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KLUSENDORF TEACHES PRO-LIFE 101 AT U of M

When Scott Klusendorf addressed 35 college students at University of Maryland College Park October 25, he was "speaking to the choir."

These kids didn't need conversion; they were already pro-life. What they did need was a rousing course in pro-life apologetics, so they could spread the pro-life message in a sea of secular humanism.

Klusendorf's five-hour workshop gave it to them.

The College Park workshop capped off a four-day, Defend Life-sponsored tour that included talks at two churches and a shorter talk at the College Park campus, as well as presentations reaching at least a thousand students at Mount St. Joseph, Loyola and Calvert Hall high schools and Perry Hall Christian Academy.

Klusendorf, a 43-year-old evangelical who admitted with a grin that most of his pro-life audiences are Catholic ("They take it more seriously," he said), frequently had his young listeners roaring with laughter at his ready wit and apt mimicry (he did a dead-on imitation of California Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger).

But he had a serious message: The word "abortion" has lost a lot of meaning because our primary epistemology--the way we look at the world--today is through TV.

"TV has changed the way people think about the world and what they think about it," he declared. "People used to learn about the world through books and study. They could follow linear reasoning.

"But now there is a disconnect from their ability to follow a conclusion from a set of premises. America's ability to think logically has been destroyed by TV."

Therefore, if the pro-life message is going to get across, you can't just do it with words, he said. You must use visual images to reawaken moral sensibilities and "level the playing field."

Bringing the GAP display, which included large, graphic pictures of aborted babies, to College Park in September was "exactly the right thing to do," he said, "because showing the pictures starts the conversation going."

Pro-lifers are also confronting a post-modern culture in which there is no objective truth.

Klusendorf said he came up against this mindset at Mount St. Joseph High School when a student commented after his talk, "Everything is just a matter of opinion."

"I said, 'Is that true, or is that just your opinion?' He said, 'Touché.' He got it!"

Finally, said Scott, we are in a culture that wants difficult life problems to go away--in fact, people think they have a right for them to do so.

Scott stressed the importance of simplifying the issue of abortion to one question: What is the unborn?

"When we do not bring down the debate to one issue--when we let the opposition frame the issue around 'choice,' privacy, trusting women to make their own decisions--we lose," he said.

Klusendorf noted that evangelicals and Catholics can both get distracted from what should be their main focus, but in different ways.

Evangelicals have tended to equate the pro-life movement with evangelism.

"I think that is mistaken," he said bluntly; in the pro-life movement, "your primary mission is to save babies."

Catholics have missed the boat in two ways, he said: first, with the "seamless garment" concept, initiated by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, which holds that in order to be consistently pro-life, you must also be "pro-life" on a myriad of related issues, such as capital punishment, the exploitation of workers, health care, etc.

The concept trivializes the issue of abortion and allows voters to vote for a pro-abortion politician because he is "pro-life" on other issues.

The second mistake pro-life Catholics make is allowing themselves to be sidetracked by their opponents on the issue of contraception.

Scott urged his listeners that if they are debating and someone says, "What is your position on contraception?" they should reply, "I am not here tonight to argue against any birth control that doesn't take the life of a child once it's begun."

He said that our pro-life argument can be summed up as: "From the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living and whole human beings."

Klusendorf expanded on this central theme with down-to-earth, practical responses to the usual pro-abortion claims.      He noted that many people that attack pro-life positions make assertions, not arguments.

"They can't refute your claim simply by making a counter-claim," he explained. "They must present evidence; the burden of proof is on them. Your response to their assertions should be, 'Why should I believe that?'"

At his earlier College Park talk, for example, a student said that embryos are not persons because they are not conscious or self-aware.

"He made a claim, so he bore the burden of proof. I said, 'Tell me, why does consciousness matter?' He didn't have any reasons."

Scott also warned the students not to fall into the trap of defending themselves against ad hominem attacks.

"When someone says, 'How many unwanted children have you adopted?' you should say, "You're right, I'm a callous conservative and I don't care a rip about babies once they're born. But how does my unwillingness to adopt a child justify an abortionist's killing them?'

"What makes a fetus human is not my behavior but the evidence," he concluded.

"Don't take what you learned today and just sit on it," Klusendorf urged the collegians.

If they give the presentation that he had outlined before 100 Catholic young people, because Catholics and evangelicals have abortions at the same rate as the general population, "you can save the lives of 15 or 20 children," he predicted.

A summary of Scott's presentation can be found at www.str.org, under "Bioethics Articles by Scott Klusendorf"; go to the link, "Abortion, Research Cloning and Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Knowing Right from Wrong."