Who Really Cares About the Sanctity of Life?

People love to argue with each other. Even those who claim to hate arguments will dive into one if it is over “something that matters.” Everyone wants to be a champion of a noble cause. No one wants to be on the wrong side of history.

The truth is,most of us are on the same page. Just about everyone I’ve ever met is for good things and against bad things. But being on the same page is neither fun nor exciting. Agreement provides no opportunity to think you are better than other people. And so we all end up arguing about the same things from different perspectives, constantly one-upping and condemning one another, and no one ever gets anywhere.

Two topics have reigned supreme in the public discourse for as long as I can remember. These topics are both so artificially controversial that just mentioning either of them will invoke the ire of everyone in the room. No matter where you go in the United States, someone will want to yell at you about abortion, and it is boring. At the same time, you can’t really go anywhere without someone wanting to lecture about gun control, and that is also boring.

Gun control and abortion are omnipresent things that everyone wants to argue about. And yet no one seems to realize that the people who are against guns, and the people who are against abortion, are really both for the same thing. Both sides really care about the Sanctity of Life. They believe life is sacred, and ought to be protected at all costs.

It is a complex issue, but if you ask people why they are against abortion, most of them will say they don’t believe in killing. Gun control is also a complex issue, but if you ask most people why they are against guns, they would say it is because they are against killing.

People are against abortion because they are pro-life. But people are also against guns essentially because they are pro-life. Apparently life is a wonderful thing that everybody is in support of. It’s curious, though, that you rarely see an anti-abortion activist who also wants to get rid of guns. And you never see a gun control advocate who also wants to ban abortions.

If the sanctity of life is really so important to these people, then shouldn’t they all be against all forms of killing?

There is an easy solution to these problems. If we care about life then we should ban guns, sure, but we should also ban abortions. If we really care about life then we should ban abortions ,but we should also ban guns. It is like a Solomonic test to see if people value life, or if what they really value is rhetorical positioning.

At the very least, everyone can agree and bond over how much they hate me and my stupid, horrible, tyrannical, cis-normative, out-of-touch ideas.