Mark Joseph Stern: A Fetus Wrapped In Newspaper is a Moral Good

NOTE:  I actually wrote this some time ago, but for reasons I don’t recall, never posted it.

Mark Joseph Stern’s column at Slate.com A Quiet Victory, proves once again that the pro-abortion crowd can’t stop whining about losing the moral argument.  His writing is, as always, well done, emotionally appealing, and provocative.  His legal reasoning may be accurate, but his moral reasoning fails miserably.

Stern is writing about Jennie Lynn McCormack, an Idaho woman who gave herself an abortion via pills, because she couldn’t afford to pay for one.  She was ultimately arrested under Idaho law because the baby was apparently at a stage (19 to 23 weeks) for which a non-surgical, self-induced abortion wasn’t allowed.  Ms. McCormack was “furious” that the government could intrude so “deeply into her private life.”  According to Stern’s reporting the police “found the fetus wrapped in bags on McCormack’s back porch.”  I guess I must at least give Stern credit for referring to the dead baby as a fetus. 

What Stern champions here is McCormack’s attack on Idaho’s self-induced abortion law.  He provides some legal analysis of cases which I, frankly, have not read, so I’m taking his word for it.  The 9^th Circuit struck down this law as unconstitutional, to which Stern refers as “a powerful affirmation of constitutional autonomy in an age when that value is “in short supply.”

Constitutional “autonomy” only applies to those who have sufficient power to wield it, I guess.  What about the unborn child’s “autonomy?”  Valuing unborn children is in short supply in Mr. Stern’s world.

For Stern, who blithely ignores the child as having any part in this conversation, it is all about the mother’s “reproductive rights,” which is an oxymoron if ever one has existed, since it always refers to the mother’s right NOT to reproduce.  As I  have argued previously, this nonsense about the “mother’s own body” remains one of the most egregious examples of raw emotional argumentation ever ( Abortion is Not a Moral Matter ).  Stern, however, continues to act as if the mother’s right to choose makes sense as an argument.  Yes, he is right in a dry, technical, legal sense.  However, Stern uses phrases like “insane restrictions,” and “shockingly stringent” when describing laws which reduce the availability of abortion, as if it’s awful that we don’t let people willy-nilly kill off human lives.

Stern should take a lesson from Janet Harris, and make his legal arguments, shrug his shoulders and point out that the law is Roe v. Wade until such time as the Supreme Court overturns the decision or the Constitution is amended (neither of which will ever happen in this writer’s lifetime).  But he can’t and won’t. 

He can’t simply make his legal arguments and rest his case because he knows and understands what Harris was honest enough to almost say out loud: you can’t make the moral case for abortion.  Stern argues, in a roundabout way, that pro-life advocates are hypocritical because they have a hard time arguing the police should be arresting mom for engaging in a do-it-yourself abortion.  Well, this pro-lifer doesn’t mind saying that whether mom does it herself, or whether a doctor does it, the result remains the same: a human life is snuffed out and we typically arrest people for killing other people.

Let’s face it, the only murder for hire scheme that’s legal in this country is abortion.

So what Mark Joseph Stern and others continue to do is hide behind the “legality” of abortion while ginning up emotional arguments about “autonomy” and “private lives” and “reproductive rights” in order to keep themselves from feeling guilty about the true nature of what’s going on.  Not too long ago law professor Jay Sterling Silver suggested in a New York Times op-ed that there is a symbiotic nature between the law and morality – if a law declares something illegal, people see it as more immoral.[1]  Oddly, the opposite hasn’t seemed true when it comes to abortion: declaring abortion legal hasn’t worked to make it seem more moral.  This confounds folks like Stern.  He desperately wants people to see abortion as a moral good.  So he portrays every pro-lifer as a wicked and despicable woman-hater who wants to delve into women’s “private lives” and tell them what to do with their reproductive organs.  His forlorn hope is that somehow if he keeps saying that pro-lifers are nasty and mean and morally repugnant it will become true.

Stern seems to hold Ms. McCormack up as one fighting for justice and the law.  Maybe she and Mr. Stern are right about the law.  But it’s pretty hard to get people thinking you’re on the side of morality when your heroine tosses her dead baby on her back porch, wrapped up in some papers like a picked over fish carcass.  Joan of Arc she’s not.  Just argue that her legal rights were violated and stop there, Mr. Stern.  It’s all you’ve got and you’ve seriously overplayed your hand trying to turn this horrific human being into some sort of virtuous crusader.

