Consistent Right To Life Ethic

    Zeal for life is a divinely inspired grace. The channel of this grace's working is conscience-sensitive, and when offended, drives to defensive anger. Disrespect for life aroused Jesus' anger with the money-changers in the temple; money-changing religion desecrates life. Zeal for life goes to the essence of parental conscience, of man's respect for woman, of woman's respect for man, and for their mutual respect for the life they beget.
    The angry and uncompromising response of lay women and men to the sexual abuse by clergy is righteous because the abuse disrespects divine sensitivity for life at its incipient and essential base, the delicate love relationship between man and woman and their mutual responsibility to nurture, sustain and honor love, and least life. The chagrin, hurt and anger over the abortion of defenseless life are righteous, called-for and necessary. The seamless nature of love, life, and specifically, love for life, calls for righteous response. Response is honorable and righteous when it is authentic, not ideological (pretentious), when it is consistent, not selective. The selective focus on one aspect of right to life, in such a disproportionate way as to blind conscience toward other equally important aspects of life is inauthentic. Heresy is rightly described as "excessive zeal for one truth that violates other truths."
    Respect, zeal for life, must be a consistent ethic that is equally sensitive to all right-to-life causes, for the right to life of the unborn child, and for the right to life of the divine order by which life is nurtured, sustained and honored, namely, vital sexuality and life's global ecozoic network-the continuity basis of all life, the naturalis sacramentum ordinis that nurtures, sustains and honors life globally.
    It is inauthentic, for example, to be fanatical for one cause and blind to other right-to-life causes. Fidelity to Catholic theology's Consistent Life Ethic requires of each of us to have zeal also for the causes of clerical responsibility (sexual) for women and children and ecological responsibility toward network life, for in the ethic of proportionality, these right-to-life causes have moral standing with anti-abortion causes. Each requires equal conscience; their causes must be joined.