Human Dignity Is Priceless, but Baby Organs Start at $74.99 [+video]
In his ruling on same-sex marriage, Justice Anthony Kennedy discovered what I call the “Oprah Winfrey Clause” in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bars any law that might inflict “dignitary” harm on any citizen.
To respect the dignity of the 1.5 percent of Americans who are same-sex attracted, and from among them whatever slice really craves the lifelong, monogamous covenant of marriage, a majority of the Court was willing to rewrite the Constitution, overrule the sovereignty of 50 states, steamroll over voters and imperil the religious liberty of Americans. Those judges were willing to dump orthodox Christianity into the same fever swamp as white supremacism, and marginalize the faiths that founded America, tacitly granting the point of Obama’s Solicitor General that recalcitrant churches might share the fate of those that once rejected interracial unions — losing their tax exemptions, since they don’t serve the public good.
So the human dignity of our minority groups is really, really important in America, right? Organizations that don’t promote it don’t serve the public good. Is that what we’re meant to believe?
So why does the U.S. government pour $528 million per year (as of 2014) into a supposedly non-profit “charity” like Planned Parenthood, which was founded by racist eugenicists, which aborts hundreds of thousands of Americans every year — and which we now know, thanks to a sting video released today by the Center for Medical Progress, sells baby parts for profit, even haggling with customers over the price? This, by the way, is the second of their undercover videos of Planned Parenthood. The first was equally disturbing.
There is no rational case to be made that Planned Parenthood serves the public good. As more facts emerge, it’s becoming clear that it is engaged in the lowest, most ghoulish form of human trafficking imaginable.
It is hard to wrap our heads around this. The details are so sickening that you don’t want to watch the videos. What sane person would? The Allies in World War II were likewise at first incredulous when reports from Jewish escapees from Hitler’s Europe began to expose the full extent of the Final Solution, as historian Walter Laqueur documented in The Terrible Secret. If men such as Churchill and Roosevelt had trouble accepting the truth about a regime they knew was evil, whose utter defeat they hastened by firebombing its cities, why should we be surprised that this new truth is so difficult to grasp?
The villains this time aren’t foreigners in outlandish uniforms who hold menacing torch lit rallies and worship Wotan. They are pretty, well-coiffed women like Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, and spunky legislators in pink running shoes like former Texas State Senator Wendy Davis. They are also self-styled Catholic politicians like Joseph Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who talk all the time about social justice and helping the poor. They include a president who sings “Amazing Grace” inside a church.
They are affable policy wonks like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dunbar, whose specious argument in Freakonomics purported to “prove” that legal abortion explains the drop in the crime rate. They are the neighbors we run into at Olive Garden, who worry about the need for “paring back the welfare rolls” and write checks to groups like Planned Parenthood that promise to help. They are normal, even nice people who spook themselves into thinking that restricting abortion would somehow bring back an age of sexual “repression” and hypocrisy. Their very normality fools us and lulls us to sleep.
This has happened before. In 1830, when the British Empire finally outlawed slavery, Parliament was only able to pass such a bill if it agreed to compensate slaveowners for the value of their “property.” In a noble expenditure, the British government devoted 40 percent of its budget that year to paying the price of freedom — which was doled out to some 46,000 British owners of black slaves in the Caribbean, including the ancestors of novelist George Orwell and Prime Minister David Cameron. These people weren’t moustache-twirling wielders of whips in the field, but ordinary Englishmen who had invested in a “business overseas” that produced sugar, tobacco or rum. It just happened to be the business of squeezing cheap labor out of black people at the point of a gun.
It had required a 30-year religious crusade on the part of men such as William Wilberforce, and a crushing bill to be paid by British taxpayers in 1830, to end Britain’s role in exploiting slaves. Part of the reason this reform took so long was the sheer unwillingness of people to look at evil squarely, to see that its tendrils extended into their neighborhoods and their bank accounts, their churches and their Parliament.
We Americans are lucky. We don’t need to spend some 40 percent of next year’s budget to end Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funded role in human organ trafficking. In fact, we can save the taxpayers $1.4 million dollars a day by cutting off that organization’s public funding. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has bravely stepped forward among other legislators who seek to defund Planned Parenthood as part of upcoming negotiations over U.S. highway funding. The next step should be to revoke the profiteering Planned Parenthood’s tax exemption as a nonprofit.
We can do this. It would save us a half-billion dollars. It would make every American’s hands just a little bit cleaner. That doesn’t mean it will be easy. The Obama administration has already doubled down in defense of Planned Parenthood, whose organ sales it called “ethical.” We will have to look long and hard at the monster that we have been feeding, petting and training. We will need to be a little bit ashamed of ourselves. We need to in order to galvanize our attention for longer than a news cycle or two.
The enemies of life will not rest in their pursuit of a culture of death. Neither can we. (Posted with permission of the author, “Human Dignity Is Priceless, but Baby Organs Start at $74.99”, originally appeared HERE)
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