Abortion doesn’t become moral because it’s legal, any more than Brussel sprouts suddenly taste like sugar just because they’re good for you.  Nonetheless, Stern offers up the “abortion is legal” theory here because he has nothing else to say that might impact anyone’s conscience.  He seems to think if he can show that if this case remains good law it has some sort of impact on the morality of abortion.  He’s like a magician talking about one thing while doing something else with his hands, to keep the audience focused on his talking so he can pull off the magic trick.  Fortunately, too many have been seared and scarred by abortion, either personally, or through the obvious reality that abortion kills a human being to be fooled by talk that the 9^th Circuit said Idaho’s law was unconstitutional, as if unconstitutionality is a rational boundary line for morality.

Abortion is murder and whether legal murder or not, Mr. Stern, it’s not moral.  Case closed.

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[1] Can the Law Make Us Be Decent (Published November 6, 2012).

The Gorilla Had to Go because it's not about Justice

The prosecutor’s office is meeting with police to do something about the loss of Harambe, the gorilla who was killed by officials at the Cincinnati Zoo.  What, precisely, the prosecutor and police plan on doing isn’t exactly clear.  But, by golly, there has to be “justice.”

I wasn’t there and neither were 99.999999999999 percent of the people who are so “outraged” at the gorilla’s death.  So let’s get some perspective here.

First, only the Mom and maybe one or two other people actually know how the little boy got away from her.  Stop just assuming.  You don’t, in fact, know what happened because you weren’t there.

Second, this was a gorilla.  As the Judge in the Tommy the Chimp case said, "Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their action." (see my post here).   Just insert gorillas where it says chimpanzees.  No, there is no “justice” for gorillas because they’re ANIMALS.  That doesn’t mean the gorilla “deserved” to die, any more than a dog that bites a kid and is put to sleep “deserves” to die.  Animals deserve neither life nor death because they aren’t moral actors.  Gorillas don’t ponder the consequences of their actions – Harambe wasn’t wondering whether he should drag the boy around when he did it; he just did what gorillas do.  No one who is rational is blaming the gorilla but no one who is rational ought to believe Harambe was anything other than an animal.

Third, how is it that so many secular thinking people believe animals “ought” to have some sort of special “rights?”  I’m not talking about humans acting as good stewards of the planet because that’s a given.  I’m talking about the Tommy the Chimp kind of rights – the notion that somehow merely by existing animals obtain rights.  How is this possible?  If gorillas and chimps get rights, what about lower forms?  Do rats have rights?  What about spiders?  How about bacteria?  Where does the ‘right’ to “rights” end or does it?  Let’s face it people, if there is no God and we’re the sole arbiters of right and wrong, then this whole “justice for Harambe” thing is purely arbitrary and truly senseless.  He had rights; he didn’t have rights: it’s really all meaningless, anyway.  I don’t see people pushing for cockroach rights – but of course, there are zillions and zillions of them – plus they’re disgusting and disease carrying.  So we don’t care about them. We are inconsistent.  Gorillas are no more able to appreciate having rights as cockroaches are. (By the way, I’ll get to the “therefore babies in the womb don’t have rights, either” argument in a moment).   The secular view clearly depends solely and exclusively on totally arbitrary designations about which animals “deserve” rights and which don’t.  This is hardly a mechanism for any reasonable or rational discussion of rights and therefore not a reasonable or rational mechanism for discussing justice.

Yet, yet, for some odd reason many people are angry that this gorilla had to die.  And, YES, he HAD to die.  I’m not happy or pleased the Cincinnati Zoo personnel believed this was their only option, either.  But these folks are the experts and they acted under pressure and under troubling circumstances, making a very difficult choice.   I’m not in favor of killing such animals unless absolutely necessary.  But when it comes down to deciding whether an animal or human dies, I’m choosing the human, every time.  Even a crappy, no good, rotten, so and so, [expletive deleted] type human.  Why? Two reasons.  One, because as the eminently sensible judge in the Tommy case noted, animals don’t bear any legal duties or accept any social responsibility.  In other words, if you don’t have any responsibility, you don’t have any rights.  Second, and much more important, even the most corrupt human beings have a chance at salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ; animals are not included in this offer (that doesn’t mean there won’t be animals in heaven, just that they aren’t “saved” like human beings can be).

