Prof. Hadley Arkes, writing in The Catholic Thing, explains "What Our 'Best Minds' Can't Understand" when it comes the principles—indeed, truths—underlying the pro-life cause. Some excerpts: "I’ve often used, as a model of principled reasoning, that fragment Lincoln wrote for himself, in which he imagined a conversation with an owner of slaves, putting the question of how that slavery could be justified. Was the slave less intelligent than the master? Well then the owner could be rightly enslaved by the next white man more intelligent than he. Was it color? The lighter skin having the right to enslave the darker? Beware again: he could rightly be enslaved by the next white man with a complexion even lighter than his own." "Some of us have used precisely the same mode of argument on abortion, in asking why the child in the womb is not protected by the law. And in the same way we discover that there is no 'principle' brought forth to justify the abortion that would not apply to many people walking about well outside the womb. The child is not wanted? By that measure we would have lost Joe Biden years ago. Would the child be dependent on the care of others? We don’t think people lose their human standing as they become dependent on the care of others." "We hear so much these days about 'polarization' in our politics. But the deeper polarization may involve the division, found in both parties, and marked by the deep erosion of those furnishings of mind of the people who would supply our 'political class.'" Read the whole piece here.