Lies and the abortion president.

Every generation must sooner or later account for the lies it tells itself. Given that Baby Boomers have eluded themselves with more fibs, stretchers, whoppers and virulent deceptions than any generation in history, it is not surprising that the reckoning should be so powerfully humbling. It is powerful enough to bring low the president of the United States, currently the subject of a humiliating investigation into whether certain stains on a young woman's dress are his bodily fluids.

Only the facile or deluded will attribute Mr. Clinton's dilemma to a native inability to keep his trousers zipped in the presence of the opposite sex. The president's real problem seems much more his gullibility in believing the underlying deceits of this era: that human sexual behaviour is almost exclusively a means for momentary pleasure, and that lust can be cultivated or satiated without consequence.

Such pointed dogma is so central to Baby Boomer belief that even sexually politicized feminists insist Mr. Clinton must not be condemned for incontinence, even if it occurred with a young woman over whom he had phenomenal power.

Public opinion surveys show the great American public accpets this approach. A majority would fault the president only if liaisons with Monica Lewinsky led to telling lies after the fact.

The incoherence inherent in such a state of denial was typified in a recent Los Angeles Times article by law professor Stephen Gillers who argued--perhaps playing the Devil's Advocate--that Clinton might actually do more harm than good by admitting to such lies. "Clinton might figure the public actually needs his denial, even a denial it does not believe, to avoid having to deal with the fact that he lied under oath and to the public. A confession could burst that bubble."

This blindly overlooks the clear truth that the very act of adultery is itself a lie. If the American president has been adulterous, he has already been a liar. He has violated oaths far more important than those made to the amorphous body politic. He has shattered vows made to his own wife before God.

As our Catechism puts it so beautifully, conjugal love "sees to be definitive" (#1646) and it is not an arrangement made "until further notice." It "expresses constancy in keeping one's word. God is faithful. The Sacrament of Matrimony enables each man and woman to enter into Christ's fidelity for his Church. Through conjugal chastity, they bear witness to this mystery before the world." (#2365)

Here is the real bubble that would leave a mushroom cloud in its wake were it to be burst by a Clinton confession. It would unleash the scorching realization that lies only beget further lies, and that this holds as true collectively as it does individually. It would force recognition that Bill Clinton is merely a manifestation of the lies an entire generation has told itself; that his reckoning is its reckoning.

The importance of that reckoning would be its inescapable connection with Clinton as, above all things, the abortion president. No previous American leader, after all, has been such a fierce stalwart in the cause of killing the unborn. His administration has aggressively sought to stamp out all opposition to surgical death sentence for those in the womb. Infamously, Clinton himself has vetoed a ban on the gruesome practice of partial birth abortion.

If North Americans are obliged to look upon the U.S. President as the adulterer who lied to us about the very lies we've told ourselves, how could we possibly avoid confronting his--our--most vile prevarication of all?

That prevarication, of course, is the heart of the Baby Boomer pro-abortion position. It is the claim that human life can be justly terminated simply because its existence refutes our current generational fantasy of divorcing copulation from procreation, marriage from fidelity, physical from spiritual union.

In the wreckage of the Clinton presidency, then, may lie the opportunity to reckon with these and other mass hallucinations of the age. Even if the accounting does not come quite so soon, we can be assured it will certainly come later. And with a vengeance.

Peter Stockland, columnist for the Calgary Herald, writes regularly for Catholic Insight.