There is no “Culture of Life”

Neither the right or the left actually believes in life, as an overriding goal above all else. Both sides believe in some lives and not others.

In this post, I’m making many broad and extreme statements to illustrate my point, which is that there is no such thing as a culture of life or a love of death in the ideological spectrum of left and right. I know that these statements can be picked apart and debated, and feel free to do so. But I’m making them because I am so tired of hearing this culture of life b.s. when it is simply not true.

The right cares about some lives. They don’t care about the lives lost when they make cuts to Medicaid. They don’t care about lives lost due to exposure or illness when they reduce homeless programs. They don’t care about lives lost due to war. They see them as necessary evils, losses to be expected, broken eggs in the making of an omelet.

There may be very good reasons the right does some of things they do. I too would like to see communities rather than governments deal with their homeless problems. And I am a person who understands that lives get damaged or lost in making great changes. I’m no peacenik who thinks military action is always wrong. There are decisions that have to be made for the greatest good and some will suffer along the way. I don’t often agree that the approaches they are taking are the right ones, but I don’t slap them with a culture of death label, either.

There are good reasons the left supports the causes we do. The left understands that lives get lost in some situations. The Terri Schiavo case: It was more important to uphold the rule of law, the separation of powers, and a person’s right to choose than it was to save one life, especially a life of that quality. We on the left understand that there will be women who are irresponsible about their reproductive choices and use abortion as some form of birth control. We are willing to allow a minority of people to do that to serve the greater cause of preserving women’s rights over their (our) bodies.

Neither side is—or can be—supporting a “culture of life.” That’s too broad, and no one truly practices it. So can we please drop that stupid statement? No one is “right-to-life.” We are in favor of the rights of some lives (hopefully most) in some situations depending on what we need to do right now to get to the next stage in our development.