Some will suggest my argument makes the case for abortion, since babies in the womb can’t have any responsibility, they don’t get rights.  The simple answer to that is babies have rights because God says so.  Moreover, babies in the womb will never come out as gorillas, or chimps, or dogs, or fish, or zebras, or elephants, or bacteria, or . . . you get the point.  They will only be human babies.  Humans are a special class, all to themselves.  Why?  Because we are the only part of creation made in God’s image.  Gorillas at the zoo, or in Africa, don’t get together for a colloquium entitled: Close Enough: Horseshoes, Hand-Grenades, and Humans, Why Humans Should be Called Gorillas and Given Gorilla Rights.  They simply don’t have the intellectual or moral capacity to fathom the concept of rights.  It is a uniquely human attribute.  It is so because we are not merely random products of the universe; we are not merely distant cousins of some primordial ooze.  We are something altogether different.  We are the very sons and daughters of the God of the universe.  As such, we are welcomed by him to repent of our sins and accept by faith that Jesus Christ lived the sinless life we couldn’t live, died the atoning death we couldn’t die, and raised himself from the dead, giving us everlasting life we could not obtain on our own.  No gorilla will ever receive this offer from God, ever. 

When you come to this discussion believing in a creator God, it changes everything.  Suddenly human babies do have rights.  Suddenly you do care that this gorilla was killed.  Suddenly you are worried about the little boy and how this event might affect him going forward.  Suddenly you care that the mom is apparently getting death threats (or at least people with her name are getting them) from people who weren’t there and have absolutely NO IDEA what happened.  Suddenly you care that people seem to be unable to logically process anything in these situations, but simply run on raw emotion.

Let’s face facts, people. 

Harambe had to die.  It’s sad, but true.  In the process, a little boy was saved.  It was not an equal exchange – the little boy is a human being – a unique and precious bearer of the image of the God of the universe.  Yes, he was more important than Harambe.  And not one of the “outraged” would be “outraged” if it were their child down there being tossed about by a nearly 500 pound gorilla. Not one.

Apparently I have "white fragility" and didn't know it

I just read an editorial by a young man named Bennett Carpenter, writing in The Duke Chronicle.  Frankly, it’s just so high-brow that a lowly puritanical nut like me is probably in way over his head to comment, but I’ll give it a whirl, since I can't help myself when there is so much irony packed into such a small package.

He starts his article by saying “I am thinking about how an urgent and overdue conversation about racism—on our campus and across our country—has been derailed by a diversionary and duplicitous obsession with the First Amendment.”  What I think he is suggesting is that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment and, therefore, hiding behind the First Amendment is unhelpful.  He is correct in this sense: you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater if there is no fire (which he incorrectly quotes as “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” – we’ll give him a pass since he’s not a lawyer).  From this standpoint, he is correct in asserting the First Amendment (a) doesn’t protect all speech and (b) isn’t always implicated in speech.  Nonetheless, does it not follow that because the government can’t generally censor speech, and because of this country’s history of engaging in all kinds of speech, we don’t see a great deal of censorship at any level, including at the private level?  In other words, the First Amendment casts a long shadow, which helps protect speech even when it really has no true authority.  Duke University is a private institution that could have easily censored Mr. Carpenter’s article for any reason, some reason, or no reason at all, yet it chose not to do so.  Mr. Carpenter would have nothing to say if Duke did so, since the First Amendment clearly isn’t implicated (Duke is not a government actor).  Yet one can only wonder what howls would issue forth from Mr. Carpenter and like-minded thinkers if Duke decided it wasn’t going to allow his article to be placed in the university newspaper.

He loses me when he seems to suggest that in order to have an actual conversation about race, only those who are “anti-racist” should be invited.  He loses me when he excludes almost all white people from the conversation because they’re suffering from “white fragility” which he defines as “a range of defensive behaviors through which white people (or more accurately, people who believe they are white) deflect conversations about race and racism in order to protect themselves from race-based stress.”  Translated into plain English, I think he’s claiming most white people often try to avoid talking about racism because it makes them feel uncomfortable which, in turn, means they’re racist.  Ironically, even though he’s white, he’s not one of those people.  Reality check for Mr. Carpenter - about 65 percent of the US population is white, so you simply can't just erase them from the conversation.  Moreover, it is an absurdity of cataclysmic proportion to claim, without evidence, that "almost all" white people are racist.  How many of the roughly 214 million white people in America are, in fact, racist, Mr. Carpenter?  And upon what realistic basis did you arrive at your conclusion?

