An Uncomfortable Truth

Megan, in discussing how stupid it is to tie abortion law to feelings, ends with a very libertarianish bit of dictum about how we don’t like the government to regulate things we “hold sacred.” I don’t really want to go too far into it, because there’s something great about just pondering this elegant throwaway line and seeing the implications unfold for yourself, but it strikes me that one such implication is the strange and tragic relationship between culture and politics…or between the State and the Sacred. [See Helen.] It may be that to hold things sacred at all, we must accept limits and failures in our ability to enforce our favored kinds of alleviation of suffering…whether that suffering happens to be that of a mother with an unwanted pregnancy or that of the fetus inside. Less than a claim to moral equivalency, this is a claim about the nature of morality in the context of the sacred. Uncomfortable, but we can’t always help what we wind up thinking about before breakfast, can we, now.