Down the Road to Perdition: Part 2

"Kermit Gosnell is the Philadelphia abortionist who stands accused of murdering seven children who were born alive. Ricochet Member Cornelius Julius Sebastian quite courageously posted a photo of Gosnell's handiwork on the Ricochet Member Feed recently. In it, we see a baby lying on his side, his back turned to us, a tuft of hair on his head as thick as you please. His head is lying in a pool of blood, which runs from the open gash at the base of his head, spreading across the white sheet, outlining the length of his little shoulder and back. The gash is from the scissors Dr. Meng,…er,..I mean, Dr. Gosnell used to stab the child and kill him by severing his spinal cord, with no anesthesia, because we learned at Auschwitz that children aren't human and can't feel pain, right?  

 A country whose government directs funds to an organization whose representative testified in Florida that if a baby survives an abortion and is born alive, whether or not that child lives, "…should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician," is a country that has lost control of its government. And a country in which people twice elect as President a man who, as a state senator, couldn't bring himself to vote against infanticide, is a country fast losing its way.

I swear, the next time some leftist tells me that government must regulate our food and purge school vending machines of the last M&M, or give in to the latest ridiculous ultimatum from the teacher's union, all in the name of the "The Children," I'm going to stick a photo of that little boy lying in his own blood in front of their well-fed face and ask if THIS was done for "The Children" as well. A nation that permits the butchering of its children signs its own death warrant.  

What is it, exactly, that permits these degradations that are "fundamentally transforming" America into a place our ancestors would never recognize and, possibly, might have declined to defend? Well, yes, of course it's the relativistic slide into a chaotic "no man's land," in which we've become unmoored from the Constitution, natural law, and the nation's religious heritage. But that's not really what I'm asking. Rather, what was the intellectual anesthetic that facilitated the trip and made it so seamless and pain-free? I submit that it was language, or rather the perversion of it, that made the unthinkable first plausible, and then probable. The term, "abortion," for example, was, well, aborted, in favor of "a woman's right to choose." Choose what? The left doesn't want to say, because descriptions of the order I undertook earlier are too ugly to contemplate. So instead they equivocate and engage in euphemistic demagoguery, something those of us on the right should correct at every opportunity.

What the left hasn't been able to do with euphemism, they've instead opted to accomplish by means of outright redefinition. The appropriation of the word "gay," to signify homosexuality is one example, and the left is busily working to alter the word "marriage" to mean something other than what it has meant for thousands of years. Chief Justice Roberts correctly identified the core issue this week when he noted, "If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, 'This is my friend,' but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend." It is not the conduct of consenting adults in private, but rather the debauchery of the language itself that corrupts civil society.

The thoughtless and frivolous rhetorical antics of political correctness, in its infancy, have given way to an Orwellian dynamic which debases our traditions, culture, and institutions, yielding to the double-speak of the contriving utopian who dares not state plainly his intention, for example, of confiscating your earnings, preferring instead the unfocused and platitudinous nonsense of "paying your fair share." To give ground in our language is to acquiesce in an Environmental Protection Agency that cares more about harassing citizens than protecting the environment, or an Department of Education that educates no one, or an Affordable Care Act that adds over 16,000 IRS agents but not a single doctor. Is this future irreversible?"  

*Excerpt from the essay "Was Orwell Right" by Dave Carter