Pro What Now?
Susan Pace Hamill is a professor of Law at the University Of Alabama School Of Law. She has written copiously about tax policies in Alabama and given interviews with titles such as What Would Jesus Tax. While I am not Christian nor particularly religious in the traditional sense, I whole heartedly agree with her claim that tax policies are rarely grounded in our moral beliefs. Though she writes primarily about the tax policies of Alabama State, her message applies to all states and to the country as a whole.
I was inspired in particular by a recent article she wrote criticizing Alabamans for being lazy about their pro-life beliefs. Having read the article it is not a far stretch to conclude that when Alabamans say they are pro-life, what they really mean is that they are anti-abortion. If you listened to this past Easter Sunday’s Meet the Press you heard Sister Joan Chittister criticizing those who claim to be pro-life as being pro-birth. If you consider the entirely of life, the left wing vegan nuts who break into alpaca farms, sit around in trees, marry their best friends and protest war and poverty are the real pro-lifers. A truly pro-life country would have no death penalty, never launch a pre-emptive war, safe-guard the nation’s wild-life, and spend its riches on ensuring that every life had a fair chance at liberty and happiness.
It quickly becomes apparent that those who so often claim to be pro-life are really just anti-abortion and are using the word ‘life’ to frame the debate. The opposite of pro-life is not pro-choice, but rather pro-death and pro-choice is not the same as pro-abortion. Very few believe in abortions but unlike idealistic anti-abortionists who claim themselves pro-life, pro-choice groups live in the real world. The way to reduce abortions (something we can all agree on) is to treat the causes of unwanted pregnancies and to realize that sometimes the most inhumane thing to do is force an unwanted pregnancy to completion. The abortion debate needs to be split and reframed: there are those who believe in creating even the cruelest of lives at any cost and those who believe we should make the most of the lives we have.
To Susan Hamill’s point, we should be talking about how our policies (both taxes and otherwise) help us as a nation make the most of our 295 million lives and the world’s 6.5 billion lives.