Schizophrenia is no less schizophrenia if one of the voices happens to be talking sense. Hard schizophrenia is no less difficult if murderous insanity is linked up tight with weird, pathetic, and arbitrary scruples. In fact, if such an arbitary pattern is applied long enough, one may detect a method in the madness.
I am talking about our erratic public policy when it comes to protecting human life. Gosnell is a disgrace because he killed babies in this spot instead of the officially-approved that spot. As one observer noted, he is apparently being charged with murder because he enjoyed himself and because his place was dirty. If he had only kept his slaughter hygienic and had been snipping spinal columns for the sake of the Constitution, instead of doing it for his own jollies, and had done his work before that magic and metaphysical week after which responsible medical professionals cease dismembering their clients’ babies, he could have served as a witness for his own prosecution
In the meantime, the kidnapper of three women in Cleveland is facing murder charges for brutally causing a miscarriage, and for doing so without a medical degree. Ah, someone will reply, that was because what he was doing was violent and coercive — the mother of the child had been kidnapped, raped, and was subjected to this treatment against her will. Right . . . as though the unborn child ever volunteers for an abortion? It was unacceptable coercion because he was forcing two people to submit to his twisted desires instead of limiting himself to just one person?
His brutality is to be sharply distinguished from our constitutional and noble practice of applying the same kind of lethal coercion to the kind of people who never have any hope of escaping next door. Our constitutional and hygienic methods insist that we limit ourselves to those who cannot speak, who cannot get away, and who have no advocate. Actually, we delude ourselves in thinking they have no Advocate. They do, and He will speak to us about them soon enough, when He walks contrary to us in His fury (Lev. 26:28).
This erratic behavior on the part of our civil magistrate — filing murder charges for doing here what was just fine over there — is not simply insanity. When the law makes no sense, and is capriciously applied in a lottery-like fashion, the underlying logic of the whole system is totalitarian. The government becomes completely identified with the law, and the people learn to live with it the way a battered woman learns to live with an abusive boyfriend. Somedays he is in a good mood, and you think you can get by.
After a while, the Stockholm syndrome develops. We have good reason to believe that the American people have a bad case of it. After all, we have been locked up in this awful house in Cleveland since 1913.