Just over a week ago, I spoke at the annual convention — their 50th year — of Massachusetts Citizens for Life in Worcester. At some point in my remarks I implored people to be super and hyper sensitive about people’s pain. (I ditched my prepared notes, and I’m fairly certain I used both adjectives.) There are many wounds and confusion that lead to the point where someone finds herself advocating expanded abortion — or even is screaming at you for praying outside an abortion clinic.
I was grateful to a man who came up to me after and disagreed with me. He said, among other things: “They wouldn’t do the same for us.” Even as he said that, I didn’t get the impression he was being cruel, a curmudgeon, or otherwise dismissive of suffering.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that in recent days. Was it my use of the word “sensitive” that made him recoil? “Compassion” doesn’t suggest being drawn to timidity.
In some ways, I think Mary Eberstadt’s piece in the Wall Street Journal about why she is not speaking at Furman University in South Carolina today captures the wisdom of what the man was communicating to me. He wasn’t being callous. He was acknowledging what Fran Maier captures in the title of his review of Mary Eberstadt’s latest book, Adam and Eve After the Pill Revisited, in First Things: that there is a “New Intolerance.”
I still think it’s necessary to have a deep well of compassion for all the hurt that surrounds the most contentious issues in our society — which usually happen to be the most intimate. Mary has written about how the sexual revolution was akin to the Soviet threat in terms of how it radically shifted things. So maybe there’s a new “trust, but verify” that comes with it. That’s what Mary wound up doing at Furman — finding out what ignorant hostility she was going to be facing, and prudently choosing not to go and be bullied or worse (all the while having copies of the book she had been asked to speak on — Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics — being sent to campus, should any students or staff have an interest in what she has to say).