The heart of his argument is that despite appearances of “a nice equivalence between racists and anti-racists—both exercising free-speech freedoms, which must be equally and indiscriminately defended” this is, in fact, false.  Why?  Because “words are actions.”  According to Mr. Carpenter, because of “the centuries-long history of racialized oppression to which hate speech contributes . . . [h]ate speech is thus both violent and an incitement to further violence.”  Since it is per se  violent this should allow the government to step in to stop it and subject to punishment anyone who uses words to “harm.”  Never mind that the “harm” from words is, inevitably, subjective, as opposed, to say the harm from striking someone with a baseball bat.  Moreover, never mind that Mr. Carpenter seems blissfully unaware that there are actually people who might reasonably find some of the things he is saying harmful.  Ironically, either this thought has never crossed Mr. Carpenter’s mind or he doesn’t care because his kind of harm is okay since it's not racist.  Never mind that he might be egregiously offending others who are not racists (more on that below).

Mr. Carpenter implies there ought to be laws against hate speech, but then argues there’s no point in trying to get the government in on it, because “the very government quite literally built on white supremacy [can’t] save us from its effects.” 

The fundamental problem with Mr. Carpenter’s entire argument is that its underlying rationale assumes somehow banning racist speech will help.  We have laws by which we have banned murder and rape but last time I checked, that hasn’t stopped murder and rape. If such speech is tantamount to murder, as Mr. Carpenter suggests, then doesn’t logic indicate banning it won’t stop it?   The fact is that people who already think murder and rape are immoral refrain from engaging in the conduct – they don’t need laws to stop them.  Same with racism.  There are many white people who are not engaging in racism and aren’t having any “white fragility.”  Why?  Because they already believe racism is morally unacceptable and aren’t afraid to say so.  Ironically, Mr. Carpenter seems to include himself in this group.  These folks don’t need Mr. Carpenter’s speech laws to stop them from engaging in racist speech.  They already don’t do it. Racism is wrong.

Moreover, despite Mr. Carpenter’s assertions to the contrary, speech is NOT action.  Yelling a racial epithet at someone is unequivocally NOT the same as lynching them or beating them.  Yes, all three actions are harmful, but ask anyone who has been seriously beaten whether they’d rather just have someone yelling at them.  Reality has to enter the discussion.  In a free society we must come to a place where we draw a line in favor of, not against, ignorant, stupid, and even mean-spirited discourse, if only so those who do it may be shown to be the ignorant, stupid, and mean-spirited creatures they are by their very engagement in the speech.   Mr. Carpenter seems unable to appreciate how simple this is: when we grant people freedom to show how utterly ridiculous their beliefs are, others simply will not accept those beliefs.  That’s why Nazi marches attract more protesters than supporters.  That’s why you don’t see the Keeping Up with the KKK show on television – who’s going to watch it?  The very movement on college campuses against racism is, itself, ironic proof that freedom of speech works best to root out such things.  Are not college students free to rail against racism? 

The irony in all this is deliciously inescapable.  Via freely writing in a university newspaper, which gets freely distributed to students on campus, and which is freely disbursed across the internet, Mr. Carpenter argues there ought to be significant limitations on free speech.  Even more ironic, Mr. Carpenter graciously exempts himself from being one of those people, that is, the kind who say things that harm others.  Yet, his entire column smacks of a holier than thou attitude, as if his Duke education somehow grants him insight into all this that rest of us unwashed and pathetic ignoramuses lack.  Is that kind of noblesse oblige not offensive?  My dad understood race relations extremely well as a result of 30 years in the United States Air Force.  He would hardly need some 28 year old PhD. student explaining the facts of life to him.  He told me again and again from the time I was small that a man is judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin (I wonder where that came from, Mr. Carpenter?).  Carpenter's entire column is a verbal punch in the face to men like my Dad who diligently sought to make sure his children were clear about what matters when it comes to engaging with others.  Apparently, Mr. Carpenter feels quite at ease offending such folks and is blissfully unaware of just how ignorant, vapid, and silly he sounds.

In the end I must forgive Mr. Carpenter for making such a fool of himself.  He’s a product of a system that has taught him that he makes sense and is behaving righteously.  Yet, as I am regularly reminded, none are righteous, no not one.  We are all in Mr. Carpenter’s boat (including me, most of all).  In making such absurd pronouncements Mr. Carpenter wants to do good; however, what he is really doing, and this is the most grotesque irony of all, is simply trying to soothe his own conscience, to show he doesn't have any white fragility.  Well, Mr. Carpenter, that isn’t going to happen by telling people there ought to be laws barring free speech.  That will only happen through the blood of Jesus, shed at the cross on Golgotha, where everyone is leveled to the same place – prostrate in front of the God of the universe begging for forgiveness.  Until you understand that reality, no amount of whining about white fragility will ever change anything.