OTTAWA, May 20, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Popular blogger Matt Walsh called on young people to be warriors for truth in a rousing, powerful speech at the National March for Life Youth Banquet in Ottawa last week. The event is co-organized by Niagara Region Right to Life and Campaign Life Coalition.
Abortion is the ultimate destroyer of families, Walsh said, and youth, who have historically led revolutions and been a great force for good, have a responsibility to fight on behalf of life and family.
“Abortion is ground zero of the culture war,” Walsh told nearly a thousand teens. “The institution of the family is built on two people—the man and the woman, husband and wife—and pro-aborts are attempting to eradicate manhood and womanhood, thereby destroying the life giving and life affirming bond of the family. From life giving to life taking.”
Abortion tells women “death and destruction empowers them,” Walsh said, when the reality is the power to conceive and bear life is the “greatest power” any human has.
It is the pro-life movement, not abortion advocates, who understand and appreciate the “unique characteristics of womanhood and manhood,” Walsh said. “Pro-aborts are experts in womanhood the same way an arsonist is an expert in architecture. He knows how to burn it down, and that's all he's interested in doing.”
Abortion destroys womanhood and manhood by making women the opposite of genuinely feminine and men the opposite of genuinely masculine, Walsh said. Abortion doesn’t allow women to be merciful, compassionate, or nurturing, nor does it allow men to be just, protective, or display moral leadership. Through abortion, he said, women have lost their roles as women and men have lost their roles as men—roles that “mean something” and contribute to society and families.
“We call ours the culture of death because our culture's dominant ideology, Liberalism, is, in the end, a death cult,” said Walsh. He suggested “liberalism” be called “secular Satanism” “because that’s truly the most accurate and coherent way to describe it.”
“I don't know how much fun we will have as the faithful remnant in a godless world, … but I know we will have hope. As long as even one person will hold the flag of truth and life and defend it with everything they have, no matter the cost, then truth is still alive, and there is light, however dim.”
“The whole religion and ideology of Satanism…was born when Satan himself turned from God and said, ‘I will not serve’—and what better and more profound way for humans to reinforce that point than to ritualistically massacre His most vulnerable and precious children?” asked Walsh.
He dismantled common pro-abortion arguments for “bodily autonomy” by citing many of the ways in which parents’ bodies are used to help born children, like breastfeeding, carrying them around when they get tired, and waking up in the middle of the night.
“An argument for absolute bodily autonomy means that it can't be illegal, or considered immoral, for a parent to decline to do any of these things, so long as their decision was made in the name of bodily autonomy,” Walsh explained.
He stressed both the centrality of the abortion issue to winning cultural battles and the importance of recognizing its connectivity to other injustices and moral problems.
“I'm a big believer that, although there's nothing wrong with concentrating intently on abortion itself, we cut ourselves off at the knees if we don't extend the pro-life principle to every issue,” said Walsh. He highlighted pornography because it violates the dignity of the human person, and same-sex “marriage” because it “violates the sanctity of the family and marriage.”
“Pro-life is an absolute declaration,” he said. “It is not something that can be parsed and divided and sectioned off. We are pro-life wholly, or not at all. And the world, I believe, needs us to be pro-life wholly.”
Walsh offered a sobering message to the teens that our culture is heading in an increasingly dark direction and that few are willing to live as outcasts for the sake of the truth about life and family.
Our parents’ generation “handed us a world on fire,” and a “losing battle”—at least for now—against powerful forces of evil, Walsh said, but the millennial generation has an obligation to fight.
“I don't know how much fun we will have as the faithful remnant in a godless world, as warriors for life in a culture of death, as sore thumbs in a land of collectivists, but I know we will have hope,” he said. “As long as even one person will hold the flag of truth and life and defend it with everything they have, no matter the cost, then truth is still alive, and there is light, however dim.”