Michelangelo’s Last Judgment
Those who deny the existence of Satan ought to sit up and take notice. We’d thought that we had purged the worst evils of the world by demolishing Nazi Germany, by out-producing the Soviet regime, and out-lasting Mao and trading with his ideological heirs. We believed that we had overcome the ugliest organized examples of human evil among men, and not without some justification. Think of the tens of millions of people mercilessly butchered in Europe, Asia, an in other Hell-holes around the globe, realizing that the United States of America had been instrumental in putting an end to it in many cases. Then consider that in 1973, we permitted our highest court to open the Pandora’s Box of state-sanctioned infanticide, casting aside our long record of being the nation of life and growth through most of our history. Now, the devils have arisen again, but this time, in our own nation, where like in NAZI Germany, or in pre-Civil War America, they have taken refuge behind the shield of our law. We are permitting them to shelter there, in pretense of justice, and in mockery of our greatest principles. Even the head of one of the world’s largest religions has abandoned the innocent in favor of the guilty. There they hide, in plain sight, now proposing even the outright murder of children, just as dismissively as taking out the trash. Will none rise up against this? Will no-one proclaim “stop?” I thought we had collectively vowed “never again!” Was it all talk? The implied confessions of our silence reveal our acceptance of the devils among us.
Abortion has been legal in the United States since the despicable, illogical 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Since that time, tens of millions of babies have been “aborted,” a.k.a. killed or still more accurately, murdered. They’ve been disposed in landfills, carved-up for medical experimentation and harvested for various tissues. They’ve been murdered in silence, while the lives of their mothers have been changed, their psyches wrecked by guilt and loss, or hardened into radicalized purveyors of villainy. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the truth of abortion is terrifying, and the recently-enacted New York law could have been considered to have been the pinnacle of such monstrosities, that is, until we heard from the Governor of Virginia:
This governor is a physician! This monster wants to be in control of your healthcare, and frankly, your lives. This devil wants to make an abortion-surviving infant to be made comfortable while a conversation is had between mother and doctor over what comes next, which is to let the child die, or to kill it outright, a la Kermit Gosnell. When you consider the implications of this entire situation, it’s clear that our civilization is in free-fall. Nothing can excuse this.
It’s difficult to write about this subject, not because I’m a father and grandfather, but simply because I am human, and I love life as the precious, unique, and wondrous gift it is, and should be. Last Saturday, we had the miserable chore of euthanizing an old gelding we had bred and raised. As the veterinarian administered that lethal dose to relieve the horse’s suffering, I held his head in my arms, and sobbed as he slipped away. We had nearly lost him as a wee foal, to an accident involving a fence. We had nursed him back from that nearly tragic early ending, all those years ago, never questioning for a moment that we would undertake all we could to preserve his life, and to restore his health and function to the degree possible. He had a happy and easy life for a horse, for all the years between then and now, but when the end had become inevitable, and suffering was the only state now left to the animal, we euthanized him. That’s our ethos regarding the lives of animals on our farm, and while some aspects of the farm can desensitize you to some things, perhaps one of my personal weaknesses is that I cannot easily, intemperately, or too quickly dispose of life. It’s not that I’m squeamish, but that life is an irreplaceable commodity that once ended, is gone forever, never to be retrieved. Even in the days since, I have thought of him and wondered if there had been something more we might have done. I’ll ponder that question interminably, as I always do. This is not so in the world of the abortionists.
We have a thoroughly broken culture in which humans are disposed with much less regard and care than farm animals raised for food. We desensitize our young to the whole concept, and while we let the animal rights nuts preach to our children about the “evils of meat,” we do not arm our children with the knowledge of the evils of abortion. We do not tell them the truth. We do not tell them about the long train of wrong choices that lead one to that decision. Many of us pretend to ourselves that it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter; we paint over it in our minds’ eyes with some vague notion of “un-viable tissue masses,” and lumps of cells; we change the subject with indignant talk about women’s rights; many of us will do anything and say anything to avoid the truth.
If the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are a fact of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as our founders correctly asserted, but not some privilege granted by the favor of the state, or the alleged “Divine Right” of some king, then there can be no legal wiggle-room in which to rationalize the deprivation of that liberty among the unborn. It is the height of arrogance to steal life from another human, without the most severe justifications of self-defense and justice. There is no manner in which you can argue in favor of a right to kill merely for one’s convenience that does not fail the test of logic. If that growing baby within a woman’s womb has no claim to a right to life, then neither does she, nor the man who fathered that child, nor the doctor who performs the abortion, nor the legislator or judge who had pompously legalized that procedure. (In New York, the new law of that sick state now permits people other than physicians to perform abortions.) There can be no way to rationalize it that does not simultaneously sanction the murder of any other human for the convenience of some other, be that other an individual or the state.
The truth about abortion is and has always been that it’s murder. It’s never justifiable but in some hyper-rare event of self-defense, where the continuance of a pregnancy is literally a threat to the mother’s life. That’s almost never true. Instead, what we have is a rationalization for murder dressed in the clothing of the defense of one’s convenience. We have a justification propped up in the mannequin of false claims of liberty. We have legal cover constructed so as to feign innocence where there had been little other than guilt, all around. We have the abolition of responsibility. We have the removal of blame because, after all, it’s legal, isn’t it? What “blame?” It’s her right, isn’t it?
What’s been done in New York is an abomination. I am officially and forever boycotting the state of my birth. I will never return there, despite all the people and places there I still love. I hate to surrender it, and in so doing, bid it farewell, but it is dead to me now. There are too many devils there now, who walk freely and openly in the streets, cheered by crowds, and fêted in media. I would rescue New York if I could, but none can now rescue her as they have finally murdered the blindfolded lady with the neglected scales and long-dulled sword, portrayed on that state’s great seal. They long ago vanquished Liberty, the other lady on that seal, as they have nullified the motto with which that icon is adorned. “Ever upward” has become a long slide downward and into the abyss. Too long had that state been dominated by the city that shares its name. Now, it shall finally share its fate in infamy. What the hijackers could not steal from the people of New York, the people of New York have finally surrendered. It is a place of devils now.
As America begins to shift from decline to free-fall, in foolish imitation of the worst wreckage on the globe, and as we become the worst of what we’ve been and against what we have fought, it’s right to ask if it’s time to put-down this dying leviathan. What lies ahead seems now to be only wreckage, pain, and the devils who thrive in it. I have been proud of my country for all its great achievements, and for overcoming its ills of the past, but at long last it seems that we have collectively decided it must now end. Ours is a nation in moral and ethical retreat. This is how the beginning of the end of a civilization always appears, despite the technological mask we enjoy. I no longer dare hope that it’s not so. If there is any chance at some reversal, it must come soon, or it will not come at all, and it must be we, not others in our stead, who will bring it into being. The devils among us know we’re weak and apparently beaten, but they won’t relent until the last of us have surrendered in shame.
