Columba's Anglican Pulpit: THE GREATEST PROTEST SONG EVER

This morning was received an e-mail flyer from the leftist magazine The Nation asking "What was the greatest protest song ever?" Well, since they asked, Here's the answer:

The best protest song ever was Seals & Crofts' "Unborn Child," proclaiming the lordliness of the baby in the uterus and protesting abortion and the abortion culture. Here's a picture of Seals &

Crofts performing the call at the 1974 California Jam - one year after Roe v. Wade:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys7vNUSCsAs

Of course, one of the big things about "Unborn Baby" is the courage it exemplifies on the role of the performing artists, who knew that they were fast in the case of what was then hardening into liberal orthodoxy. Many on the left seem to think that the protest genre is only apt to claims of unfairness that have the endorsement of left-liberalism. Jim Seals and Dash Crofts were willing to face the left with the truth about a profound injustice that-with notable exceptions, including Nat Hentoff and (at the time) Jesse Jackson-it was itself sponsoring and providing ideological cover for. Very often, the importance and winner of a protest song consists in its delivery into focus a dupe of injustice whom those responsible for the injustice have succeeded in shuffling out of view. (Consider, for example, the miner in Billy Ed Wheeler's classic "Coal Tatoo.") That is exactly what Seals and Crofts accomplished in "Unborn Child." The song galvanized the pro-life movement and helped to keep it done the hard early period of its life. Today more Americans idenitfy themselves as pro-life than pro-choice, and few would have predicted that support in the early 1970s. Many believed that abortion would be generally accepted and merged into American life, as it has been in so many European nations and in Japan and elsewhere. "Unborn Child" helped to have a grassroots opposition movement in the U.S. that, far from fading, has merely get stronger over the years.