Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 4:13am

Man Isn’t Meat

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Kevin Williamson, who was adopted as a newborn just prior to Roe being decided in 1973, has the best commentary I have seen yet on the Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt striking down the key portions of the Texas abortion law:

 

There is a great deal of dishonesty in the abortion debate, which is necessary: Otherwise, we’d be obliged to think about the horror of what we perpetrate and what we endure, and that would be very difficult. Instead, we hear a great deal about extraordinarily rare catastrophes of pregnancy, which are heart-hurting but which also are, in the vast majority of cases, entirely beside the point: These cases are as a statistical matter nearly nonexistent. Even the usual hedge offered by office-seeking pro-life Republicans — the exemption for children conceived through rape or incest — approaches statistical insignificance. (Never mind the moral insignificance, as though we could murder a four-year-old, or a 38-year-old, because he was conceived via rape.) We hear dark warnings about a new Torquemada and a rising theocracy, as though an atheist such as my good friend Charles C. W. Cooke doesn’t know a baby when he sees one, as though the world were not full of agnostics and outright heathens who still have enough civilization in them to know better than to accept butchering unborn children as normal.

 

A culture that treats pregnancy as a horrible disease and classifies its children as liabilities rather than assets is a culture that is, strangely enough, childish. For most of our history, we marked adulthood from the moment of sexual maturity, i.e., from the age of fertility in women and the roughly corresponding age of men. Granted, these were young, inexperienced, ignorant adults — but we knew that they were at the age of responsibility, if only barely. We eventually learned to tell ourselves a different set of stories about that, and in anno Domini 2016 we have men in their late 20s, perhaps with a grey hair or two in their beards, perhaps with their hair showing the first signs of starting to thin, worried about being kicked off Mommy’s insurance policy. “I didn’t think I was ready,” I’ve heard any number of women say, sometimes with regret that could absolutely waylay you. No doubt there are men thinking the same thing, though you don’t hear them talk about it very often. The women always say the same thing: “They lied to us.”

Of course they lied. You cannot foist a philosophy of man-as-meat on civilized people without a great quantity of lies, some of which will be published in the form of Supreme Court opinions. That is why those who oppose the philosophy of man-as-meat are denied political recourse, and why the authorities in backward places such as Ohio have tried to quash their First Amendment rights, too. Man isn’t meat, and the political model built on insisting that man is meat cannot withstand much scrutiny or debate. It must rely on brute force, which sometimes comes disguised as a Supreme Court ruling. How many people throughout the ages have been convinced of the most indefensible nonsense by similar figures in black ceremonial robes? Think on that the next time you feel inclined to snigger at Iran’s Guardian Council. But when the hysteria subsides and the blood dries up, reality is still there, and we’re still putting millions of unborn children to death because Caitlyn doesn’t want her prom ruined and because Rachel is living out some third-rate HBO fantasy in Brooklyn, or some place she wishes were Brooklyn. Harry Blackmun didn’t imagine that, but it is his legacy — and our indictment.

Go here to read the rest at National Review Online.  Over the past half century life has become ever more enmeshed in a pernicious game of make believe.  All of this might be bleakly humorous if the consequences were not so deadly for so many of the most innocent among us.  Perhaps Pope Francis could address this murderous flight from reality, after he deals with the more pressing issues of youth unemployment and lonely geezers, of course.

 

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Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Wednesday, June 29, AD 2016 4:17am

Yes, yes let us please hear a word from Pope Francis who, some of us believe, is supposed to reflect the thinking of Christ. It is the very Liberal folks he admires most that are the greatest advocates of abortion and other methods of suppressing life and freedom.

Pinky
Pinky
Wednesday, June 29, AD 2016 2:01pm

I can’t think offhand of anyone who’s more of a “must-read” right now than Williamson. Range, depth, originality of thought, he’s got it all. He’s the kind of person who rightfully deserves the name intellectual, back when the term had meaning and hadn’t become a pejorative.

TomD
TomD
Saturday, July 2, AD 2016 5:52pm

“Over the past half century life has become ever more enmeshed in a pernicious game of make believe.”
And now we believe that Iranians are not building nuclear weapons nor that they mean it when they chant “Death to America”.
What goes around might just come around, thanks to such a pernicious common denominator.

Micha Elyi
Micha Elyi
Tuesday, July 5, AD 2016 2:56pm

Amazing that there still are bishops who fail to preach monthly jeremiads against the sin of voting for the Abortion Party and all her candidates.

A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them.–John 10:12 NAB

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