Planned Parenthood is in the business of setting up clinics in minority towns and in districts throughout the country where there’s a vast majority of blacks and other non-white people. You didn’t even mention that. You know what?

You’re right. I didn’t. And I did that intentionally because it’s a very bad argument. Let’s look at this for a moment. Let’s suppose Margaret Sanger was the devil incarnate. And you could make a pretty good argument. She’s going to go down in history as being one of the most evil people to ever exist. I completely agree with that. But suppose she’s that bad. She’s the worst person in the world. She’s a racist. She hates minorities. She wants to kill black babies.

And she’s in the business of trying to get society driven by eugenics to eliminate the black race. Now, I happen to believe that she wanted to do that. Her writings make that abundantly clear. However, when you’re talking to somebody about the rightness or wrongness of abortion, the fact that that Margaret Sanger was a racist does nothing to establish the truth or validity of your pro-life argument and does nothing to refute their position that abortion is morally permissible. Could abortion still be morally permissible even if Margaret Sanger was a racist?

The answer is yes. For example, I think capitalism is the most humane and profitable way to launch and establish a nation’s economy. It does the best job at creating wealth, the best job of lifting the poor out of poverty. But there were a lot of capitalists who were kind of shady in their character if you want to get right down to it. Some of the leading people of America’s guilded age, the people that were responsible for building wealth and h helping the country get established economically were not always the greatest moral heroes if you look at their personal lives.

However, it doesn’t follow that their arguments for capitalism as the most profitable and humane way to lift the poor out of poverty were wrong. It just means they did not live consistent with a lot of what they espoused. But it doesn’t make the case for capitalism any less weak or any I shouldn’t say it doesn’t make the ca case for capitalism weak by pointing out their character flaws because the case for capitalism stands on its merits just like the case for the pro-life view stands on its merits or the case for the pro-abortion view.

The case for abortion stands or falls on its merits, just like our case stands or falls on its merits. You can attack the character of people all day long and get absolutely nowhere in advancing the legitimization of the behavior you’re trying to espouse for. So I think pro-lifers, the number one thing we need to always do is remember that less is more. Keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is this. What is the unborn? If the unborn are human beings, is it okay to intentionally kill them to make it easier for someone else?

That’s the moral issue. Everything comes back to what is the unborn? People bring up economic hardship, for example. Well, there’s a poor woman and she can’t afford another child. Okay? Would anybody argue that way if we were talking about killing three year olds or five year olds? No, they only argue that way with the unborn because they’re assuming the unborn aren’t human. We saw this a couple of weeks ago when NT Wright, the famous theologian, was making arguments in favor of abortion where he simply would assume the unborn weren’t human.

He didn’t argue for it. He just assumed it. For example, he said, “Well, it’s probably not a good idea to have men in the Catholic Church telling women what they ought to do.” Well, would he argue that way if he was talking about mothers who wanted to kill their six-year-olds? No. He only argued that way with the unborn because he was making an assumption in his argument that the unborn were not human. Something he never really argued for. He later asserted that it was viability that gives us value and a right to life, but he presented no argument for that.

He just asserted it. But really what he tried to do is justify his willingness to permit abortion by attacking men in the Catholic Church that somehow they weren’t in a position to be telling a woman what was right or wrong. Okay, that that’s just utterly facious. But again, this is what we see when people make the argument about people involved rather than the more abstract and important point. Is this argument valid and sound? Is it a good argument? That’s the question, not who are the people making the argument?

But this is such a temptation that even proifers fall into it. And I really wish they wouldn’t. And you see it also when people on the pro-life side get defensive. They say, “Well, you know, our critics say that we only care about life in the womb.” So, we need to prove to them that we actually are broader than that. Why? We care about the poor. We care about that woman after she has a baby. We care about all life, not just unborn life.

And we need to make that case to the public. And if we do, they’ll come around to our point of view. Let me make something very clear to you. No, they won’t. I can say this 100% of the time I have ever asked a critic who says, “Oh, if you’re really pro-life, what are you doing about poverty? What are you doing about ending gang violence? What are you doing about helping inner city moms? What are you doing about immigrants? What are you doing to help refugees?” And they go through a whole laundry list.

And I’ll sit there and I’ll listen patiently. And when they get done emoting all their lists of stuff that I have to do simply because I oppose the intentional killing of an innocent human being in the womb, they assume from that I got to fix everything. When I get done listening to their diet tribe, I very calmly look at them and say, “Okay, I will do everything you demand I do. I will fix everything wrong with society and use my scarce pro-life resources to do it.

Will you now join me in opposing abortion? The answer 100% of the time with absolute certainty is no, I will not because abortion is a fundamental right for a woman and you’re just a mean person to want to take it away. In other words, they brought up all these other issues when they’re totally beside the point. Their real position is they are committed to abortion wholesale and they’re not about to change their mind. And you changing your behavior thinking that’s going to win them over on the argument is pure fantasy.

And I wish our leaders on our side of the issue would understand this. These people are not going to like you. And even if they did like you more, it doesn’t mean they’re going to change their minds. I have watched pro-life leaders talk about how great it is that they have developed friendships with people on the other side and they start referring to their pro-choice friend Gail or Mary or whoever or Bill. And look, I’m okay with saying be civil. Try to have reasonable discussions with people.

I’m all in on that. I don’t think we should be jerks. But I’m here to tell you something. Just building a friendship is not necessarily going to change that person. And in fact, most cases where I’ve seen this done, it doesn’t change. You know why I’m friendly to critics? Because the Bible tells me I should be as a Christian. I am to love my enemies. I am to be of good character above reproach and how I deal with people. That’s why I try to be a gracious ambassador.

It’s why I don’t think we should be unduly offensive. However, if you think you’re going to get the other side to like you just because you cave into all their demands and you take on all the laundry lists they give you of things you have to do, you’re living in a dream world. I mean, think about how morally corrupt you must be to say to yourself, you know, I’m not going to oppose the intentional killing of innocent human beings until people defending those humans do this, and this.

And maybe if they do all that, I will agree that we shouldn’t be killing innocent human beings. If that’s your moral compass, you’re sick in the head. And you’re not going to come our way just because pro-lifers appear more likable. Can we get over this insane and misguided idea that we need to be liked and that we have to be so nice that we betray our convictions? No. Let’s realize we are in a war of ideas, a battle of ideas, and we are not going to be liked by the people opposing us.

They have a demonic fixation on killing children in the womb. Most of them do. And the activists who are most outspoken are not people we’re going to win over by being somehow champions for their causes. Give that up. The arguments always come down to who’s got the better evidence, who’s got the better case. They do not come down to who is more likable. Now, again, do all you can to be likable, but don’t be so likable that you give up your principles and the persuasive arguments you have at your side.

You should use those arguments. And that’s why I want to remind you again as we wrap up today, don’t forget our course, Prolife 101. In just one week, you will be equipped to be a persuasive ambassador for Christ. And you won’t fall for all these distractions that people want to throw at you, both from the other side and sadly some from our own. So we want to keep you focused. Less is more in a post Roie Wade world. Keep the main thing the main thing.

The main thing is the pro-life argument. That’s what we need to focus on. Thanks for joining us today. I look forward to see you the next time.