Building consensus on life

It's unusual for a newsman to offer up a diatribe on the sanctity of life.

Yet, today, as we mark the 37th anniversary of the most ill-conceived and most politicized Supreme Court decision in the history of our republic, I feel compelled to speak out again.

Any society, if it is to remain a self-governing, free and cohesive one, must have consensus on some foundational issues.

Our founders understood this. In fact, they knew well that slavery was an issue causing so much division within the early republic that it could well tear the nation apart – as it did in an internecine war that would be the bloodiest in which Americans ever fought.

From the beginning, however, there was a consensus on the sanctity of life.

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It was written into the Declaration of Independence and, in a way, less directly, yet still clearly, into the Constitution of the United States.

Only when America began to lose its moral bearings did the idea that people had an inherent right to kill their unborn offspring and others who couldn't speak for themselves begin to emerge and even dominate our society.

Today, I am considered some kind of fanatic within my own profession because of my outspokenness about the sanctity of life.

Yet, child sacrifice, whether performed in the name of Baal or to the gods of feminism, political correctness, convenience or the "right to choose," is wrong, immoral, evil and sinful. It always was and it always will be.

On that principle, Americans need to rebuild a consensus.

Without some media support, that will be difficult.

It might surprise some that many of the greatest newspapers in America were founded on Christian principles. After the American Revolution, Christians dominated U.S. journalism, and their worldview characterized many major American newspapers. What was the largest circulation weekly in 1830? The New York Christian Advocate.

What were newspapers like in those days? Three-quarters of all material in papers at that time was religious, theological, ethical and devotional. And, in the early 19th century, New York City alone boasted 52 magazines and newspapers that called themselves Christian. Between 1825 and 1845, more than 100 cities and towns in America had explicitly Christian newspapers.

It might also shock the guardians of moral relativism in today's press to learn that the New York Times, perhaps the most liberal, secular voice of the establishment, made a name for itself in the mid-1850s as a Christian newspaper that crusaded against abortion – not legal abortion, by the way, which would have been unthinkable at the time, but against the back-alley illegal abortion industry of the day.

From 1987 through 1992, I served as editor in chief of two daily newspapers in California that became, under my leadership, avowedly pro-life.

From the reaction of colleagues across the country, you would have thought these newspapers had taken a position that the world was flat. One prominent San Francisco radio talk-show host railed against me night after night with the most vicious kinds of character assassination. (Parenthetically, he later was fired for trafficking in child pornography.) On the other side of the continent, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz took it upon himself to expose this grievous breach of journalistic propriety. The Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco papers conducted newspaper show trials of my work, ensuring that I would never again be hired for any position of responsibility within the so-called "mainstream media."

So, in 1997, with the advent of the Internet, I determined that I would launch a different kind of news organization to compete with the guardians of political correctness – one that was, again, unashamedly pro-life in its worldview.

WorldNetDaily.com quickly became the largest independent news source on the Internet – and remains so today, 13 years later.

Today, because of WND and the blogosphere it helped to inspire, pro-life voices as diverse as Ann Coulter, Alan Keyes, Molotov Mitchell, Jill Stanek and Nat Hentoff have platforms reaching millions of Americans and others in every country in the world. Meanwhile, those old-line media establishments that sought to silence the voices of reason and morality are facing extinction like dinosaurs.

There's much work to be done in rebuilding the pro-life consensus.

It needs to be done throughout all the cultural institutions – the schools, the major foundations, the entertainment industry, even the churches.

I believe, deep in their hearts, everyone knows that killing innocent babies is wrong. God has given each of us a conscience. Those who want to see an end to the bloodshed and the holocaust we have witnessed since Roe v. Wade need to stand up and prick that conscience with clear and loud voices.