January 11-17, 2009 Issue |
Posted 1/5/09 at 7:00 AM
America needs Henry Hyde, now more
than ever.
Pro-lifers suffered major defeats in
2008. The human tendency is to reject our opponents in anger. Our job is to do
what Hyde did. We must find away to reach out to opponents and save lives when
our movement has lost the position of power.
U.S. Rep. Hyde, R.-Ill., died in
November 2007 at age 83, after 32 years in Congress. Hyde’s signature pro-life
achievement is the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited the use of federal taxpayer
money for abortion. Before Hyde intervened, the federal government had financed
300,000 abortions. Afterwards, the number dropped to zero. The National Right
to Life Committee has estimated, conservatively, that the Hyde Amendment
prevented at least 1 million abortions.
Not only does that make him the
single most effective pro-life activist of our time — it may mean he has saved
more lives than any other individual in our time. About a million people are
breathing, working, laughing and living life today because of what Henry Hyde
did.
Amazingly, he passed the bill first
in 1976, with a pro-abortion president, Jimmy Carter, in office, and a
Democratic majority in Congress. With another pro-abortion president and
Democratic-majority Congress coming to Washington, we would do well to remember
what Hyde did, and follow Henry Hyde’s four rules for pro-lifers.
1. Don’t compromise on the right
to life. Ever.
Perhaps the best article on Hyde’s
pro-life legacy was Sheila Liagminus’ article in the Register. She quoted his
own self-assessment. “I did not come into politics with a great interest in the
rather heavy subject of values in public policy,” he wrote in 1985.
“Appropriately enough, the crisis of abortion introduced me to the crisis of
church and state.”
“Abortion was and is a technical,
emotional and controversial issue. It is what politicians call a ‘no win’ issue
— something that will make you enemies no matter what you do.”
He faced the no-win issue with
courage.
“The early fights for that amendment
were radical,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who, with others, such as Rep.
Chris Smith, R-N.J., are pro-life heirs to Hyde. “Hyde was the star, a
trailblazer. It’s tougher to blaze the trail than to follow on. Henry taught me
the lesson that some things are worth losing elections for, and life is one of
them.”
2. Respect, and work with, your
opposition.
Hyde was a man who knew that
respecting, and even befriending, your opponents is different from accepting
their positions.
It would have been impossible for
Hyde to fight the antagonistic coalition of the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and
others by denunciations alone, with congressional majorities against him.
Instead, he did what politicians do: He put together a rival coalition not of
pure pro-lifers, but of whomever he could get, and marshaled that coalition for
pro-life purposes.
President Bush summed up Hyde’s
high-road approach when he awarded the congressman the Medal of Freedom. “Henry
Hyde spoke of controversial matters with intellectual honesty and without
rancor,” said Bush. “He proved that a man can have firm convictions and be a favorite
of Democrats and Republicans alike.”
The Register story quoted Wayne
Andersen, who began working for Hyde in Illinois in 1971. “Look, he had to
persuade people to sign on to the Hyde Amendment who felt differently than he
did on the definition of life and personhood, from the very beginning stages,”
said Andersen. “He succeeded because he was extremely effective in his power of
persuasion.”
3. Support other pro-lifers.
If today’s pro-lifers can learn from
Henry Hyde what it means to “love your enemies,” we also need to learn from him
what it means to love our allies.
The Thomas More Society’s Tom
Brejcha described how Hyde intervened on behalf of fellow Chicagoan Joe
Scheidler, the bullhorn-bearing founder of the Pro-Life Action League.
“We were at a low point in the trial
of NOW v. Scheidler, the judge was
inhospitable to our advocacy, and Congressman Hyde came back to Chicago from
Washington to be a character witness for Joe,” Brejcha told the Register. “In
his testimony, Henry praised Scheidler’s courage, and said that if pro-lifers
had done similar work ‘at the entrance to Dachau and Auschwitz, there may have
been fewer people incinerated there.’ He was absolutely unflappable.”
A corollary of working with the
opposition is to not work against
one’s allies. Something is wrong with our priorities when we value our
differences more highly than the unity of our common cause.
4. Never give up.
Hyde didn’t live his whole life as a
saint, though both he and his wife died very close to the Church. But he shared
many of the political virtues that St. Thomas More, the patron saint of
politicians, is famous for. In the movie A Man for All Seasons, More
likes King Henry VIII as his friend and serves him as his king, even as he
opposes his schism. More stays faithful to his principles to the end, dying
“the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
Like More, Hyde died in the midst of
his political battle, never backing down from his convictions.
“The principles he fought for will
endure beyond his life on earth,” said Andersen. “He really made a difference.
There is no other American politician who has so successfully committed himself
to Catholic values. He always separated issues from people, and treated all
people with respect.”
We don’t have to be politicians to
imitate Henry Hyde. Every citizen in a democracy has a political role. We can
apply Hyde’s four rules in our efforts to contact our own representatives (see
VoteSmart.org), in our letters to our newspapers and comments on online forums,
and in our personal dealings with voters and potential voters. Polls show that
a majority of Americans have pro-life beliefs and don’t realize how far the
laws have gone. We can teach them.
Hyde himself summed up our vocation:
“God put us in the world to do noble things, to love and to cherish our fellow
human beings.”
May we do that as well as he did.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Make a Donation now!
Insightful. Informative. Uncompromisingly faithful. The National Catholic Register is more than a newspaper. It’s a cause. Your support for the Register funds important journalism that helps to build a Culture of Life in our nation, and throughout the world. Help us promote the Church’s New Evangelization by donating to the National Catholic Register right now.
.
