Elizabeth Scalia on Geraldine Ferraro.

At The Anchoress:

Ferraro, like Kennedy, has “now stood before the Truth—not the subjective truth, not the relative truth, but the All-in-All, Alpha-and-Omega, Truth— and knows more at this hour than she did, more, indeed than any of us still stepping through this vale of tears. Maybe she simply hopes that the lot of us will henceforth try to serve what is wholly true—without excuses, and without euphemisms—our humanness left sufficiently intact to end a day’s bickering with a bracing single-malt salute amid brothers-in-Christ, our voices joined in a better song.”

I’ve always felt that when it comes down to life-death issues, whether they be debates on capital punishment or end-of-life care, we should, if we must err, err on the side of life.

And with each other, perhaps, if we will err, we should err on the side of mercy. We’ll all need it, in the end.

Plus, a comparison of the abortion issue to the slavery issue, which is probably apt, and to the capital punishment issue, which . . . almost certainly is not.

Elizabeth writes so beautifully, though, that it would feel petty to squabble about it if I weren’t such a dyed-in-the-wool law-and-order girl. I mean, I understand that in the strictest sense capital punishment is part of the culture of death–but so is war, which we do, with grave misgivings, accept.

I live in California, which feeds, clothes, and cares for Charles Manson. And if it had executed him back when I was a child, I do not think I would be grieving over it.

But the child I killed? I think about him or her every day. Every damned day. And I am committed to helping others figure out why this isn’t a road you want to go down–not via the law, but by means of faith and reason. Those two guideposts are enough to steer one away from abortion.

Yet Geraldine Ferraro changed things profoundly for me and for a whole generation of girls and women–and I cannot turn my back on her legacy. She made all kinds of things appear possible for females in more than an abstract way; how can we not be grateful for that?

Elizabeth, again:

She battled blood cancer for over a decade, and it seems to me she bore that cross with a good deal of grace and discretion; many people did not even know she was struggling, and she did not seem to seek out sympathy. That’s an instructive thing to ponder in Lent, at least I think it is. Perhaps the notion that people can disagree on important issues yet still instruct each other in other matters is a lesson in itself.

Yes. It’s one of the more important lessons, and spooky-easy to unlearn in a hasty moment on nearly any harried day. Let’s not do that.

I am off to make a list of my liberal/left family members and friends with whom it is probably time to rebuild bridges.

Go rebuild a bridge yourself–or make one from scratch.