Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
~ from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats
When Yeats wrote this poem in 1921, he believed that the end of time as foretold in Revelation was drawing near, and he thought that humanity had reached a threatening state of transitory principles and values.
Oh dear. Whatever would he say in 2005?
Kathryn Jean Lopez takes the liberals to task in the National Review Online, pointing out the absurdity of requiring parental consent for teenagers using a tanning machine or taking Tylenol, but not for getting an abortion. Lopez hits the bull's eye on the left's true agenda:
At the heart of the yelling against a common-sense attempt to keep kids away from making such a grave decision without parental inclusion is the worry that guides a lot of the actions from the Left in America today: an opposition to anything that might in anyway restrict legal abortion in America.
Preserving totally unfettered access to abortion, by any female of any age, is a much higher priority for the lefties than either protecting children's welfare or defending parental rights.
It smacks of Communist Russia, this slinking behind a parent's back to further a political agenda at the expense of children--both teenaged and unborn. Certainly, the poet's "ceremony of innocence is drowned" by such tactics. To encourage a child in serious crisis, a pregnant teenager, to evade a parent's rightful authority is deceitful, irresponsible, selfish--it's wrong on so many levels that it becomes difficult to choose a single adjective.
Liberals may be "full of passionate intensity," but at what cost to our young people? Is this cold, court-sanctioned separation of the family the "rough beast, its hour come round at last" that Yeats warned was "slouching" our way?
How can parents fulfill their responsibilities towards their children if they are not made aware of such a crucial issue as a daughter's pregnancy? How can the law see fit to separate parent and child at such a critical time, when a child needs her parents and their guidance more than ever before?
"The falcon cannot hear the falconer..."
