Ipso Pronto

This last summer, the pro-abortion world was rocked by the release of a series of sting videos that showed Planned Parenthood illegally serving as merchants of baby parts. I hesitate in using that word illegally because their practices are ghoulish and appalling long before they become illegal. What they do is manifestly illegal, but that is not the heart of what is wrong with it.

In other words, we live in a country where it is perfectly legal to turn a healthy baby into baby parts. That part is okay. It is just that when you do this, you can’t sell any of the parts afterward. Selling them would be an indignity and grossly illegal, while throwing them into a furnace, dumpster or landfill is somehow consistent with American core values.

And it is, too, because American core values have come to include high levels of hypocritical hairsplitting.

Chopping little Billy or Sally into unmerchandisable bits is not an indignity. Being very careful in how you kill them, so that the kidney, heart, thymus, and femur remain usable, is against the law. This highlights pro-choice hypocrisy, even though the inconsistency was created through pro-life pressure that made the merchandising against the law.

Insisting on the arbitrary illegality of this is pro-life shrewdness, because it spotlights the central lie of the abortion industry. They got away with the killing itself because of their insistence that what we were dealing with was a nondescript lump of tissue. We were removing a cyst-like thing that later on becomes a human being. Okay, said an America that had never paid too much attention in high school biology. But now all the cyst-like characteristics have disappeared, and we discover that if Planned Parenthood could figure out how to make a buck selling tiny fingernails, they would most certainly be doing so.

The general public may not know rudimentary biology, but they do know enough to know that you can’t have it both ways. If you pass a law concerning lumps of tissue, you must treat the lumps of tissue as that thereafter. And if you go on to set up a big business selling parts that are highly valuable precisely because they are distinct human parts, you have undercut your whole project — and have not a shred of moral credibility left.

So the thing about hypocrisy is that it never knows when to quit. Knowledge of when to quit is called repentance, and so, failing that repentance, the hypocrisy just gets more and more bizarre. Less repentance, the only thing you can do is double down. And then, after that, you triple down. After that comes Hell.

Because we have banished the true God from the public square, we have in effect said that we only have to obey the laws established by the true god of our system, the god Demos, the god who serves as the voice of the people. If it is illegal, then we won’t do it. Cross our hearts. Promise. This is a democracy.

Ah, but they are doing it. How shall we account for this? Grandiose narcissism is always sold as the noble service of Us, but it always translates, by the end of the day, into the ignoble service of Me.

So however much it makes no sense within their larger system, it is illegal to sell baby parts, and Planned Parenthood in Houston was manifestly selling baby parts. So what happened? Texas has a pro-life governor and pro-life lieutenant governor. The prosecutor’s office was told to look into it. Were the sting videos reliable? They “looked into it” and came back with an indictment of Daleiden and Merritt, the investigative journalists who uncovered and documented the corruption of Planned Parenthood.

Correction: I am informed by a reader that a detail in the above is incorrect. The state investigation is ongoing. The indictment was the doing of the Houston prosecutor, trying to get out in front of things.

In response to this unconscionable indictment, the Center for Medical Progress has courageously released another video — and good on them. This is a showdown, and we need to not blink. We need to help the CMP to not blink.

If the indictment is not thrown out ipso pronto, to use the technical legal phrase, then Gov. Abbott of Texas should simply pardon them. Or rather, he should promise to pardon them if they are eventually convicted of anything — because while they are on trial they can use the process of discovery to perhaps uncover more than their videos ever did. The promise of a gubernatorial pardon will mean that the bad guys, regardless of what they do, will be in a lose/lose situation.

In addition, every candidate for president needs to be pressed on this same question. We are now in the midst of primary season, which means that many ordinary citizens will have opportunity to ask such questions. The question should have two parts — if Daleiden and Merritt are convicted, and if that case wends its way into the federal system, can you commit yourself to a presidential pardon for them? And secondly, would you be willing to consider awarding them the Medal of Freedom regardless of the status of their case?